The challenge In September 2018, Jamie Beaumont, Founder of Offerd, hired an outsourcing agency to build an MVP of the ultimate digital platform for recruiters to attract funding for full-fledged product development. However, the engagement proved to be highly ineffective as there was no transparency into processes and the code delivered was unclean, messy, and unreusable. It eventually turned out that the development team was based in India, not England, as was promised at the beginning of Jamie's software development journey. In July 2019, Jamie raised £300,000 from investors. That was enough to pay that agency off and start fixing the product. Jamie hired another agency. And that new experience didn’t go well either. The new agency did a great job with the design of the product, but again – Jamie didn’t have access to Jira to see what they were doing, nor was he ever involved in daily stand-ups. And that agency was incredibly expensive. Every single time they deployed functionality, it broke something. And when they fixed that, it broke five other features. Having spent over £200,000 working with agencies, Jamie got an MVP that wasn’t stable enough to take to market. As Jamie started exploring other options, a colleague of his introduced him to Colette Wyatt [Evolve’s CTO]. How we helped After a discovery session, our tech team said we weren’t going to build Jamie's dream product right away but we were going to make sure he has a stable product he can make money with, so we wanted to take away all the crap and polish the product first. That was exactly what Jamie wanted to hear from his tech partner. "I didn’t want agencies to just make money off me; I was looking to build a long-term reliable relationship." Evolve provided the following resources for the Offerd Agile Team: a Head of Delivery, a Solution Architect, two .Net developers, and a Nodejs developer. The team is scaled up or down depending on the current project needs. Results Although product development is still in progress, the Offerd platform is already used by real customers and the feedback they provide based on their experience is positive. Jamie is thinking of starting a new project with Evolve soon.