What do an online radio station, a vegan restaurant website, and an upcoming video game, all have in common? Each of these was handcrafted by Jamaican start-up Gizzada Software. Gizzada Software handles everything from basic website design to onboarding clients to their state-of-the-art business management and productivity backend, the aptly-named Jamaker.
The innovative company, made up of five friends turned business partners, has made the push into software development promising a combination of aestheticism, design-savvy, and utility that most associate with developers outside of the region.
Co-founder, CEO, and CTO Christopher Gayle, co-founder, COO, and Project Manager Joel Christian, Head of Illustration & Animation, Cory Mills, Head of Multimedia Production Warren Honeywell, and CMO/Secretary Victoria Gregory make up the prodigious fivesome. Named after the classic Jamaican pastry, Gizzada Software hopes to emulate another tech company named after a popular treat.
Established in 2017, Gizzada Software led with their project ‘Get There.’ Releasing on iOS and Android, the ride-hailing app was a pioneer in the field at the time. Think Uber or Lyft. While the app didn’t take off, the team struck gold with the internal tool they created to streamline development, now publicly available as Jamaker.’
Beautiful, Productive Software
Jamaker is your “office in the cloud,” and the secret behind Gizzada Software’s success. The service has grown over the years and boasts scalable productivity and management features. Custom web domains and hosting, email inbox, cloud storage, teleconference minutes, all the way up to training & customer support and fleet management are just a handful of the features offered.
Supporting a tool as powerful as Jamaker would be enough for many start-ups at least twice the size of Gizzada, but the company takes pride in its diverse portfolio. “Software is very flexible,” explained Joel Christian. The co-founder and COO ensures that the team is compliant with regulations, and on time with projects and assists in onboarding clients and maintaining their high rate of satisfaction. “We like the diversity [of our products] and we try to be as diverse as possible. It shows that we can optimize any kind of business.”
In their mission statement, Gizzada states the importance of software in improving the day-to-day life of Caribbean people. Christian sees this as a revision of his original career path. “I wanted to be a civil engineer,” he explained. “I remember thinking, ‘when I grow up, I want to fix all the roads.’” Today he and the Gizzada team have swapped that physical infrastructure for digital roads.
Bringing the Caribbean online
Like many tech startups, the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine placed Gizzada in an enviable position — business as usual. Comfortable working remotely, the company used its expertise to bring brick-and-mortar stores into the digital age. “I’m glad we were able to help some people go through it,” Christian enthused. “People were nervous, how do we go about doing these things? A lot of these people didn’t know that there were local people who could do this for them, they were fretting that they’d have to get these overseas people at high prices who don’t necessarily understand them and can’t really communicate with them.”
Gizzada Software is looking to expand its reach, taking on clients from other Caribbean islands and the United States. CEO/CTO Christopher Gayle has a belief that if you can develop software that works in the Caribbean, that software can work for anyone. Caribbean culture pulls together many disparate cultures. The standard of living can drastically vary across the same island. “You build a solution that can work on an island, you build a solution that can spread to the rest of the world.”
