Insane Lab can help you with product strategy, project management, and the entire product development process. For those reasons, we’ve decided to introduce a more sophisticated and customer-centric approach.

Let’s start with the obvious: it’s not easy to get your product to market. Over the last two years, we’ve deployed several digital (and physical!) products. Some of those we’ve built on our own, and the others we’ve developed for our customers. In late 2017, we began to see an incredible increase in end-to-end product development requests that lasts until today.

Insane Lab was established as a web development agency (by the way: here’s how not to hire one). It’s been doing well with the help of its founding team and amazingly talented people from all around the world. After all, European developers are consistently ranked among the top three globally. We’ve seen that first-hand.

We were lucky to capture a significant share of the web development market. After establishing this pillar, we’ve expanded into mobile development and pursued a partnership with Microsoft. We’ve had our mobile and web development teams working in tandem on bringing digital products to market as fast as possible. Internally, we’ve considered it another step on our journey to be able to responsibly provide end-to-end solutions.

And that’s when it started. From time to time, our client would ask us if we would also work on the overall user experience and user interface. Moreover, we’ve noticed that queries related to visual identity—or even branding itself—started to appear in our sales funnel. At first glance, this didn’t seem like something we could’ve handled without proper resources. Those requests were not in our initial scope of expertise, and would require us to invest in internal training as well as hiring experts in their respective fields.

Then, we’ve realized that we should go from a company that provided services billed by the hour to a company that to put it simply solves problems. We knew that without understanding the business strategies and goals of our partners, we would never be able to take the step into an end-to-end product design and development.

The more requests for proposals we’ve received, and the more we’ve talked with our existing customers, we’ve realized that it’s a direction worth exploring.

Building bootstrapped products

There is an apparent difference between building a user interface kit and taking care of an entire brand. That’s why we’ve decided to embark on a journey of creating products that today exist as standalone businesses. We’ve onboarded incredible talent following our remote-first statement, and decided to undergo a trial run.

Overtime, our product development process became clear. It’s based on the design thinking principles, followed by an entire process described here. It has already been tried, tested, and successfully deployed. Starting with market research, through idea generation, designing and developing, to testing, deploying the final product, and managing its life cycle—it’s been a long couple of years full of trial and error. However, at this point we’re ready to share your mission and vision. We’d be honored to do it.

Big Mouth Survey

Nine months passed from an ideation stage to signing a contract with a significant, widely recognized enterprise. We’ve had to develop and establish a new brand on all applicable offline and online marketing channels. Then, our job was to assist with full product development—we were building a customizable tablet-based survey kiosk and a web-based administration system.

Here’s the tricky part: we had only six months to do it all.

We’ve decided to base our work on three main pillars:

• Close collaboration with the client: continuous strategy sessions that enabled us to adhere to our partner’s needs
• Extensive research: we didn’t only deliver software but also helped secure a partnership with the right kiosk manufacturer. Then, we oversaw the simulation, user, and stress tests of the entire solution
• Applicable design: translating advanced logic to a simple, clear, and intuitive user interface is always a challenging task

Focus on the big wins allowed us to deliver Big Mouth Survey in a record time while gathering cross-market customer feedback and offering full remote support for every unit.

We’re helping almost 40 million tourists in NYC

Did you know that automobile and taxi transportation account to more than 30 percent of how New Yorkers travel around the city? Residents alone own about two million cars.

Moreover, the Big Apple welcomed 65 million visitors in 2018, with international visitors comprising 13.6 million of the total. Overall, 37.9 million tourists stayed overnight in 2018—which creates a large market for any company dealing with hospitality, transportation, and accommodation.

That’s why we were incredibly interested when MPG Manhattan Parking, a company that has managed parking spaces in NYC for more than 60 years, approached us to help them undergo a digital transformation. We’ve known that it will be more than just software building since day one.

While there are Software-as-a-Service solutions on the market, our client wasn’t convinced that this was the right business model for them. MPG wished for a platform they can directly own—and tailor their solution to their customers based on their extensive experience. In turn, that would allow to control both the customer experience, and the pricing structure (deploying promo codes, providing event-based pricing, and more).

We ended up building a user-friendly, cross-platform solution for both web and mobile, as well as consulting MPG’s entire digital business model. The product has already been deployed and is serving customers living or visiting New York City.

Product Development: Now at Insane Lab

These two examples of full, end-to-end product management and development are the reasons behind Insane Lab’s growth as a company. Soon enough, we’ll be presenting additional products that are currently under development.

2020 has been challenging for everyone. We consider ourselves lucky to have amazing partners that are not afraid of sharing the risk—and we value these kinds of relationships highly. For anyone out there that’s interested in building a product with an agency, or through a team extension model—remember that the other party’s job is to help you meet your goals. That can be done in a variety of ways from body leasing, through hourly billing, to full-on use case consultancy. We’re here to help you get the most out of every scenario—even if it costs us your business. We believe that professionalism, honesty, and transparency should always come first.