How a digital startup doubled in size and scaled 5x faster with Allura
“We went from a business that had to brief in every little feature to third-party developers, to one that could move rapidly to scale. Having our own development team to provide feedback on our vision and use their expertise to add value to our offering has helped us build a better business.”
The Spec Sheet is a digital platform on a mission to centralise and automate the compiling and sharing of ad specs. It makes it easier for media agencies to access every publisher’s verified ad specifications across every channel, and gives creative agencies the confidence to build out multiple assets for any campaign around the world.
It’s the brain child of advertising natives, Jesse McLallen and Sharon Gray.
As Jesse says, “It’s like a Google doc on steroids with a massive database of local and global publisher’s ad specs behind it.”
In order to launch this industry-changing tech, Jesse and Sharon needed a team of developers to bring their platform to life. After receiving their initial funding, they sought the help of a third-party development team to get their idea off the ground and create an MVP.
But given their lean resources and growing ambitions, they realised it would make better business sense to invest in and build their own development team.
So, they turned to Allura.
“Allura understood the journey we were on. They remained in contact, connected us with the right people and were very flexible in accommodating us as a startup. I’ve now got the right team in place, and the empathy and understanding Allura showed has built trust and long-term loyalty. They are our go-to recruitment agency of choice” Jesse says.
As ad creatives, the co-founders had never built a global business. But working with Allura’s tech and digital consultants to build The Spec Sheet’s development team, allowed Jesse and Sharon to run the business their way.
“We went from a business that had to brief every new and different feature we wanted, to one that could move rapidly to scale. And having our own team to give us feedback and add value to our product through their expertise has helped us build a better, more efficient business.”
The Spec Sheet could now operate 5x faster. The newly appointed tech team were able to change the fundamental code language the platform was built on, to make it more scalable across borders and liquid enough to accommodate any features new markets may throw at it. They could now build a suite of products in line with Jesse and Sharon’s global ambitions.
Working with third-party developers meant doing one-off, isolated feature drops, which was cumbersome and didn’t work when it came to putting the vision together. Having an in-house team meant the developers had a clear line of sight over the whole process, and could think about the future implications of the tech they were developing.
This saw The Spec Sheet double in size and gave Jesse and Sharon “the confidence to build all four of the products on our roadmap, making it super easy to launch our suite of products overseas within 48 hours.”
If you’re looking to build your tech and digital team but don’t have the time or know where to start, our tech and digital consultants are here to help. Speak to Jake.
“Going with Allura, knowing they had deep expertise in the roles we were looking for, was ultra helpful and provided confidence. It’s not just one person doing tech. They have specialists in different coding languages, tech stacks and tiers – from mid to senior to chief officer roles.”
– The Spec Sheet