New Evolution Digital — Our Team

The past few weeks have been absolutely crazy. Doing a ton of planning on a project with Jesse Medrano and starting a front end and a react native application. Recruiting a Rockstar team to work on a project that long term will hopefully become fully monetized, but in the meantime will be a highly ambitious portfolio project for each of our team.

Our team consists of a number of full stack web developers, 2 data scientists, and a ton of crazy ideas to build out a product that is hoped to revolutionize the automotive industry for the better.

My name is Kyle Willard, and I am a Full Stack Web Developer, and now React Native Mobile Developer, I am also operating as the product owner. This post is to introduce our team to the world, and briefly touch on what we are working on, but to do that we have to delve into my history.

I come from a sales and customer service background, and been a sales rep, sales manager, and more recently a sales consultant, and curriculum developer for both a used car lot, and an automotive dealer association, for which I spent the last 3 years designing and running a complex WordPress site for.

Along with Jesse Medrano the idea of a sales centric web development agency was born, and created, this is New Evolution Digital, and originally the plan was to work with small businesses that have a subpar web presence that was likely negatively affecting the bottom line. Quickly, however, that turned into building ambitious projects. We have talked about a ton of projects but the one that really hit home was an automotive listing service that focused on transparency, honesty, and a focus on smaller automotive dealers, who tend to be amazing people trying to make ends meet.

Since 2018 I have talked to over a thousand dealers in Oregon, and come to find that the bottom line was always the hardest part of the job, and with new legislation that cost them more money, such as the corporate activity tax, they were struggling, and were feeling like they had to climb a cliff just to put food on the table. I have watched as a number of dealers closed their doors, and walked away. Some after only a few months, others who had been in business for decades.

On the flip side I have heard horror stories about dealers treating customers like garbage. Bait and switch, increasing the price of a vehicle, selling mechanically unsound vehicles (see lemons), and I have heard about customers arriving at one location, only to have to travel 50–100 miles to actually view the vehicle that they had originally wanted to look at, and still more who sell vehicles and do not take down the advertisements causing customers to show up and waste time looking for a car that was long gone.

In Oregon there is even a law firm whose web domain is Isuecardealers. That is how bad it gets at times. The listing companies that exist now are actually doing a disservice in some ways to both sides of this equation. Utilizing pricing data from major cities, and not accounting for more rural areas, sending insanely weak leads to dealers, and not having a high level of transparency for the consumers. These are only the tip of the iceberg.

To that end we linked up with some amazing, and talented people to work with us. This is on the basis of a portfolio project, and if proof of concept is powerful enough eventually, hopefully, a paycheck. I want to highlight each of them, and say very clearly:

These people should be hired immediately, even if that means us losing them. They deserve a paying gig. The level of talent, and commitment that I have seen from these people is unreal.

We asked them all to learn a completely new technology stack when we recruited them, many did not know TypeScript, GraphQL, Apollo, or microsystems. We threw new infrastructure at them with AWS & Docker, and without question, without argument, they all dove in and learned the stack.

Enough about all that lets talk about our team:

Product Owner/ Full Stack Developer/ Mobile Developer

Kyle Willard

Engineering Lead & Architect/ Full Stack Engineer

Jesse Medrano

Full Stack Engineers

• Chad Diaz
• Orlando Rivera Jr.
• Ashton Stom
• Tony Sorensen
• Anil Ramcharran
• Phil Lisak

Data Scientists

Peter Geraghty

Natasha Upchurch