Bookmark’s Story of Success: The Benefits of Hiring Remote CTO and VP of Engineering

Customer Overview

Bookmark.com is an AI-powered website builder that helps entrepreneurs with no technical skills to start and expand their online business. David Kosmayer started the company with the aim to help business owners spend more time on managing their business rather than managing their website.

Today, Bookmark goes beyond just getting a website online. With the help of its powerful Artificial Intelligence design assistant, the end user gets a modern, fully responsive and smart website within 2 minutes. The main advantage, beyond the website’s design and functionality, is its ability to constantly improve. By using proprietary data, the website will make suggestions on how you can improve the overall user experience and generate more conversions. All of the above, coupled with their comprehensive learning platform and analytics reporting, makes every customer feel like they have a website team supporting them every step of the way. Well, behind Bookmark’s success there is a dedicated team of developers working under the eye of a remote CTO and VP of Engineering.  

Bookmark’s Challenge

Founded back in 2014, Bookmark grew out of the need to provide a truly personalized and unique website building experience. Their statement is simple: Provide competitive edge technology to the non-tech business owner by helping them create smart websites that combine the creativity of humans and optimization via machine learning. 

In order to provide high quality No Code experience, they needed to have a highly skilled coding and design team. As any startup, Bookmark looked for high-quality talent at a reasonable price.  

Building a team within their budget is what got them started, but it is the top-notch quality that made them stay and grow. 

They sought to work with developers with strong technical knowledge in Software Architecture, PHP, SOLID principles, MySQL, Javascript, as their core skill-package. Another essential trait they were looking for was the core soft skills like: communication abilities, team management and working under pressure.

The Proposed Solution

Having the client’s requirements in mind, the solution that we offered to Bookmark was more than just a regular outsourcing software service. By using our staff augmentation model, we offered building a team under their terms within their budget. Over the years, they hired more and more people and with the team’s expansion they now have a vast variety of profiles. We supported their growth steadily, with almost 0% turnover and most of the teammates being with them throughout the whole journey. 

As for the development methodologies, they use a combination of both Scrum and Kanban – Scrumban. This provides them with the necessary flexibility to make the team more agile, efficient and productive. The Bookmark team has three separate environments: Development, Staging and Live. 

Technical Challenges While Implementation

In the very beginning, one of the biggest technical challenges was creating an infrastructure that dynamically creates websites without the need to restart the servers.This challenge needed to be overcome on the fly. Our team solved it by using a custom version of Nginx server with embedded Lua Scripting language and Redis Storage system. This allowed them to map domains to hosting folders on the fly during the web request. By doing this, they allowed Bookmark to be able to create as many websites as possible without the need to restart the servers. 

Results

Though they started as a small dedicated team of 2 developers and 1 designer in their early stage, this is far from what they are today. Over a few years, they have significantly grown and continued to partner with us to hire new employees and build the team. Just over a year ago, Bookmark partnered with Moneris, the largest financial technology company in Canada that specializes in payment processing. Now their innovative ai-powered website builder is a formidable choice for any entrepreneur and business owner to create a website and build an online presence.

Today, we are happy to share that besides the roles that were crucial to grow the brand with more frontend, backend and full stack developers, web designers and QA specialists, the team now includes key roles like Chief Technology Officer, VP of Engineering and Product Owner. Currently Bookmark holds around 20 employees and they are searching for more developers to join them.

Now, on top with their innovations and AI powered website builder, they want to be the first choice for any entrepreneur and business owner who wants to create a website.