Shahed Khan
@_shahedk · Founder @ Loom. Prev @ Upfront VC
Hey @elmerm, few questions. How is this different/better than the current on-demand engineering platforms out there right now (better talent? smaller/bigger projects? price? etc), such as Gigster?
I went on your pricing page and couldn't find any info how you charge. Even some context here will give me and others a better idea of how you plan on charging. It currently says I have to subscribe to a package (with the added value of trying it free for 7 days), assuming I'd have to pay a quote on top per project that you come up with? Why not just charge on a per project basis?
If one of your clients is building something that competes with Snapchat or a product that either the engineer/PM you chose for the project to work on, I'm sure they'll have concerns around whether or not the individual assigned to the job will "steal" their idea or worse "do a shitty job".
Last thing - If I'm an employer of one of the PM/engineer's on your platform, I'd have concerns around the engineer working on certain projects during working hrs and certain issues around IP and liabilities with you using our company name to qualify the talent in your network.
I'm sure you thought about most, if not, all of these questions/concerns, just thought this would be a great place to address it. Also, please put up a pricing page! That always helps ;)
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Elmer Morales
@elmerm · CEO of Koder - Developers-as-a-Service
@_shahedk Thanks for the questions. That’s a lot so I’ll respond by paragraph :).
1. The idea is similar to other services but we differ in the business model. We believe that just like you’re able to hire an employee on an at-will basis, your engineering team should work the same way. Our subscription plans provide this level of flexibility to ensure that as a customer, you’re happy with the team assigned and the progress. You don’t have to make a big commitment upfront. In the world of consulting, there is a lot of bait-and-switch, I saw it first-hand and I think this model addresses that.
2. In terms of pricing, I agree 100%. To be honest, I woke up this morning in shock we were on Product Hunt as we weren’t planning to debut publicly until March. Pricing plans will be fully disclosed then, likely sooner. Our model is subscription-based and if you want to accelerate development, you can pay for surge pricing to increase capacity. There isn’t a fixed fee on top of the subscription.
3. Why not do fixed-fee per project? Because that’s no different than the thousands of consultancies out there, Gigster’s model included. That’s been done for many years. Software is expensive, and as a startup, it’s very hard to commit to a large amount, especially if you’re not well-funded. Using the subscription model, you can downgrade or cancel anytime if your product is completed or if you’re simply out of budget. Of course, we want our customers to continue when projects are completed even if it means they downgrade to a less expensive plan as we can work on bug fixes, incremental improvements, serve as their CTO, etc.
4. The “do a shitty job” part we address by 1) having a trusted CTO and Product Manager oversee everything and 2) if a shitty job is done, the developer will simply not get paid until it’s fixed, we manage that, not you. In terms of stealing ideas, we take this very seriously and our engineers and customers are covered by a mutual NDA on a project by project basis.
5. Yeah, if the engineer is not a full time Koder, we don’t allow them to work on Koder during working hours or on their employer’s equipment. There are a lot of rules around this that vary state by state, but I won’t get into this here. As we scale, this will obviously be something we’ll look at and address very carefully on a case by case basis, just like Uber has done when moving into a new city that didn’t allow on-demand drivers.
6. Great questions @_shahedk, thanks for asking.
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