Metajive x PXLP

Pixel perfection: Hard to find, even harder to find great partners. That was the premise behind creating PXLP – our in-house development company that works on most Metajive projects as well as external client work. Years in the making, and with one successful year now under our belts, we figured it was time to talk to two of PXLP’s co-founders, Dave Benton and Valentin Schreibmaier.

V: Being the CTO of a digital agency for many years I saw firsthand how hard it is to build an in-house development team that is able to build outstanding products, and cope with the changing requirements of agency projects while meeting every deadline. Many conversations with other agency owners and CTOs made it clear that most are facing similar challenges. This is why we set out to solve this, not just for ourselves, but also for our partners.

D: It was not an overnight decision, we had been partnering on projects for over a year before we talked about “putting a ring on it”, then PXLP only worked on Metajive projects for six months to work out the kinks. This team is dedicated to growing slowly if it means getting things right.

D: We really looked at what problems existed for companies that set out to build great projects and it comes down to three things.

1) Bad onboarding. Developers are not mind readers so it's our job to ask questions and get all the specs.

2) Lack of project management and communication throughout the process, keeping everyone in the loop when anything shifts.

3) QA, QA, QA. It is not just one person's job to test a project, so we set up multiple levels of QA to do whatever we can to make the project well, pixel perfect! (Sorry, had to).

D: I am always surprised when things go according to plan! We have formed some lasting partnerships with brands and agencies I have known and admired for years. I have also been surprised how welcoming our partners have been to a global team. Of course there were hiccups but we were able to find some incredible people to join the team globally… A distributed team is much easier in development than in other industries.

V: We knew from the beginning that building a remote culture and dealing with multiple time zones would be the two biggest challenges that we would face. After a year, we are surprised how these challenges turned into advantages, allowing us to be better and more productive than we would have been in a single location. Since we were already fully remote and spread across many time zones it gave us access to a much larger talent pool than in a traditional setup, allowing us to hire the most talented and dedicated individuals.

We have found some seamless times to communicate and keep the train moving. We have also made trips from California to Austria and back because face time matters. One day we will get the entire company together but we are not there yet as a company. Online collaboration tools have come a long way so there might be Slack messages flying 24/7, but the way we break projects down to tasks allows us to coordinate in real time and asynchronously.

D: We are hoping to find more people who are dedicated to creating great work to join the team. We have already done our 2023 planning and are constantly evaluating our process against the next stage. Evolution not revolution, we are focused on keeping the team tight and making tweaks where we can.

We also need to make more t-shirts.