you have questions?
we have answers
Sometimes, you just want a straight answer about how things work. Here’s a list of common questions, and how we handle business.
We do! You can download a PDF and sign our Mutual NDA by clicking here. You can also email us directly at Hello@ChopDawg.com and we’ll be happy to send you a copy.
You can be anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection that is compatible with Zoom. Our partners are working on their businesses from many parts of the world!
Absolutely! We have partnered with companies and individuals from many countries such as Canada, Mexico, Ireland, United Kingdom, France, Thailand, Kuwait, Egypt, New Zealand, Australia, and China since 2009. Potential partners who live abroad need to be available within reasonable EST business hours, however.
We’ve built our processes and capabilities to work for a broad range of organization sizes — from early-stage startups to large enterprises. Working in a diversity of spaces is essential to our team’s continuous proficiency and growth.
We are selective with the industries we work with, but we never turn down an incredible opportunity just because we haven’t worked with a specific industry before. We are continually leveraging our acquired capabilities from past projects into new ones. We discuss this further in our Process Page.
That being said, what are some of the industries that we know very well? Here’s a shortlist: Healthcare, investing, online retail, dating, real estate, the stock market, internal business operations, gaming, theme parks, casinos, education, sports, government, hospitality, and environmental management.
Use our Portfolio Page to look through our select catalog of work. Don’t see your industry above? Want to see if our team could work in your industry? Contact us via our Hire Us page or send an email to Hello@ChopDawg.com. We’re happy to help!
Though every partner’s project is different, we often break our projects into distinct phases that you can read about in our Process Page.
Our project proposal is always free! That being said, we require any potential client of ours to sign an LOI (Letter of Intent) first before we proceed forward on an official proposal. Our proposals do expire 28-days (four full weeks) from the initial date you received it.
If your proposal expires after the 28-day expiration, you won’t be able to re-open it for one calendar year. This allows us at Chop Dawg to ensure we’re creating proposals for those who are serious about proceeding forward with us and give other organizations the opportunity to work with us; without worrying about a potential conflict of interest.
Until you sign a Letter of Intent (LOI) with us, there is no time on the clock or expiration date to worry about. We recommend moving forward with a proposal only if you’re determined to begin working with us within 1-2 months from that specific date to avoid having it expire on you prematurely.
Before we begin working on a formal proposal for you, we kindly ask all of our clients to sign and execute a Letter of Intent (LOI) with us. This is a small agreement that discusses everything you should expect in the proposal planning process (Discovery) with us. For example, all of our proposals have a 28-day expiration. If you do not move forward with us after 28-days, you either can let the proposal expire or sign the contract agreement to proceed forward on your project with us.
Our LOIs also works to avoid any possible conflicts of interest. The LOI allows both us, a fair, transparent way to plan accordingly before working together. Carefully setting the agreed upon terms before anything is underway has allowed for many smooth project turnarounds.
Strong communication makes working together significantly easier, and we take this seriously. That is why for all of our partners, we work together to determine how much communication is needed. Some projects require weekly meetings. For others, bi-weekly and monthly meetings suffice. We are always a call, Slack, Zoom meeting or email away. And most of all, we feel accountable for your product’s success. We incorporate you into our process and work with you directly to drive things forward. We’ll also provide you with a progress board in Jira, a state-of-the-art project management platform.
When it comes to our remote meetings, we traditionally use Zoom. This allows you to chat with us, screenshare, and more. Zoom is supported on any web browser, operating system, and even available as a mobile app for both the iPhone and Android. Each Zoom meeting comes with a call-in number that you can use, in case you ever find yourself on the road without a reliable internet connection and need to dial-in old school!
Outside of our weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly calls, you’ll know the personal emails of all of the people on your team. You’ll be able to Slack message us, call us or email us at any time, and you’ll always hear back from us within one business day. We’re your team and we have your back.
