Blue Sky Propane Client Review

I’m a general partner at Blue Sky Propane, which is a gas delivery company.

We needed them to build us an interactive mobile iOS and Android application for our customers.

We used an Excel spreadsheet to lay out our idea for them. We then paid our back-office software provider to build an API and team up with Sunflower to build a custom-designed app with native software for our roughly 5,000 customers. At the same time, a different company was updating our website, so that served as a blueprint for the app’s design.

The key features for the app include enabling customers to submit orders, schedule refills, as well as see their account history and previous delivery history. They can add and remove credit cards and bank accounts for payments — our payment gateway is NMI. Customers can also get to-date fuel comparisons that tell them how many gallons of gas they used in one year versus another to assist them in gauging how much they should purchase in the future.

We found them on Clutch. We searched the list of the top-rated application developers on the site, and Sunflower was among them. We chose three firms from that list at random to contact. With the first, we had a language barrier that made it difficult to communicate with one another. With the second, they never got back to us. Sunflower got back to us, and despite a slight language barrier, we decided to move forward with the partnership.

We’ve invested between $43,000 to $45,000.

We began working with them in August 2017. The app was supposed to go live on Dec. 1, 2017, but due to a some unforeseen issues, it ended up going live on Dec. 20, 2017. Since then, they’ve made minor fixes here and there, but their work on the app has been minimal.

Out of our 5,000 customers, only 200 have the app, so we’re still in the process of transitioning and acclimating our customers to it. But of the people who have it, they’ve expressed that they love it and are very thankful for it. We’re looking to get a better idea of customer feedback for the app in about six months from now.

They’re fantastic. We communicate primarily through phone and email, though we were able to have a face-to-face meeting with Yash. They’re very timely — there are plenty of days where we’d get a response to our email in 30 minutes or less. They were agreeable to doing things over and making changes where needed.

Everything was impressive. They go above and beyond to solve problems for us. For instance, they reached out to let us know we needed a loading page for our app. We came up with some ideas of the page and asked our web developer to put it together, but they were charging around $2,500 for the small animation we wanted. We told Yash and and he said, “Let me see what I can do about it.” Within one day, he came back with a design we loved, and it was only $100. That was terrific problem solving.

It’d be great to be able to use a formal program to track their progress and allows us to see how the app is being designed. It would allow the client a bit more control in the app’s aesthetics and structure.