Dev Shopper

Hey everyone! Very excited to share Dev Shopper with the PH community! The idea for the product came from... well, my 15 years in tech. I’ve bootstrapped and sold a few businesses, helped a Silicon Valley startup scale from seed to Series C by building its team of 26 in Europe, mentored dozens of batch companies at 500 Startups in San Francisco, and co-founded an international network of entrepreneurs now active in five countries. Across all of these endeavors, I’ve always had this feeling that the way we all shopped for software development services simply sucked. Most tech projects nowadays are team sports that require a number of specialists with different skill sets. Outside of a situation where you are hiring for these roles, the best source of specialists are, of course, dev shops. The problem is, there is so much noise in the dev shop space. Sketchy agencies that turns out to be resellers of other companies’ services. A well-known dev shop that not only regularly fails to deliver what was originally agreed upon, but also has a nasty tendency of taking your deliverables hostage until you pay up more money. An offshore firm of such catastrophic quality that the project requires onshoring two months into it. Sadly, I’ve seen all of these and more. So, where do you go to find high-quality service providers these days? 👨‍💻 Big freelancing sites? You are unlikely to find a great dev shop there because the best don’t want to waste their time racing to the bottom against $5/hour firms. 🌎 “Remote team on demand” sites? Most of these opaque services hide a dirty secret. All they do is lease out dev shop employees from Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America to you at a hefty markup - up to 25x the original price! (Not a typo, sadly.) Your “vetted freelancer” had to sign a contract that they won’t utter a word to you about their real employer. 🤝 Brokers? You are always going to get nudged towards the same two or three shops they work with and your total project cost will inflate by 10-20% due to commission. Same with a lot of “friendly referrals”. 🗂 Online directories of service firms? These would actually be useful… if they weren’t pay-to-play. A dev shop could be the best in the world at what they do, but unless they fork out $15k monthly for marketing on the site, they’ll stay buried on page 492 and you’ll never even get to see they exist. All of this was driving me nuts. There are so many wonderful dev shops out there and yet there’s this expensive and frustrating minefield of a situation. The space is a total mess, despite services being an important gear of the tech industry machinery. What these teams work on touches most other areas of digital economy in one way or another. It doesn't matter if it’s a 50-person shop in San Francisco with a multi-million skunkworks contract with Microsoft, a team of six Shopify specialists in Belgrade that helps a first-time entrepreneur in Houston get her e-commerce operation off the ground, or a small Canadian firm that gets swallowed by Facebook in an acquihire. Dev shops create new products we use, keep the existing ones well-oiled and running, and provide us all with a steady supply of specialists battle-tested across many projects in a certain space. And so, for many years, I wished for an easy-to-use dev shop marketplace populated with quality firms. I wanted something where I could just go, tell the shops what I needed, answer their questions as they came in, and get bids I could then follow up on. I did not want to spend a week emailing back and forth and scheduling meetings and video calls just to find out if a shop was too expensive, not available for a couple of months, or didn’t accept new clients at all. Oh, and I wanted it all to be not just free of all the aforementioned middlemen BS, but free, period. Why? Because the Internet is frickin’ awesome, so why not? In other words, I wanted Dev Shopper. So I eventually went ahead and built it. Dev Shopper is an online marketplace featuring reputable service providers from around the globe. Think firms that rock a CTO who’s an AWS Serverless Hero or a tech lead who published a book for Packt - good, reliable folks with a lot of experience working with some of the world’s top brands. These companies are now available to you in a fast and convenient format that eliminates the sleazy intermediaries. A healthy mix of shops of different sizes and specialties ensures no project is too big, too small, or too exotic. There’s always going to be at least a few firms on Dev Shopper interested in partnering with you at competitive price points, no matter what you’ve got: a fixed-scope spec, an agile project, a 50-page RFP, or just a need for two developers and a designer to shore up your team until you finish recruiting new employees of your own. Once you post your project, you talk with the shops directly as they ask you questions about it and compete for your business in a 48-hour bidding process that puts you in control and shields you from cold outreach. (If you're in tech and breathing, you probably get way too many unsolicited emails and LinkedIn messages from people peddling their services already.) You decide which bids you like, who to pass on, and who you want to continue talking to through our built-in one-on-one chat to iron out the details of the engagement. The best part? It’s all 100% free. (Because, it turns out, the Internet is frickin' awesome.) There's no commission. No hidden costs you’ll discover once you’re halfway through the process. How can it be? Easy - we charge the shops a small flat monthly fee to access the platform, which in turn keeps it free to you. (In other words, we flipped the tired old marketplace model on its head and turned it into a simple and affordable SaaS for the shops.) TL;DR: if you are looking for great devs for your next project, take Dev Shopper for a spin - you’ll be happy you did. 🙂 Whew! Thanks for making it this far! I’ll be here all day, so feel free to hit me up if you have any questions/feedback! ✌️

I have been running sales for Polish software development companies for about 6 years now. I've been through everything that's out there. Actually, that's how I met Lazar about 4 years ago. During that time we've been chatting about all sorts of things. I was always amazed how responsive and eager to chat he was, given whatever I offered was not of his interest. That made me realize how truly authentic person he is (thank you man!!!). When he just launched DS I was one of the very first people to know. Although the Platform only got like two first projects, I knew I need and want to back it up. Why? Because as much as I believe in the idea (I really do) I mostly believe in the founder behind it. The man that was always there even before having a system that would ask me to pay anything to use it. Lazar, to me you are the next big name in this field and I support everything about DS with all my heart and brain. Again, thank you! Wojtek Stefanczyk, Samplepop.com, Bravelab.io and Quadrra.com

I've referred several happy customers to Dev Shopper. I can see this platform being useful for smaller fixed spec projects where you simply cannot free up your existing team or for people who are starting a new endeavour and can quickly tap into and compare competitive bids from around the globe.

This is extremely important at the moment, I love the opportunities you bring to the global market with this app. Kudos, Lazar! How did you make the video btw?

I've seen a trend where customers and vendors are switching from the dev shop model that typically has a PM or Account Executive managing the project on your behalf to more of staff augmentation in which the agency now just focuses on recruiting, screening, and managing payment/payroll. Some examples include Toptal, Terminal, ArcDev but there's more propping up. Where does Dev Shopper fit in this environment? Are you going after a segment of customers that would not use Toptal, Terminal or ArcDev ? or is it this vetted dev shop model better than staff augmentation ?

One of those things you wish existed when you started your first software project. :) I worked with several companies on the platform and they've delivered great value to my team. Congrats @lazarstojkovic !