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Interesting branding. Clear value proposition. As essentially an alternate interface/version of an off-shore development agency for small tasks this will succee

by mswen 7y ago

Interesting branding. Clear value proposition. As essentially an alternate interface/version of an off-shore development agency for small tasks this will succeed or fail over the longer run based on whether the developers are competent and speedy, whether project/task management is done well. One thing that strikes me is how well constrained and defined the micro-tasks are. I find that many of the micro-tasks are micro for someone who is already familiar with the business processes, tech stack and existing code base but as soon as you want to hand it off it becomes more complex and the hand off consumes nearly as much time and effort as just doing the task yourself. In a larger project the cost savings in rates often justifies the additional communication and project management overhead but I wonder if that can still work at a micro level.

swaroooooop 7y ago
Hi. Thanks a ton for your thoughts! All very pertinent questions, and some food for thought for us too. Completely agree with your positioning of us trying to be an "off-shore development agency for small tasks". We realized that no one does it - and currently the only route is through freelance platforms, where probably 40 hours is spent to find a dev for a 2 hour job. With respect to project/task management - we are trying to eliminate the project management layer and keep it to a bare minimum. So once a user posts a microtask, there is an account manager and developer assigned automatically basis their existing workload and skillset. Ideally over the long run the developer utilization should still be > 70-80% for it to give us good enough margins, and hopefully we do get there. At this stage, we feel the well defined and constrained nature of the microtasks would work to our advantage, since we really are not too worried about the macro picture of the product. We ask for very clear requirements and would only need to know the files and logic for the microtask. And if the developer is familiar with the tech stack and the code is well structured we have noticed there is not much of a learning curve involved. In larger projects - like in the other agency we run - there are months spent trying to understand the product, figure out the industry, UI/UX, user testing and research and maintenance - all of which lead to a lot of additional overhead, which at many times are not billable to the clients too. Having said that, even we are still understanding the market and testing out the above hypothesis! So fingers crossed! Thanks a ton again for your valuable thoughts.

by mswen 7y ago

swaroooooop 7y ago

Hi. Thanks a ton for your thoughts! All very pertinent questions, and some food for thought for us too. Completely agree with your positioning of us trying to be an "off-shore development agency for small tasks". We realized that no one does it - and currently the only route is through freelance platforms, where probably 40 hours is spent to find a dev for a 2 hour job. With respect to project/task management - we are trying to eliminate the project management layer and keep it to a bare minimum. So once a user posts a microtask, there is an account manager and developer assigned automatically basis their existing workload and skillset. Ideally over the long run the developer utilization should still be > 70-80% for it to give us good enough margins, and hopefully we do get there. At this stage, we feel the well defined and constrained nature of the microtasks would work to our advantage, since we really are not too worried about the macro picture of the product. We ask for very clear requirements and would only need to know the files and logic for the microtask. And if the developer is familiar with the tech stack and the code is well structured we have noticed there is not much of a learning curve involved. In larger projects - like in the other agency we run - there are months spent trying to understand the product, figure out the industry, UI/UX, user testing and research and maintenance - all of which lead to a lot of additional overhead, which at many times are not billable to the clients too. Having said that, even we are still understanding the market and testing out the above hypothesis! So fingers crossed! Thanks a ton again for your valuable thoughts.