You’ll have access to provide us feedback on everything through the following tools: Figma (primarily via the ‘comment’ tool), Google Workspace, Slack and Jira/ Confluence. This allows for you to not only track our work in real-time, but provide us your timely feedback as well.
We build everything on our own, highly secure and private development server. When we are building a react native application, you will receive “builds” to see your app in real-time as we are working on it, and you’ll be able to provide us feedback along the way. If we’re building a web app or website, you will receive a direct URL (link) to access on any web browser.
The more information that we have on what you are looking for, the better! Especially during the Design Phase. However, we’re also mindful of your time. For many of our partners, hopping onto our weekly, bi-weekly, and/or monthly scheduled calls is more than enough for us to do our jobs successfully. On average, these calls will last between twenty minutes to an hour. In most cases, you will never need to give us more than three hours a week, even on the most complex of projects, though you are always encouraged to provide us more time if you are up to it!
Of course! For any project that we take on, we include a 30-Day Bug warranty and Maintenance Window. You’ll never owe us final payment on any project until it has been completed 100%.
Never. All of our prospective partners sign a non-conflict of interest clause with us in our Letter of Intent (LOI). For any partner that is currently active with us, we will not work with their competitors. It’s our commitment to see our partners succeed, always.
Being an “active partner” means you have an open, existing contract with Chop Dawg that has yet to be fulfilled or completed. It also means that we have your back, dawg!
No, absolutely not. Once the full project balance is paid, transfer of all ownership occurs, with all resource access and assets we created for that particular project becoming the property of our partners.
We’ll offer our feedback on any presentation materials such as their pitch decks and business documents, and we will guide you as you craft your pitch. We’re always happy to make introductions for you to angel investors and VC firms that are in our network. This is a service offered to all active partners at no additional cost. We can’t make any promises here, but we’ll always make an intro or recommendation whenever we can. Check out this post for reliable funding sources in 2022!
We’ll offer our advice on how to stand out to the media when seeking to get coverage, and who to reach out to. We’ve also directly connected our partners with media partners in the past, such as Technical.ly, Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, TechCrunch, TheNextWeb, Mashable, EliteDaily, NBC News, FOX News, ABC News, Startup Grind, Startups.co, Business Insider, and more.
Unfortunately, we do not. If you’re interested in learning more about why we (and other high-quality development companies) do not accept profit-sharing, equity, or joint-ventures as a form of compensation, you can read this post that our CEO Joshua Davidson wrote on the topic . Here’s an up-to-date resource on seeking funding for your future app. If the entry-level cost of app development is prohibitive to your overall venture right now, consider starting with a NFP (non-functioning prototype) . At Chop Dawg, this includes the full design of your future app, including wireframes, hi-fis, product flows and a clickable prototype to demonstrate your app’s functionality to investors, customers and users alike. We’ve also launched an alternate development model, where we offshore the programming side of the app only (something we only do with your permission at Chop Dawg) with our core US-based team still handling the rest.
Every project that we work on for our partners is different since no two apps or sites are built the same!
Here, we’ve provided a broad range of typical project costs based on platform and development source. The time, labor and whether or not we utilize our core US-based development team are big factors in where pricing falls.
Branding: $1,000 to $10,000+ (USD)
Non-Functional Prototype (NFP): $15,000 to $30,000+ (USD)
WordPress/ E-Commerce Site: $15,000 to $50,000+ (USD)
Website App: $100,000 to $300,000+ (USD)
Cross-Platform iOS/ Android App: $100,000 to $300,000+ (USD)
We launched an alternate in-house development model for startups, nonprofits and small businesses, so we can also offer our services in the 100K+ range for full-scale apps. By offshoring the development side of your app (something we’d never do without your consent at Chop Dawg) to a trusted offshore team who works under the watchful eye of one of our US-based senior developers and your project manager, we’re able to pass those cost-savings on to you, and bring you into our wheelhouse to work within our proven methodology for much less than using our core onshore development team. Nothing changes about our overall app development process — you’d still partner with one of our UI/UX designers for the design, and have a dedicated PM to walk you through the entire process.
