About the agency

on/Sight is an ecommerce agency dedicated to helping Shopify merchants build better online shopping experiences. They’re a small team, with a focus on bringing their clients’ best ideas to life, no matter how complex the build might be. They specialize in web development, UX design, and custom app solutions.

The problem

The on/Sight team has spent years building up a strong reputation in the Shopify space, creating lasting relationships with clients and delivering tons of projects: themes, scripts, apps and more.

Their excellent reputation within the ecosystem meant that they had more incoming projects and feature requests than their small team could handle. As the pressure to maintain high quality work while meeting client expectations mounted, the on/Sight team needed a way to expedite their app development workflow. Brandon Olin, one of the lead developers, began looking for tools and frameworks that could help automate repetitive development tasks, and speed up the process of building and deploying applications.

The solution

In his search for a solution, Brandon stumbled across Gadget. The platform promised to take care of all the infrastructure setup and boilerplate code that slowed down his team, and even offered a built-in integration directly with Shopify. Brandon saw Gadget as an opportunity to automate some of the more repetitive parts of his team’s workload, while retaining full code control of the business logic and the user interface of his apps.

The on/Sight team decided to evaluate Gadget on a few small, low-risk projects to get a feel for the platform; for example, an app that allows customers to upload pictures and send virtual holiday cards to their friends and family. With a bit of time and practice under their belts on these projects, on/Sight’s developers were able to build the confidence they needed to use Gadget for more sophisticated projects.

“Gadget has done everything that I've wanted it to do and then some. It takes me ten minutes or less to get an app up and running and functional now, whereas before Gadget, it was an absolute bloody nightmare.” 
— Brandon Olin, Lead Developer at on/Sight

The results

With Gadget’s full-stack app development platform, the on/Sight team was able to offload much of the tedious work involved in building their applications, resulting in more projects completed more quickly, using the same, or fewer, resources. Today, their to-do list is even longer than it already was, but they can ship twice as many projects in half the time. That has resulted in the team acquiring more clients, translating to an increase in revenue.

Gadget has accelerated on/Sight’s development process so much that Brandon can’t imagine building Shopify apps without Gadget. “It seems like a no brainer to me. Do you want to be able to keep up or not? Because the agencies using Gadget are just going to be way faster and better than you.”

In just 5 months, on/Sight’s development team was able to ship 10 custom apps for their clients, with more in the works. The team estimates that previously, they would have only been able to ship 2-3 of them, but with Gadget, apps are live on production-grade infrastructure from the moment they’re created. With an instantly provisioned backend, embedded frontend, and Shopify connection, the team is able to focus on writing the code that matters. With more time at their disposal, they’ve even been able to take on projects that previously would have been prohibitively complex and time consuming, like a custom loyalty program. And they’ve done it all without having to turn down other smaller projects, thanks to Gadget.

“The fact that with Gadget, I can just build things faster without having to worry about the ongoing maintenance, means that we can get more done in a day.” Since Gadget automatically scales all of the infrastructure and even makes it easy to update to the latest Shopify API version, time that would have otherwise been spent on maintenance for their older projects can be used to continue building new projects.

The team hopes in the coming months, they’ll be able to create a library of app templates that could be easily customized to suit specific client needs, giving them even faster turnaround times than they already have, and one more way to increase revenue.