This is the type of question you hope you never have to ask your children but I promise, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Let me explain. Switchbox solves unique business problems. We do this in almost every industry: medical, manufacturing, distribution, marketing, etc. We even work in a few unique industries like prisons, stock exchanges for poker players and even groups that prevent human trafficking. Because of this experience, we’re not usually thrown off when clients want their websites to do odd things. However, last month while sitting in a meeting to discuss rebuilding a client’s web dashboard for their organization, an odd request came up. The client works with various farmers to help collect opinions on how to spend millions of dollars on research and development each year. Their current online application worked reasonably well but needed some help. We were in the process of discussing how to sort some of the dashboards for them and one of their board members told us that he didn’t care about anything else except that it had to work in my tractor, in the middle of my field, at 10pm at night, without an internet connection.
We are ambitious but making web applications work without the internet in the middle of a corn field at night was a bit of a stretch. To make a long story short, we went through our discovery process and worked through ways to solve his problem. The real problem wasn’t that he needed to use the application without internet access but that he needed access to summarized data from the application during his late night board meetings. We worked through what he needed and found a simple solution to the problem. If we had built it as requested it would have been a giant undertaking, but since we took the time to actually understand the problem we found something that solved the issue and stayed in budget.
Switchbox is about solving our client’s problems in the best way. Sometimes the best way is complex and sometimes it’s simple. We don’t care what it takes, we find solutions.