Brand Besties

Brand Besties is a fast-growing experiential staffing company that connects top-tier brand ambassadors (“Besties”) with leading brands across the U.S. As the company scaled, manual processes and disconnected spreadsheets were holding them back

The founder had previously invested heavily in a development agency, but the project failed to take off. The root cause? A lack of a structured discovery process involving key roles like a Functional Analyst, UX/UI designer, Technical Lead, and Project Manager. As a result, the project lacked clarity, and the budget was exhausted before any real product was delivered.

When Brand Besties approached us, their main pain points included:

• Manual event staffing: Besties applied via spreadsheets and emails, making it hard to manage and scale.
• Inefficient payments: Payments to Besties were manually calculated based on estimated hours.
• Poor visibility: No real-time insight into who checked in at events or if Besties were present at all.
• Limited scalability: Finding the right Besties in the right city was a slow, manual process.

A Fractional CTO brought us in to guide the process and assemble a full-stack agile team with the right roles for each phase of the project. This team evolved over time depending on the project needs—starting with discovery and transitioning smoothly into development.

Discovery & Planning: Discovery & Planning: Conducted a structured discovery phase with a FA, PM, TL, and UX/UI designer. Aligned business goals with product scope, use cases, and budget. Defined user journeys, designed user flows and wireframes to address specific pain points.

MVP Development: Developed a platform where Besties can sign up, apply for events, and check in/out at gigs. Built a real-time dashboard for the internal Brand Besties team to track event staffing status across cities. Automated payments by integrating check-in/check-out logs, hourly rates by role, Veem for disbursement, and QuickBooks Online for accounting.