QBell – doorbell is cool again
Native QR reading features in smartphones have opened a broad range of opportunities to connect physical and digital communication. The technology has been reborn.
At the same time, online shopping and home delivery have exploded. Buying nearly any product online has become not just easier than physically, but often the only choice for many. Improved online buying strongly affected delivery. Despite many technologies adopted to improve it the bottleneck remains the front door. Meeting at the front door breaks schedules and takes time from both – the buyer and the delivery service.
„We ourselves experienced first hand that this is a real pain for home delivery services as at the time we ran an online coffee shop. One day we connected the dots – why can‘t there be a virtual doorbell instead of a traditional one? And now we have QBell. A visitor just needs to scan the QR code at the door, the resident receives a message in their QBell app, and both can chat just like if they were standing on the opposite sides of the front door – instantly and safely.“, explains Daniel Houston, CEO at QBell.
When you catch a trend wave you can‘t lose pace. The same applies for QBell – the startup born in Liverpool, UK. Started 12 months ago QBell has already received more than 5000 signups for its upcoming Pilot launch. The promised V1 launch is coming soon, and the floor is getting hot in the office.
When a team is under time pressure nothing is more important than taking full control of the plan. On the other hand, startups diving into unexplored areas must be agile and adapt to any changes or new findings quickly. Aqua Zumaraite, Head of marketing at QBell knew, that to be both agile and in control of the great plan, you must have a proper project management tool.
„First we tried using Monday.com for a couple of months. We noticed that it takes too long for us to manage work data within the system itself and it gets quite messy when the scope increases. Besides, we missed features like task dependencies in our chosen plan.“, Aqua shares about the beginning of their journey. This led to a decision to look for an efficient and easy-to-use work management tool. And the next choice was Teamhood.
„We tried Teamhood for a week, and we loved it. The tool makes it easy to structure work items into the boards. Now it only takes 5 minutes to check the boards once a day – and the status of the project, as well as things to be done, are clear to everyone. We work at an extremely fast pace now and there are changes happening in the plan almost every week. Therefore, the dependencies feature is particularly important. It takes minutes to apply the latest changes to the plan and we can see how they will impact the further stages as well as the whole project.“, says Aqua Zumaraite.
Last, but not least Aqua and the team have also found that Teamhood Kanban boards can be applied for other purposes, for example, customer management. Postponing adoption of CRM might save time and resources needed for early business growth.
Let‘s see if Teamhood becomes the one tool for all work management at QBell and how many electric bells will be replaced by QBells before the end of the year.
2019 - Present Co-founder and CEO @ Teamhood.
2015-2019 Head of software engineering department at Danske Bank.
2017-2018 Partner Associate Professor at Vilnius University. Lecturer of Software Architecture course
2011 - 2015 Managed numerous smaller IT teams at Prewise.
Co-founder of RaveIT, Eylean, No Brakes Games
Certified Agile product owner and practitioner. Managed large scale enterprise projects as well as launch of small startup products.
MSc of Software Engineering at Vilnius University.
Hobbies: Racing, MTB cycling, Windsurfing
