Let's Build Something
ZND Laboratories has helped dozens of small and medium businesses optimize their operations, enhance their offerings, and advance their marketing. Let us help you unlock the full potential of your business with software and technology.
Impacted by COVID-19? We can help you deploy remote solutions and supplement your IT to keep your employees productive during these trying times.
Business Solutions
Outdated Websites
Decay is a classic problem on the web: you hired a designer, spent a bunch of money, and launched a great new site! ... 4 years ago. But your designer disappeared as soon as they cashed your check, and since then the trends and capabilities of the web have left your site looking old and awkward. We hear this story all the time, and want you to know we can help. You don't need to completely redo your site either - often a few simple updates will refresh your look and get you back to where you want to be.
Consultation
If you aren't nose-deep in the software engineering field, it's easy to get left behind. Machine learning, blockchain technology, and ever-changing standards can be overwhelming to wrap your head around, if tech isn't your area of focus. How do you know what can help your business? How do you know what it will cost to on-board? Simple: ask us. Once we understand your business, we can consult on a number of technical topics, help develop business plans, software solutions, and anything you might need.
Project Deadlines
Let our team be your team. If you are faced with a big technical deadline and need a few more heads in the game, we can help you quickly scale up your development force for the duration of your project. We are familiar with a wide array of technologies and platforms, so we can get up to speed quickly and work within your constraints to suppliment your team. Don't confuse team extension with outsourcing. We share your timezone, speak your language, and this avoid many pitfalls of freelance help.
Software Consulting
Many small and medium business do not have an in-house engineering team, and no wonder! Without expertise, it can be difficult to hire someone, let alone manage their projects while trying to handle the normal operations of your business. Furthermore, depending on your needs and type of business, it may not make financial sense to have a team on staff full time. That shouldn't stop you from sourcing and implementing the automation, marketing, and software solutions that can help your business grow! We partner with small and medium business like yours, and we'll be your tech team on-demand. We can work on a per-project basis, or on a retainer so that we are available for anything that comes up, without the cost and overhead of keeping an in-house team.
Team Extension. We commit to a fixed number of hours (per week or per month, for one or more developers), and you can reach out at any time for anything you need. We'll jump on it straight away, at no further charge, up to the number of retained hours. This is a good model if you want your IT on call as things come up (they always do), or for ongoing development work that requires regular part-time work hours.
Technical Consulting. We can discuss technical issues with you, even if you don't choose us to implement the needed solutions. Sometimes customers get cryptic messages from GoDaddy, or find they need to update their version of PHP, or they are looking to launch a new product and need help designing the database becuase their own developers are less experienced with systems engineering. Whatever you need, we can help with our general consulting services. Often, suggestions evolve into projects, and we're happy to help you from the first step to the last step, or any of those steps in between.
Project Design. Have the next big idea, but no idea what goes into it technically? We can consult on projects that lack specifics and help you form a roadmap to turn them into a reality, including estimating costs and discussing the business side of operating a business around the idea. We've worked with many small and medium business, and can offer insight into the business process as well as the technical requirements. Please note, we generally do not sign NDAs before discussing ideas.
Project Implementation. If we've helped you articulate your business needs and we have a solution in sight, we can build and deploy that solution for you, at a fixed price, based on delivery milestones. We even have some relationships where we work full time for customers over multiple projects, as though we wroked within their company, but the customer retains the ability to scale our team up or down on demand, and still avoids the overhead of recruiting, interviewing, training, payroll taxes, and other expenses that come with bringing developes in-house.
Data and Information
Many modern applications need to take advantage of public data. Let us help power your business with data feeds and APIs across a variety of diciplines. We have experience working with various data vendors and with scraping our own data sets to build APIs and custom-feeds to provide you with the data you need to power your application. We have particular experience with fantasy sports and las vegas odds, including building applications and utilizing data to create a variety of backend services for these expanding industries.
