On January 23, 2020, ACT | The App Association visited Port Orleans Brewing Co., a New Orleans, Louisiana based brewery, to engage with developers about the local tech community, Louisiana’s app economy, and general trends and opportunities for tech businesses. Through this event we met Maxwell Walters of Revelry. Below, Maxwell discusses how platforms have changed the software distribution industry and how Revelry harnesses the tools platforms provide developers to meet the individual needs of each of their clients.
Revelry’s mission is to help companies manage software solutions by leveraging our team, processes, and tools. We design, build, and scale innovative products people love to use. Our seasoned product teams are experts at delivering high quality code. We leverage the best technology to solve the problem at hand. Over the past seven years, we’ve built several web and mobile apps that help businesses scale. Our engineers are experts in Elixir, Ruby, JavaScript, React Native, WordPress, and more.
Currently, the company employs over 55 full-time team members, and with our headquarters in New Orleans, a majority of the team lives in Louisiana. We have smaller offices in Chicago and Dallas and additional distributed team members. We like to keep things local, so we invest in the New Orleans ecosystem, empowering local entrepreneurs and businesses. We want to ensure local businesses have access to the resources they need to grow and be successful. Revelry prides itself on being a bootstrapped team founded out of necessity. We’ve steadily grown over the past seven years, thanks to our entrepreneurial, scrappy, and gritty perseverance.
I joined Revelry after relocating to New Orleans post-graduation. I knew I wanted to be in technology and part of building products, and my background was working for a series of entrepreneurs, helping them kickstart their early-stage ideas. So, when the opportunity became available, I took a product internship at Revelry where I learned how the company works with their clients. I then joined the team full-time as a sales leader, where I’ve been for more than four years. My current role is to help prospective clients figure out how to best work with a tech team like Revelry. I help prospective partners understand our approach to building software, ensure they have done their necessary research before investing in building technology, and help people think through their business model and articulate their objectives. Revelry uses software to meet business objectives, so when I speak with new people, I listen their concerns and earn their trust.
More people are building software than ever before. It’s a good thing, but it’s inherent competition for Revelry. We’re a small firm, but the availability of major platforms gives us the ability to compete with bigger companies. Our partnership with AWS provides a level of validity to clients that wasn’t available just over a decade ago. It proves that we are capable of working with the enterprise technologies that they need. Platform partnerships make it possible for us to compete at a higher level.
Our clients range from startups to large enterprise companies, and we work across a variety of industries including energy, healthcare, finance, and logistics. Revelry provides the resources to build apps for our partners, helping them contribute to the app economy at large. We leverage existing platforms as pathways to get our clients’ ideas to market. We use the Apple App Store, Google Play store, Amazon Web Services, Azure, WordPress, and more.
Twenty years ago, downloading software with a few clicks was not possible. Customers had to drive to the store, make their selection, many times based on brand identification, and pay at least 10 times the cost of today’s software. The introduction of platforms and online marketplaces has not only made software accessible to a wider consumer base, it has created a built-in level of trust and more competitive pricing. What we build, they can get into the hands of their users at a much-reduced cost. Our clients are not suffocated by competition and are able to compete and disrupt. Revelry’s clients have seen firsthand that platforms allow entrepreneurs to distribute their products seamlessly and faster than ever before. Ultimately, Revelry and our partners care about positively impacting lives. We need platforms to continue to provide access to the ecosystems they built.