Founded in 2016, Pole Position has quickly grown from a pioneering start-up into a high growth organisation with hundreds of new subscribers a week across the United States and Latin America. With high growth comes the need for scalable, sustainable and innovative technology.
Pole Position is a unique app enabling entertainers to find gigs, book venues and widen their net to propose their services. The entertainment industry is one where relationships can take years to build and its hard for performers and venue managers to connect easily and safely. Pole Position brings these two sets of stakeholders together via a robust booking and safety assurance app.
Theta worked side by side with Pole Position to design, build, scale & deploy the new backbone that is key to the next stage of growth of the business.
Challenges
- - Pole position needed to focus on continuing to grow their business and did not have the bandwidth to build a solid tech foundation
- - The entertainment industry needs reliable, secure payment solutions, whatever the form of payment and whatever the country
- - A lack of statistic and real time data reporting tools up to now has inhibited the growth of the company
- - Hugely successful operational team, meant little time to focus on IT
Results with Theta
- - Real and tangible partnership in developing the new app
- - Solid technology and streamlined release cycles based on agile methodology
- - Backlog of bugs resolved, and new features and functionalities prioritized
- - Tailor-made reporting capabilities now underpin company decisions
- - Pole position is now able to move to the next stage of growth with a technology platform that sustains and adds value to their business with, unique to the market, key safety features
Technology for entertainers' safety:
Pole Position has a very interesting yet challenging business model, working in the entertainment industry. Safety of entertainers and venue clients alike is of the utmost importance.
Theta has empowered Pole Position to respond to this challenge by building technology that provides features related to safety and discretion.
Teamwork, respect and ambition:
Pole Position chose Theta for its values and expertise: teamwork, respect and ambition.
The company had an existing platform, tailored to the start-up needs and highly specialized for their industry. Rather than deleting years of code, Theta preferred to respect what was already there and started working on turning what is known as a brown field – green…dissecting and piecing the technology back together.
This approach, working in close partnership, using agile methodologies was successful in saving Pole Position significant investment, allowing them to allocate investment to the business growth rater than an IT re write.
Swift ramp up:
To ensure the continued growth of Pole Position and no drain on management attention, Theta created a strong team with the right knowledge from Ruby on Rails resources , UX design, subject matter experts, reviewing architecture and priorities.
The first month of collaboration was dedicated to:
- Week 1 – understanding the landscape
- Week 2 – stabilizing the platform
- Week 3 – re-releasing the app bug free with new functionalities
- Week 4 – taking over the entire chain of building and deploying the app in an automated manner
Pole Position is now on an automated weekly release cycle meaning that Pole Position has the means to stay ahead of the game in terms of innovation and new features in the app.
Immediate business growth:
Pole Position has been able to completely focus on their aspirations, growing their revenues becoming the number one booking engine for entertainers internationally.Thanks to a now solid IT back bone, Pole Position has hired new account managers to continue their market expansion.
“As with all our business decisions, we are cautious with whom we partner. Theta listened to us and really made an effort to understand the product and the environment in its entirety. With no IT handover what-so-ever, we have come a long way in such a short amount of time. After our first month of collaboration it was clear that this was a special long term partnership. I have never come across an IT provider that invests so heavily in doing what is right for our business!”
Caressa Carter, Head of Operations
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