Situ

Situ's initial need was for a new brand and a new website.  But what made Sound in Theory quite such a perfect fit was that they were a start up in the relatively new (at the time) sector of serviced apartments.

They needed a way of running their business that got them away from the clunky yet effective spreadsheet methods they had developed.  No off-the-shelf system existed for the management of their blend of self-managed and agency stock.

Their staff was small at the time, reliant in most part on the 2 owners doing everything, and budgets needed to be carefully managed.  We got them up and running, with a website that seamless blended the 2 stock sources, and allowed them to manage the bookings.  

The build of that system was the first cornerstone in both our relationship with Situ, and an application on which their whole business would eventually depend.  Although Situ continued to grow alongside their relationship with Sound in Theory, progress on the application in the first few years was relatively slow - we were a reactive service based on direct feature requests from the client.  However, from 2013 they became one of our first retainer clients, and everything changed.

The small monthly spend allowed a more proactive account management style, and the spend quickly grew as the faster paced development allowed Situ to take on more and more clients.  Reflecting the way that the answer to "can we..." is always yes with bespoke software development, Situ could now do the same with the requests and needs from potential clients.  This allowed Situ to quickly expand their list of clients.

The software and thus Situ's technological offering grew along with the size of the business.  As discovery was made about what the business now needed, new functionality was folded into the software at increasing rates.

A crucial architecture change was made, with the web and data layer being split.  Once the data layer was built along with APIs to remotely interact with the data, this separation of concerns allowed us to design and build a best in class, highly performant website.

Eventually Situ grew to more than 40 employees, and a large part of Sound in Theory was operating as Situ's internal technology team.  This wasn't really beneficial in the longer term to either company.  It had become clear that Sound in Theory had completed its role in getting Situ from start up to a being a large enough company to house their own technology team, and so through the close relationship we had built over the years, we helped form a plan to transition the development to an internal team.  

Sound in Theory helped with this transition, allowing some staff to directly transfer into the new Situ team, and helping to hire and manage the team during the first 2 years.

To this day we continue to work with Situ, and provide ongoing development and support for their website, continuing to ensure that they lead the field with their highly engaging and user friendly website that is the portal to 1000s of serviced apartment providers across the world.