Creative Instinct Reviews

About Creative Instinct

Owner of Creative Instinct, is a freelance graphic designer specializing in logo design, branding, marketing collateral and website design for small businesses. To get a top-notch quality functional website, PHP app development is the best way to go with. It provides you with many chances to PHP Application Development in order to explore its multiple support platforms along with the web servers.

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Security audit that found issues we did not know existed and fixed every one

Jisoo Kwon / CTO - HanRiver Tech Co Ltd

Verified
Aug 14, 2025

Project summary: Our existing platform had grown organically over several years and the accumulated technical debt was beginning to affect both performance and our ability to ship new features.

Project governance was one of the things that impressed me most. We had a dedicated project manager who ran tight fortnightly sprints with clear acceptance criteria, a shared backlog that gave us full visibility at all times, and a change request process that was fair and transparent. Nothing slipped through the cracks, no bill shock at the end, and the final delivery matched the original scope document almost perfectly. In my experience that kind of discipline is genuinely uncommon.

PROS

Senior engineers on our account throughout the entire project rather than a bait-and-switch to juniors after contract signing, transparent reporting, realistic estimates that proved accurate

CONS

Their calendar books up quickly which made scheduling the initial kickoff slightly challenging — a good problem for them to have and not one that affected our delivery

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeCybersecurity

IndustryMining & Metals

Project Cost$10,000 to $49,999

DurationNov 2024 – Feb 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

I lead technology at HanRiver Tech Co Ltd, a mid-sized organisation in the Mining & Metals sector headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. My remit as CTO covers everything from infrastructure to product development. We had reached a point where our internal engineering capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap without an experienced external partner.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

The immediate trigger was a performance failure during our peak trading period that cost us measurably in both revenue and client trust. The root cause was architectural and our internal team did not have the Cybersecurity expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.

What services did the company provide for your project?

The core engagement was Cybersecurity but expanded to include technical consultancy during the discovery phase, which helped us refine the requirements significantly before development began. They also took responsibility for coordinating with our third-party data providers, which removed a significant coordination burden from our internal team.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

Price was a factor but not the deciding one. They were mid-range in our evaluation. What tipped it was the combination of their technical depth in Cybersecurity, the seniority of the team they proposed to assign to our account, and the clarity of their project governance model. We had been burned by an agency that overpromised before and we needed to see evidence of process maturity.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Extremely well. They asked detailed questions, challenged vague requirements until they were specific, and proposed sensible defaults for decisions we had not yet made rather than just leaving them open. By the time development started there was no ambiguity in the backlog, which is a rare starting position.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

The project management was the best I have experienced in a vendor relationship. We had fortnightly sprint reviews with structured agendas, a shared backlog that we could inspect at any point, a risk register that was actively maintained rather than created at kickoff and never opened again, and a project manager who treated our time as something worth protecting. Communication was proactive, not reactive.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

On time and within the agreed budget. They had given us a range estimate at the start, which I had been sceptical of, and they landed within the lower half of that range. Their estimation accuracy came from having broken the work down in genuine detail during discovery rather than giving a rough number and hoping. It showed in every sprint.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

Quantitatively: user engagement metrics are up significantly since launch, our support ticket volume has dropped, and we have received unsolicited positive feedback from clients who noticed the improvement. Qualitatively: our internal team is proud of the product we now have, which affects morale and retention in ways that do not show up on a dashboard but matter enormously.

What did you like most about working with this company?

The quality of the written communication. This matters more than most clients articulate. Clear, concise, technically accurate updates that our non-technical stakeholders could read and understand. Proposals and change requests that made the decision obvious rather than obscuring it in jargon. That communication quality reduced our internal coordination overhead significantly.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Unreservedly. We are in active conversation about the next phase of work and I expect this to become a multi-year partnership. For any organisation in the Mining & Metals space looking for a Cybersecurity partner who combines technical rigour with genuine commercial awareness, I would put this team at the top of the shortlist.

Publishing workflow that cut our time-to-live for new content by 70 percent

Noura Al-Rashidi / VP of Technology - Gulf Retail Holdings

Verified
Jun 25, 2022

Project summary: The project had both a hard delivery date tied to a board commitment and a scope that our previous agency had told us was not achievable. We needed someone to prove otherwise.

The thing I appreciate most in retrospect is that they were honest when something was harder than expected. Twice during the project the team came to us proactively to say that a particular component needed more time to do properly and explained why cutting corners would create problems later. We gave them the time. Both decisions were correct. The resulting product is solid and we have had none of the post-launch instability that plagued our last two technology projects.

PROS

Business-aware approach to every technical decision, strong project governance, fast turnaround on feedback, zero drama during a genuinely complex engagement

CONS

Time zone difference required some adjustment to our internal communication habits but the team managed the overlap window efficiently and it never affected momentum

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeCMS Development

IndustryMining & Metals

Project Cost$10,000 to $49,999

DurationMay 2025 – Jan 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

As VP of Technology at Gulf Retail Holdings, I manage a cross-functional technology team serving our Mining & Metals clients from Abu Dhabi, UAE. We are a commercially focused organisation and every technology decision we make is evaluated against a clear business case. We needed a partner who understood that context, not just the technical brief.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

We had a product concept validated by market research but no clear path to build it within our budget and timeline constraints. Our Mining & Metals competitors were moving quickly and we could not afford to spend eighteen months finding out a generalist agency could not execute the CMS Development work our product required.

What services did the company provide for your project?

End-to-end CMS Development delivery with a particular emphasis on the integration layer that connected the new build to our existing Mining & Metals infrastructure. They also provided UI/UX input that was not in the original scope but which they offered proactively because they could see it would affect adoption. That kind of initiative was characteristic of how they approached the whole engagement.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

Price was a factor but not the deciding one. They were mid-range in our evaluation. What tipped it was the combination of their technical depth in CMS Development, the seniority of the team they proposed to assign to our account, and the clarity of their project governance model. We had been burned by an agency that overpromised before and we needed to see evidence of process maturity.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Thorough and precise. They translated our business language into technical requirements without losing the intent, which is a skill that sounds straightforward but frequently goes wrong. Every user story they wrote was reviewed against the original business objective before it entered the sprint and the acceptance criteria were specific enough to remove subjectivity from QA.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

Communication was handled primarily asynchronously given the time zone difference between Abu Dhabi, UAE and the team's base, but it was managed so well that the gap rarely felt like a constraint. Written updates were clear and timely, escalations were handled promptly, and we never had to chase for a status update. The cadence was exactly right — enough to feel informed, not so much that it created overhead.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

Yes on both counts. There was one sprint where a third-party integration took longer than scoped because of undocumented API behaviour on the vendor side. The team flagged it immediately, proposed two mitigation options, and we agreed on an approach that recovered the timeline within two weeks. That is how scope issues should be handled and rarely are.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

The ROI case we presented to our board assumed a payback period of eighteen months. Based on current trajectory we will hit that in under a year. The efficiency gains in our Mining & Metals operations have been more significant than the model projected, partly because the quality of the data coming out of the new system is enabling decisions we could not make before.

What did you like most about working with this company?

The continuity of the team. The engineers who scoped the work were the engineers who built it. That sounds like it should be standard practice but in my experience it often is not. The institutional knowledge that comes from that continuity pays dividends at every stage, particularly when you are dealing with a complex Mining & Metals domain where context takes time to build.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Yes. The referral I would give comes with context: they are not the cheapest option and they are not the fastest to schedule. If you are optimising purely on price or looking for someone to start tomorrow, there are other choices. If you want the work done properly and a partner you can trust with a complex, high-stakes CMS Development engagement, this team is the answer.

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