Developing in the Uber Economy: Why Adding Talented Full-Time Hires to Your Staff Might be the Wrong Move

Originally published on May 31, 2017.
Consistent, steady, and reliable product development is a primary concern for any growing tech startup — having a great product doesn’t mean much if you can’t develop the features it needs to function, the UI it needs to impress, or the innovations to take it to the next level.
Over the past few decades, the time-tested advice for navigating the potentially treacherous waters of growth has been pretty consistent: hire the best people, and the best products will follow. It sounds pretty intuitive, and the importance of having a great core team to guide the development of your products is absolutely undeniable.
To succeed, your company does need great people. But does it need to actually hire them?
That’s the question we’ve been asking ourselves recently at LaunchByte. Adding additional developers, engineers and UI/UX pros to your team tends to create so much extra work that it almost feels like a small product launch.
You’re stuck with a choice between spending time and money on building up internal hires to a level of proficiency you’re comfortable working with, or spending time and money scouting for talent until you find the right candidate to push through the rest of hiring process. And then hoping that they stay and become an integral part of your team.
Either way, every time you try to expand your development team and make your product better, a new timeline is introduced that directly competes with your product development timeline. So what can you do?
Well, you’ve used Uber or Lyft before, right? Maybe it’s a tired comparison, but it’s still pretty apt: in the same way that those companies solve large scale logistics problems at a highly reduced cost through an on-demand service model, we at LaunchByte are doing the same thing for product development. We’re calling it DevsOnDemand.
Whether you need a UX/UI pro for a one-off project, three developers for a year, or a solid utility player to handle patches and bug fixes, DevsOnDemand lets you access highly talented developers, engineers, and designers whenever your project development timeline requires them. You get to completely bypass the lengthy onboarding process while still leveraging industry leading talent, allowing you to get your product finished faster without sacrificing quality.
And to make things even better, all our on-demand devs are coordinated by a dedicated account manager to keep you updated on the status of your build. Additionally, the whole thing is guaranteed by our Happiness Clause, making it easy for you to be confident your product will be ready to go and up to your standards by your ship date, every time.
In other words, your team gets to stay small and lean, but your product can grow comfortably at scale. Having access to great people is probably always going to be a requirement for running a great company, but by cutting away the red tape that makes accessing them frustrating, we think we’re ushering in the next generation of how startups develop software.
Interested in learning more or getting in touch? Check out devsondemand.io to get more details. As always, you can keep up with LaunchByte via our website or by subscribing to our new newsletter.