Website Application Using Our Offshore Development Team: $75,000+ (USD)
Cross-Platform iOS/ Android App Using Our Offshore Development Team: $100,000+ (USD)
If you’re interested in receiving a more exact estimate on your website or app idea, you can email us directly at Hello@ChopDawg.com to schedule a consultation. We’d be more than happy to help!
When it comes to any project with us that will require over 40 hours of work, we bill at a set rate. You’ll always know upfront how much it will cost to build your new website or app with us.
After we’ve worked together to establish the requirements of the project, our team will determine the scope of work required. We will provide you with an exact budget requirement, and a realistic estimate on the timeframe we expect your project to take. We do not believe in billing large projects by the hour, week, or month, to decrease potential inaccuracies in the final scope of work. This also keeps us in check, and it is in our best interest to keep projects timely and high-quality.
When it comes to set-rate projects, smaller ones are usually broken into two payments with 50% due upfront, and 50% upon completion, ready for launch.
For larger set-rate projects such as building a mobile or web app, these projects are broken into multiple, equal payments for the duration of the project. For example, if you were quoted at $100,000 (USD) with an estimated timeframe of nine months of work with us, you would have a payment plan of ten payments of $10,000 (USD) throughout the entire project, owed monthly. The final payment would not be due until upon completion, ready for launch.
If a project requested is under 40 hours of work, such as a small tweak/task, we would work with you to come up with a fair hourly rate. These type of projects we usually skip over the proposal process defined in Discovery, to help save and maximize time efficiency for our partners.
In the circumstances of a delay caused by us, we would push back a payment plan accordingly to the delay we have caused. For example, if we caused a 10-day delay due to us taking longer on wireframes for you, all future payment due dates will be pushed back by ten days to offset the difference.
This is easily enforced since we agree upon the timed milestones before and during Discovery. It’s our expectation to always manage our clients fairly, and this is one of the ways we ensure we always hold ourselves accountable to do just that.
This answer in regards to project timeframes will vary by the type of project and client that we are working with. That said, here is a breakdown of the average time committed per project type with us over the last 24 months:
Branding: 1-2 Months
WordPress/ E-Commerce Site: 2-3 Months
Non-Functional Prototype (NFP): 2-3 Months
Website Application: 5-6 Months
Cross-Platform iOS/ Android Application: 6-8 Months
When we provide the timeframe estimates above, this assumes that we are creating something from scratch. When starting at zero, you’ll need us to create the user interface design, backend programming, iOS/Android or web frontend programming, administrator backend, frontend website, branding, and server setup/configuration.
During the project proposal stage, you’ll receive a breakdown of how long each phase will take and what is going to be done during the expected timeframes. Please note, however, that all projected project timelines are estimated.
If you’re interested in receiving a more exact timeframe estimate on your website or app idea, you can email us directly at Hello@ChopDawg.com. We’d be more than happy to help you!
Nope, never. We never want you to feel you have sacrificed the quality of your product, ever. You’ll have the ability to provide us as much feedback and revisions through the Design phase on every single wireframe, high fidelity, and product flow provided to you. Only once you have approved each deliverable, we will move forward on the next phase of your project with us.
We’re able to accept payments through three different methods. The most common way for our partners is ACH/Direct Deposit (bank-to-bank). We also accept ACH transfers through Quickbooks, and credit/debit card through Quickbooks (though this does add a 1.0% – 3.0% processing fee to each payment that you make). We also accept checks to our business mailing address!
Of course! Drop us an email at Hello@ChopDawg.com, and we will be more than happy to direct you to our references. If you’re able to provide us with more details about what it is you’re trying to have built too, we can give you specific references matching that type of project to be the best fit.