Here are some example data sets we've compiled and maintained for customers:
- Delayed stock prices
- Ticker symbols
- Historical stock prices
- RT / Scores and odds
- Schedules
- Team and player stats
- Crypto token prices
- Historical prices
- Blockchain statistics
- Current weather
- Historical weather
- Weather predictions
Website Hosting & Services
We can assist you with all of your website needs, from going online for the very first time, to overhauling your existing website. We're familiar with many popular ecommerce platforms, including Wordpress, Magento, and Shopify. We can also help you setup business emails, domain registration, and provide web hosting. Hosting customers have access to cpanel with unlimited MySQL databases and domain forwarders, as well as webmail, or we can manage your AWS or colocation. Here is an abridged list of available website services, many of which we'll include free in a larger project:
- Domain Registration
- Shared Webhosting
- Professional Email
- Mobile Compatability
- Website Updates
- Contact Forms & Plugins
- Security & DDoS
- Website Virus Removal
Marketing and Branding
We've worked with brands to help them build their marketing campaigns from sratch, and we've also swooped in and helped customers with existing campaigns that were not performing for them. Modern internet advertising is an incredibly complicated, and if done improperly, is incredibly expensive. The rules are constantly changing, and a whole host of companies that fasion themselves as "marketing experts" try and prey on overwhelmed business owners by charging them thousands per months with no results. We work differently by structuring every campaign to producce results before requiring you to commmit money. We make sure you understand what you are spending your money on, and why that channel is likely to bring you customers. Here are a few of the areas we can bring our experience to your aid:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Your website is only as good as its SEO, becuase if potential customers can't find your site, then it does not matter how nice and new it looks, or what great products or services you have to share. We can assess your entire website, analyze the keywords and competitive landscape, and make the necessay changes to get organic rankings on Google, Bing, and others. SEO does not end there. Search engines change their algorithms, and the competition is constantly adapting. We can provide regular monitoring of your accounts, generate monthly reports, and help you understand what is working and what is not so you can continue to gain market share.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Paid online marketing represents an enormous opportunity to reach potential clients -- but if done incorrectly, it is an endless black hole for money, with weak results. We are experts in Google AdWords and AdSense, Bing Ads, Facebook advertising, and in a variety of other popular avenues, and we can make sure every dollar you spend online helps to convert real customers. We can help you to create the right online campaign that targets the right people and brings them to your site, in the most cost effective way.
Branding. Brand recognition and a clear identity will help separate you from your competition. We can help you unify your branding across your email addresses, your website, and even your business cards. We also work with partners like MailChimp and SendGrid to help you reinforce your brand to your customers every time you make contact.
Social Media. Social media is one of the best avenue to reach customers and stay current. If done correctly, a social presence not only boosts your ranking in Google, but helps you reach potential customers, improve your brand recognition, and stay close to the pulse of your customers. We can help you setup your social assets, understand the best approach to social outreach, and guide you through maintaining a full social presence on all of the popular platforms.
Written Content. Almost every success SEO campaign requires an extensive content campaign where we generate articles and information relevant to your business and maintain them on a blog, social media, and/or on affiliate websites. They say "content is king," and this remains true today. Search engines are looking for updated websites, and users are constnatly searching, by voice or typing, for things they need. We work with teams of writers to help make sure your website has the answers to those search phrases so you can rank more widely.
YouTube Video. Perhaps the biggest opportunity today for brand recognition is through video. We can help with basic editing, animted introductions, color correcting, and other technical steps involved in producing and uploading videos to YouTube. We can also assist with creating the right description and adding the right keywords to ensure you get search traffic. Nothing captures the attention of possible customers more than video, either live or animated.
Our Team & Philosophy
Hello dear internet traveler, my name is Mike Zaffetti, and I am the owner of ZND Laboratories, inc. We are a small team here, with a wide network of regular consultants, contractors, and professionals with a large array of expertise. I've assembled them all into this project I call ZND Labs. Together, we build software, explore exciting new technologies such as Blockchain and Machine learning, and try to help business owners find success.
We have two main locations, one in Long Island, New York where I am based, and one in Puntarenas, Costa Rica, where I often travel and have a network of talented engineers I work with. I don't take on every project or every client. Some businesses want to throw a couple thousand at "a marketing company" but aren't interested in being a part of the process. Some companies want a software solution when a very viable alternative already exists on the market. These aren't the kinds of business relationships I look for. I want to build partnerships with companies who will keep coming back. Who grow to trust my team and our skill set, and rely on us as if we were part of their own company.
We also believe in a work/life balance, something that corporate America too often forgets. We work hard. Very hard. Then we go home to families and our children. Life is journey, and we don't plan to miss it, eyes set only on the distant destination. COVID-19 was a harsh reminder of this, for those who had forgotten. Thus, we don't take on more than we can handle, and we don't talk ourselves up just to close a deal. When we bring on a customer, it's becuase we believe we can bring them real value for their investment, and we feel they'll continue to be part of our business family, as long as we deliver on those expectations. Call us old fashioned, but we feel that being properly oriented in the world helps us bring forth the best in ourselves, which in turn brings forth the best in the things we build.
If you have a project and you feel you'd be a match for our laboratory, then please reach out -- Let's build something together!
