The WaterBear Survival Guide
70% of software projects don't achieve successful outcomes. The WaterBear Survival Guide is our playbook for success. We balance design, planning, and agile development to overcome project complexity, root out assumptions, and deliver an effective solution.
Stage 1: Discovery
Elegant solutions become expensive burdens when they solve the wrong problem. Our Agile Development process starts with Discovery. We invest 1 - 14 days conducting root cause analysis and identifying assumptions to make sure we can deliver the most effective solution.
Stage 2: Design & Planning
We'll design and rigorously project plan a solution to last. From back of the napkin sketches to high-fidelity renderings and process flows, WaterBear has your needs covered. Design and planning typically take between 2 to 4 weeks.
Stage 3: The MVP Sprint
We sprint towards delivering a minimum viable product (MVP) to your problem. Our cadence is 1-2 week sprints, with demos and deployments roughly every 2-3 weeks. Effective MVP's are usually delivered in 2 - 5 months.
Stage 4: Learn and Evolve
We'll conduct user feedback sessions and A B testing to refine the solution - focus its efficacy and broaden the impact. This helps ensure a WaterBear solution that evolves with your company.
Stage 5: Maintain and Scale
Don't leave database integrity, server failure, or application scaling to chance. We offer maintenance & hosting on a retainer basis of ~4 days per month of MVP sprint. Because we build and ship many diverse applications we use state of the art cloud architectures, continuous integration, and deployment flows.
The WaterBear Way
A Team You Can Trust
The foundation of WaterBear is our talented, pragmatic, and emotionally intelligent team. Building industry leading solutions requires an idea meritocracy, and that starts with people. WaterBear team members embody those three traits, building incredible products.
A Culture To Match
We're here to provide brilliant solutions and support our clients for the long haul. We believe that decentralized, extreme ownership produces top-tier results and long term motivation. Brilliant solutions take a village - we cultivate free flowing dialogue we call circulation. And we believe in refined process so that our clients get us at our best. Work with us and you'll get the integrity, creativity, and persistence forged in some of America's finest institutions.
Technology Up To The Task
Productive. Maintainable. Performant. Pick 3. Our apps are powered by Elixir and the Erlang VM. This technology is used heavily in an industry that can't afford downtime - telecommunications. Beyond that it powers successful, highly productive startups like WhatsApp, Netflix, Pinterest and institutions as well known as Goldman Sachs.
If feature-rich clients & UX are what's needed, WaterBear leverages ReactJS, the client-side technology powering Facebook and Instagram.
Meet The Team
Joseph Rosztoczy
Founding Partner & Engineer
After Stanford, Joey became a consultant in the AgTech industry. In 2014, he cofounded Leaf, an automated BI application for large farming organizations. Leaf would be featured at the SXSW 2018 Accelerator event, and serve multi-generational family farms ranging from1,000 acres of cropland to over 50,000 acres farmed annually.
Michael Tejada
Consulting Engineer
Mike graduated Stanford in 2012, traveling to NYC with Teach for America. Afterwards he taught software development at Flatiron before founding Axiom Coding. Seeing other's share the same mission he had, he joined CodeHS in San Fransisco before becoming a full-time software consultant.
Ryan Rosztoczy
Consulting Advisor
Ryan graduated Stanford in 2012 as well. He went to work as a project manager for Epic Systems, before joining Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and eventually joining Leaf/Agrarian Labs to lead business development, sales, and customer support. Ryan assists WaterBear Software as a business development advisor.
Natalie Despain
Fullstack Engineer
While Natalie was earning her degree in Fine Arts at U of A, she landed a software internship. Realizing she found a new passion, she formalized her education at Galvanize worked for an education software company, became a fullstack engineer at Leaf/Agrarian Labs before taking the plunge with WaterBear Software.
Maxime Legaignoux
Software Engineer
Max helps lead software engineering across the backend stack and our infrastructure. Boasting an MSCS from EPITECH, Max joined WaterBear Software after helping build Leaf for Agrarian Labs, and after leading software development for a startup in the Bay Area.