Forty hours might not seem like much. But it’s the amount of time we’ve used to solve our client’s business problem of having a growing team of people who want to collaborate and need to find each other’s skills and capabilities. We’ve done this by not overshooting prices with custom systems but by extending their website – what works for their current company size of 100-200 people.

Makimo delivered a rapid, creative solution to our problem, and the net result had utility and functionality beyond even that which was requested. They are a highly skilled, professional, and friendly outfit, who deliver on-time and under-budget. We look forward to working with them again.

Glenn Murphy, Tune Therapeutics

Client

Tune Therapeutics is an epigenetic programming platform for the treatment of disease according to its Crunchbase record. In 2021, the company acquired $40M in Series A funding, which accelerated its growth and helped them scale rapidly to over 100 people in 2022. The company is located in Seattle, WA, and Durham, DC, in the United States of America.

The company provides the proprietary genetic tuning platform TEMPO™ that enables precise tuning and modulation of specific genes as needed. You can read more about the platform on their website.

Problem

Challenges do await companies that do scale rapidly in size. One of these challenges is access to critical information that all team members need to have to work productively.

For Tune Therapeutics, a company with a lot of brains inside (researchers, laboratory operators, programmers), one of the essential needs is to get value out of this network of people by igniting collaboration between them. As Tune’s employees have a lot of expertise in many different areas, a spark would come out just from the ability to search people by their skills.

With that in mind, we’ve looked at the simplest possible way to do that.

What we did

Through a bit of consulting and exploration, we’ve found that:

1. Tune’s website is being built at the moment (at the moment of publishing this case study, you can find the new website at https://tunetx.com)
2. A lot of employee data has already been entered into the public-facing page https://tunetx.com/join-the-band/, and the existing visuals suit here as well.
3. There was no rationale to implement any new tools or systems, as it would constrain future choices. In the future, more deliberate tools could be introduced in a more systematic way.

Here I’d like to thank another company, Motionstrand, for their great work on the website and proposing architecture that was open to extension in such a way.

We’ve used the already existing infrastructure and framework to build an internal extension to the site with a rich search experience, built with Algolia Autocomplete in order to find people by skills, skill combinations, names, and more.

Solving this business problem came up with about 40 hours of work. It would be hard to find anything that provides this similar value for that amount of money, and an experience that doesn’t require any training, as more sophisticated tools, do.

Michał Moroz, consultant

Two consultants were involved in this endeavor. Aleksander Krawiel, whose specialization is in JavaScript ecosystems, suggested Algolia Autocomplete as the right choice for the task.

In the end, Tune Therapeutics praised our work, and the tool is going to be widely used by its employees, helping them in reaching out to each other.

Technology stack

• WordPress, PHP
• JavaScript (modern vanilla JS)
  • Algolia Autocomplete (search experience)

Our unique contribution

The unique blend of our partnership came from the following factors:

• being able to understand and then deliver a viable solution to a business problem without involving unnecessary costs
• using the right team to solve the right problem – that’s why we are not shy about changing team composition in our projects

Heroes of the story

Michał Moroz · Aleksander Krawiel