Hedge

Hedge's CEO, Jackson Fitzgerald, founded Hedge with his two co-founders, Justin Matsnev and Mitch Malinin, while in college. As avid sports fanatics and gamblers, they realized that there was a gap in the sports gambling marketplace. By utilizing round-up technology, sports fans can risk small amounts of money into daily contests for potentially huge payouts.

The team began performing customer discovery and understanding the landscape of the space they were trying to get into. Their idea to implement round-up technology was novel for the fantasy sports space. They knew that they needed technology to help bring their dream to life. After identifying a group that offered white-labeled sports betting platforms, they pursued that route to get their concept off the ground.

While diving into development, the team faced a major challenge in their roadmap. Not only was the white-labeled sports betting solution not expansive nor customizable enough for the technical complexities of what they were looking to do, but the product they were given was disorganized on the backend and was foreshadowing an unscalable application.

The team looked to Aloa to help them navigate this space, especially when it came to figuring out how to accomplish their development needs while staying on a budget. The Aloa Strategist had to identify a Partner Firm in our network that not only had experience with FinTech & mobile banking, to efficiently integrate the proper technology to seamlessly include the roundup technology, but also a team that was proficient in cleaning up and re-organizing some of the existing codebase.

The first Aloa partner that was identified brought about concerns when it came to their bandwidth capability. So, identifying this concern as early as possible, the Strategist was proactive in identifying a different firm to transition to, ensuring that Hedge didn't bear the brunt of any headaches in the process.

After conducting a thorough search and gathering multiple bids, Hedge's Aloa Strategist was able to match them with an Aloa Partner based in Cartagena, Colombia. The Development Partner was able to jump into the team's environments right away to start analyzing the situation and building a proper development roadmap. It was determined that we would look to bring on 2 full-time Node.js developers and a React Native developer, both of intermediate/senior experience. The cost of development also included a dedicated senior project manager and a QA analyst to manage the developer and ensure quality assurance was completed with each deployment.

As Hedge's team had technical capability, it was important that the team was able to work together in a seamless fashion to divide and conquer and achieve the most efficient route to project completion. Taking all of this into consideration, the Aloa Strategist prepared a custom development strategy with the team, ensuring we were balancing all aspects of the project. In leveraging Aloa Manage to take care of the actual project management, as well as Zoom and Slack to handle the communication, the team was able to work together in a smooth and pain-free process.

Through conducting technical audits on the development, Aloa was able to maintain oversight over the process of development. We were able to ensure that any and all concerns were extinguished the moment they were identified. In building out a proactive process, the team was able to establish a steady rhythm of development and systematically knock out all of the technical challenges that were encountered.

Aloa and the chosen Development Partner were able to help Hedge successfully launch the application in the Apple App Store just a few months after development began.

Thanks to Aloa's efforts, the Hedge team was able to focus on the other mission critical items for their business to succeed. Jackson was able to close a $250,000 round of funding to continue the progression of his business and the team was able to start focusing on marketing and PR for the launch of their application.

By leveraging the Aloa Platform, Hedge was able to successfully navigate the complex space of outsourcing software development in manner that not only helped them save time, but also a significant amount of money.

Hedge and Aloa continue to have a strong relationship in supporting some of the maintenance/bug-fixing needs as the app goes live. Hedge's long-term plan includes building out an in-house team, and Aloa continues to support them by providing documentation and ensuring a smooth transition process.