Chris Mcgrath Email & Phone Number

Some highlights of my work for clients:Stora.co - Initial development of a B2B Self Storage SaaS from an idea to the first paying customers and investment.I worked with the founding team to build an MVP good enough to onboard the first paying customers and help showcase the potential of the business to investors. The work involved examining the proposed features to decide on an appropriate tech platform, building out the the core functionality, building tools to help demo and sell the platform, and supporting the initial users. Once initial investment was secured the code was handed off to the new development team allowing the business to continue with its exciting initial growth.Kitman Labs - Led the effort to move their main web app from a hard to maintain PHP app to a well tested Ruby on Rails app.The existing PHP application had served its purpose in getting the company going. The quick additions that were necessary to win early business were now holding development back as making changes without breaking existing code was getting harder and harder. Together with the Kitman Labs development team, I worked out how to transition the app to a well-tested Rails app step by step. Internally we compared this to rebuilding an airplane while it was still flying. The project was successful and developing the new features required to take the business to the next level became easier after it was completed.

Long term application maintainabilityWhen I started at Kyero the app was a hybrid of PHP and Ruby on Rails. When I left it was running on the latest version of Rails available. Working on the same app for so long gave me a deep appreciation of what it really takes to make a long term maintainable application. Some early choices that seemed like convenient timesavers turned out not to be over their total lifetime as they complicated upgrades or were inflexible for new requirements. This knowledge is invaluable when making pragmatic decisions based on customer requirements as I can highlight the long term impacts of short term decisions.localeapp.comKyero.com was available in multiple languages to attract users from all over the world and we found it hard to maintain the translation files. No existing solutions that we tried did what we wanted so we thought there was an opportunity to spin out our own SaaS app for managing translations. While localeapp.com was somewhat successful and is still going overall the project wasn’t a huge business success. From this I learnt just how important it is to know how you will bring your product to market and identify and reach customers who might find your solution useful. It doesn’t matter how good you think your technology is if you can’t get it in front of people.