For our websites and web applications, our method of choice when it comes to programming is PHP with MySQL. We use the framework Laravel when it comes to web application programming, too. For most websites/eCommerce websites, you’ll traditionally find us working with WordPress and WooCommerce. All of our websites and web apps are written using HTML5 and CSS3. We also use Firebase.
For our iOS and Android applications, we support React Native. All of our iOS and Android applications use a REST API to communicate data.
Per policy, we can’t sign your NDA since as an agency, businesses pitch us ideas that may be similar to yours. We can’t prevent ourselves from hearing other businesses’ ideas or functionalities that may be similar in purpose. However, we don’t want businesses to ever think that we are stealing their ideas or not taking the protection of their intellectual property (IP) seriously. We offer our own bilateral NDA that makes sure that your idea is still protected between us and everything that you share is maintained with strict confidentiality. You can download our NDA here.
We officially opened our “doors” back on August 1st, 2009. We’re currently in our fourteenth year of operations as a company!
We currently have a talented team of over 50+ amazing, unique individuals who help us build incredible products for our partners, and help make us the best we can be. To learn a bit more about our team, and discover some of the key people who make us who we are, you can visit our Team Page.
As a company, we’re registered and headquartered in the state of New Jersey.
We have always been a remote-first company, but we also believe in the power of flexibility when it comes to collaboration. Many of our team members work out of their homes, local coffee shops, and co-working spaces. Most are based in the US, but we also have offshore development resources available should you decide to utilize those resources for your project. We also provide the option to work with a solely US-based team.
Both! Our team is a wonderful mix of our own full-time team members and talented 1099 contractors. All of our team members are based out of the United States or able to work in the US. We do not offshore our work overseas (unless you’ve chosen that development model with us), but several digital nomads do call the Chop Dawg Team home.
To date, we have helped launch over 400+ digital products.
From the outset, we are doing something that many agencies do — build apps. You’ll find agencies that specialize in different technology stacks and verticals. We keep ourselves open because we can quickly expand our team to meet your needs. So, then, how do we differ?
It’s in our philosophy of why we work in the first place. Our purpose is to help non-technical visionaries get a chance to release something game-changing. We exist to give companies and organizations the opportunity to get ahead of the technological curve.
Most of all, we know all of the do’s and don’ts when it comes to building complicated apps. The core of our team has been around since the very beginning, so our smooth communication and process is something that you will notice quickly.
Everyone in our team is united by the principles of customer service. We’re here for you, and we’ll only work with you if we believe in your idea as much as you do. We’re in it with you, and you’ll always walk away from a meeting knowing that we have your back.
Back in 2009, we couldn’t settle on the name Top Dawg or Chop Shop. We ended up compromising. The rest, as they say, was history!
Although our team is located throughout the entire United States (and can be found traveling or living abroad), we operate our business on Eastern Standard Time (EST) hours between 9AM – 7PM, Monday through Friday — the hours after 5PM to accommodate regularly scheduled meetings with entrepreneurs who might have a day job.
Our company recognizes the following holidays and dates, and closes on: MLK Day (1/15/2024), Memorial Day (5/27/2024), Juneteenth (6/19/2024), Independence Day (7/04/2024) and the following day (7/05/2024), Labor Day (9/02/2024), Thanksgiving Eve through Black Friday (11/27/2024 – 11/29/2024), and closed December 23rd through January 1st (12/23/2024 – 01/01/2025). If you are an active partner of ours, and have a weekly or bi-weekly meeting scheduled with us during one of these dates, we will reschedule with you accordingly with proper notice.
You can email us at Hello@ChopDawg.com or fill out the form on our Hire Us Page.
We’re always looking for new talent to join our family! You can follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to see new job postings as they’re shared live, or you can pass along your resume to us by emailing it to Jobs@ChopDawg.com!
Curious about the business of apps? Our team shares everything we know over on the Chop Dawg Library when it comes to technology, industry trends—even the fundamentals of entrepreneurship.
Check it out
