Hashrocket's communication style makes them unique. Their process is something we've adopted internally since partnering with them. We would do daily video standup calls with them. I've worked with software development teams before, and we never had that close connection with another team. Even though they were in Jacksonville, and we were in Chicago, we had a very close tight-knit relationship with them because of those calls. It felt like they were part of our own team. I met with one of the engineers. We spoke at a conference after our product had launched together. Even though it was my second time meeting him, we had a ton of rapport because of those very regular video calls.

I can’t add a lot of color because I haven’t worked with other shops like Hashrocket. I only worked with the Chicago team, so I can speak to them, and I can say that they’re very passionate about doing development the right way, at the same time, they listen to what I need. Sometimes, those are conflicting goals. You can build something 110 percent bombproof, but the cost can be four or five times the cost of the “just get it done for right now” solution. I’d say overall they lean pretty far towards doing it the absolute correct way, but they’re sensitive to understanding that there’s often business concerns in these things as well.

Our best feedback is from our users. The trustees that we send money to and our users love the site and love the ease of use and the less complexity of the process. Development-wise, it's been great. By the time we approached Hashrocket, we had previous developers that worked on part of the site. We had code that was somewhat there and it was close to being ready. Hashrocket was able to analyze our code, figure out what was missing, and bring it into what we actually wanted.

Today I Learned is different because it restricts posts to 200 words. It was designed to be readable and updated daily. Each post is personal– sometimes a tip is bleeding-edge stuff, while other times it's something basic that's just new to that person– but every post is fundamentally functional and directly related to our work.

They were attentive and consistent in their communication style and delivery.

Ember Weekend is now 15 episodes deep with over 3,000 unique hits to the podcast. The community has really supported and engaged with such a great effort.