A story in two chapters. It starts with our first staff-augmentation engagement at Lakeshore Learning in 2022 and grows into an embedded team across one of the region's largest proptech platforms. Every engagement is what won the next one.
Chapter 1 - 2022
Lakeshore Learning
In 2022 we placed a small team inside Lakeshore Learning, one of the biggest names in school supplies in the US. They sell to schools and government agencies across the country. In that market, the product is rarely the differentiator. The price is.
Buyers run tenders for near-identical items, and the cheapest qualifying bid takes the deal. If a competitor lists the same pencil a few cents lower, the contract can move with it. Lakeshore Learning had to watch competitor pricing constantly.
Three competitors can buy an identical item from the identical vendor and each list it their own way. That one quirk is what kept 50 people busy.
Once we understood the workflow, we could not unsee the waste. So we scoped a solution ourselves, got it approved, and built it.
We built a pipeline that pulled competitor prices automatically, every night. The breakthrough was in the matching instead of matching on names, which sellers deliberately vary, we matched on the product image.
The system compared listing images, recognised identical items across competitors no matter what they were called, and lined the prices up side by side. By morning the analysts had a clean, current, like-for-like view of the whole market.
~50
Manual checkers replaced by one automated run
Nightly
Automated competitor price pulls, every night
~200
Items tracked automatically across all competitors
AM
Full like-for-like market view ready every morning
Understand the business, not just the tickets. Own the expensive problems people have stopped noticing. We learned how to scale a team into someone else's environment without losing quality or ownership.
All of it came with us into what came next.
By the time Property Finder came to us, they already knew the kind of work we do. They needed to move fast without trading away quality, with a partner they could trust to own the work. So they started us the way serious teams should: one engineer, one hard problem, and the freedom to walk away if it did not deliver. It did.
Chapter 2 - Since 2023
Property Finder
We have built and scaled engineering teams for a US market leader and the Middle East's first prop tech unicorn. We know how to find the right people, vet them, and get them delivering fast, and we shape the process around the way you work.
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