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How is this different from UpWork or PeoplePerHour?

philip1209 9y ago
Here are some differences: - Contractors only have to work part-time. Two-thirds have day jobs at top tech companies (mostly in the Bay area), and moonlight on nights and weekends. Most talent ends up being from the US. - It’s low-touch and self-serve. You directly hire and work with contractors. - Skills are the core of matching. We track 150+ technology skills, such as React.js and TensorFlow. So, when you hire an engineer - you can find somebody who already knows your software stack. That minimizes the ramp-up time. - Because of the specialized contractors and focus on skills, projects tend to be more specific and with higher hourly rates (we average ~$100US). Here are some examples of recent projects: - A unicorn startup hired Moonlighters to test their coding interview challenges - A YC startup hired an expert in HIPAA-compliant cloud hosting to configure ETL on AWS for healthcare data - A small sales organization contracted a machine learning expert to analyze their sales data - Companies using emerging tech who need reinforcements hire help - e.g. React Native, Tensorflow, and Kubernetes
- everdev 9y ago
  I think there's a huge need an opportunity here, but what you listed (part time, self-serve, skills matching) is part of these other platforms already. It sounds like you're leaning towards extreme quality ($100/hr+ rates). If that's the case, I think the question is, how is the $100/hr developer 2x better or faster than the $50/hr developer? I've been burned many times by low cost developers but I've also found some fantastic ones. Similarly, I've been charged top-tier rates promising quality, but delivering the same quality or lower than someone who lives in an area of the US with a much lower cost of living. I guess the question is, how do I know that developers on your platform will be worth their top-tier rates?
  - philip1209 9y ago
    This is where the matching based on skills come in. If you use Rails, ReactJS, and Mongo - we can match you with contractors that know those skills. We find that much of contract work is not reinventing the wheel - so, if you can find somebody who has done it before, it's much more efficient. That specialization justifies a higher hourly rate. We've had startups start to treat us like a paid Stack Overflow. One project was just setting up Alembic migrations of a flask app. Starting from zero on that is tedious. But, if you have done it a couple of times, it only takes an hour or two.
    - everdev 9y ago
      Yes, that makes sense, but I can find contractors based on skill set in those other platforms as well. That's where I'm not sure why I'd choose you guys over an established contractor network like UpWork unless there was some key differentiator I'm missing.
      - philip1209 9y ago
        That's a reasonable question. The short answer is that, when I was trying to hire contractors at my last startup, sites like Upwork had low-skill labor, and I had trouble sifting through their communities to find the high-skill contractors that I needed. We are working on a smaller, more curated community with startup experience and more specialization. We are tailoring it for a narrow group of more experienced talent. Our goal is to avoid the problem that plagues other sites of having low-skill/low-cost workers displace higher-skill workers as they scale. We have found a model that provides large amounts of high-skill talent, and we value contractor quality over scaling. We think that the market is shifting to more high-skill workers, e.g. https://qz.com/1152683/indian-it-layoffs-in-2017-top-56000-led-by-tcs-infosys-cognizant/ https://qz.com/1152683/indian-it-layoffs-in-2017-top-56000-l...

Here are some differences: - Contractors only have to work part-time. Two-thirds have day jobs at top tech companies (mostly in the Bay area), and moonlight on nights and weekends. Most talent ends up being from the US. - It’s low-touch and self-serve. You directly hire and work with contractors. - Skills are the core of matching. We track 150+ technology skills, such as React.js and TensorFlow. So, when you hire an engineer - you can find somebody who already knows your software stack. That minimizes the ramp-up time. - Because of the specialized contractors and focus on skills, projects tend to be more specific and with higher hourly rates (we average ~$100US). Here are some examples of recent projects: - A unicorn startup hired Moonlighters to test their coding interview challenges - A YC startup hired an expert in HIPAA-compliant cloud hosting to configure ETL on AWS for healthcare data - A small sales organization contracted a machine learning expert to analyze their sales data - Companies using emerging tech who need reinforcements hire help - e.g. React Native, Tensorflow, and Kubernetes

everdev 9y ago
I think there's a huge need an opportunity here, but what you listed (part time, self-serve, skills matching) is part of these other platforms already. It sounds like you're leaning towards extreme quality ($100/hr+ rates). If that's the case, I think the question is, how is the $100/hr developer 2x better or faster than the $50/hr developer? I've been burned many times by low cost developers but I've also found some fantastic ones. Similarly, I've been charged top-tier rates promising quality, but delivering the same quality or lower than someone who lives in an area of the US with a much lower cost of living. I guess the question is, how do I know that developers on your platform will be worth their top-tier rates?
- philip1209 9y ago
  This is where the matching based on skills come in. If you use Rails, ReactJS, and Mongo - we can match you with contractors that know those skills. We find that much of contract work is not reinventing the wheel - so, if you can find somebody who has done it before, it's much more efficient. That specialization justifies a higher hourly rate. We've had startups start to treat us like a paid Stack Overflow. One project was just setting up Alembic migrations of a flask app. Starting from zero on that is tedious. But, if you have done it a couple of times, it only takes an hour or two.
  - everdev 9y ago
    Yes, that makes sense, but I can find contractors based on skill set in those other platforms as well. That's where I'm not sure why I'd choose you guys over an established contractor network like UpWork unless there was some key differentiator I'm missing.
    - philip1209 9y ago
      That's a reasonable question. The short answer is that, when I was trying to hire contractors at my last startup, sites like Upwork had low-skill labor, and I had trouble sifting through their communities to find the high-skill contractors that I needed. We are working on a smaller, more curated community with startup experience and more specialization. We are tailoring it for a narrow group of more experienced talent. Our goal is to avoid the problem that plagues other sites of having low-skill/low-cost workers displace higher-skill workers as they scale. We have found a model that provides large amounts of high-skill talent, and we value contractor quality over scaling. We think that the market is shifting to more high-skill workers, e.g. https://qz.com/1152683/indian-it-layoffs-in-2017-top-56000-led-by-tcs-infosys-cognizant/ https://qz.com/1152683/indian-it-layoffs-in-2017-top-56000-l...