On this page
About Nebular Media Group
Nebular Media Group (NMG) is an accessibility company providing audit and remediation services to small and medium enterprises. They had built a healthy, reputable services business — but they had a bigger ambition: to turn their expertise into a product that could scale beyond what a services team alone could deliver.
The Situation
When NMG came to DS Business Solutions, they had no SaaS platform, no development team, and no technical staff beyond a web designer and a team of accessibility testers and remediators focused on the services business. The idea for the platform existed. The domain expertise existed. What was missing was everything needed to build it.
They needed a technical partner who could take them from zero to a live product — without them having to figure out how to become a technology company first.
What DS Business Solutions Did
DS Business Solutions provided a Fractional CTO who also served as project manager and lead architect throughout the engagement. Alongside that leadership role, DSBS helped NMG hire and stand up a dedicated development team — three developers, one QA engineer, and one designer — and then designed and built the platform end-to-end from scratch.
The Platform
The accessibility scanner market has a fundamental problem: no single scanner is reliable enough to trust on its own. The best tools in the industry each carry significant blind spots, and produce meaningful rates of both false positives and false negatives. For organizations trying to meet compliance standards, this creates real uncertainty in their decision-making.
NMG’s platform solved this by aggregating results from a curated list of the industry’s top scanners. By combining outputs across multiple tools, the platform gave customers a far more complete and trustworthy picture — one that any individual scanner simply couldn’t provide on its own.
The Central Challenge
Building on top of multiple third-party scanners sounds straightforward in principle. In practice, it meant integrating systems with vastly different performance profiles, SLAs, and error-handling behaviors — and delivering all of that to end users as if it were a single, seamless experience.
Users couldn’t be exposed to the inconsistencies underneath. They needed reliability, clarity, and consistency — regardless of which scanner was struggling, slow, or returning unexpected results on any given day.
How We Solved It
The core architectural decision was an abstraction layer between the platform’s backend services and the individual scanners. Rather than letting each scanner’s idiosyncrasies propagate through the system, the abstraction layer gave every scanner a standardized interface. The rest of the platform never needed to know — or care — what was happening underneath.
This design decision did more than solve a technical problem. It meant the platform could add, swap, or retire scanners over time without disrupting the experience for customers. It was built to last.
The Team
- 3 developers
- 1 QA engineer
- 1 designer
- Fractional CTO (also serving as project manager and architect)
The Outcome
The first version of the platform went live in approximately five months from kickoff.
For NMG’s existing clients, the platform immediately created new value — deepening relationships, improving retention, and creating opportunities for more regular, meaningful interactions. For the business, it opened a recurring revenue stream alongside the established services practice.
But the most significant impact was what the platform unlocked in terms of market reach.
Before the platform existed, NMG had zero Fortune 500 clients and no serious enterprise prospects. The services business, however strong, simply wasn’t the kind of scalable, auditable offering that large enterprises require from a technology vendor. The SaaS platform changed that.
After launch, NMG signed deals with Ipsos, Bank of America, and Level Access — organizations that represent exactly the kind of enterprise customer that had previously been out of reach.