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Comment by exelius | Hacker News Reader

Just because you hide a software consulting shop behind an app doesn't mean you can change the fundamental difficulties with software consulting. I wish Gigster luck, but ultimately this approach isn't much different from what many offshore dev shops do today. I can get a quote in under an hour from a half dozen places today; but it doesn't mean it will be accurate or what I want.

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Wait, isn't Roger Dickey an investor in Toptal? I certainly read or heard this somewhere. That would be pretty odd (and unethical) if he is an investor in Toptal creating what seems to be a direct competitor. It's actually on his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogerdickey "Investments: Docker, Toptal, Addepar, Classdojo, OpenGov, Wanelo, Vulcun, iCracked, Facebook (2nd market)"

Actually I don't think these guys are really a competitor to Toptal. They're a competitor to the guys that Toptal was trying to under-cut by allowing you to bypass the overhead of a more full-featured development shop (project managers, etc).

I agree that they're not a competitor, but they are highly complementary. It could be that the sourcing that makes this model possible is taken straight from Toptal (and if so, great way to capitalize).

This. Nothing has changed from going to upwork or freelancer or whatever, except rather than many bidders to chose from you just have one.

find a technical co-founder if you want to make a startup work.

::::there are always exceptions::::

Presumably, Gigster has already curated the top resources into a brand you can trust for the projects that they specialize in (and which you want done).

Also they might have a library in place for speed development. Startup of services have all the same set of core needs

So does Infosys, Tata, Wipro, IBM, Cognizant, etc. They all have rapid prototyping frameworks for mobile/web apps, and can churn out something functional in under a week. This is a commodity product already offered by a number of scaled players. Their chances of breakout success are zero.

Their libraries are more geared toward big startups needing a major player, this service seems more inclined to garage dreamers, big difference in scope can make huge impact

I just can't see garage dreamers plunking down that kind of cash without guarantees. Invariably people will try to get out of paying for whatever reason (chargebacks, non-payment, etc) and at these dollar amounts and margins it doesn't make a lot of sense to try to collect. IMO the biggest problem in this end of the market is keeping your AR above water.

The thing that has potentially changed (if they can really pull it off) is the ability to get a reliable quote for any particular project in a few minutes. Any technical manager can duplicate the process of building out a project plan and lining up the cheap resources to get it done (and recruiting from schools or whatever), but being able to scope a project reliably, let alone estimate its cost, basically on the fly is a real challenge. If they've actually solved that, then this is awesome. If not, then it's probably just the same as paying someone to use ODesk (or Upwork or whatever they call it now) for you.

If they can do that, then they have found a magic bullet for one of the biggest problems in software development. I have a suspicion that's the real problem they're trying to solve, so they're "doing things that don't scale" to try to engineer a platform that solves for that problem. That's the only way VCs would throw money at a business model like this.

I wish them luck, but I just think there are too many variables that getting a large enough sample size would bankrupt them before they approach a workable solution.

Productizing a highly demanded service is a reasonable business.

It's not "productized"; it's exactly the same as the thousands of other companies that do this. I'm not saying they won't make money (it's actually a pretty profitable business), but this is not a business model that scales geometrically. It's also a really, really crowded space where relationships, project management and financial discipline (aka staying on top of your collections from day 1) are bigger factors of success than a fancy app or good customer service. Those functions don't even scale linearly, and because they're account management functions, you can't farm them off to a computer system unless you're cool with never getting paid.

Again, I know a half dozen companies off the top of my head that provide the exact same service. Just instead of a website, I have an account rep I can e-mail or call and get even more personalized service. And I can choose if they source developers from China, India, Argentina, Colombia, Ukraine, etc. based on price. Their PMs handle the intake and return a product within a specified time period. What's novel about this?

Well, I can think of one and its name starts with "g". I've done Elance/odesk several times and its far from pleasant.

I'm thinking of something a little more full-service than that. There are a number of small contract dev shops that will do end-to-end product development. I've had fully designed apps churned out in as little as 6 weeks for under $50k, and they handled design, project management, QA, requirements gathering, etc.

The problem is that you have to find companies like this, and they tend to be small because the model doesn't scale past a certain point -- once you expand past a few teams, it becomes very difficult to control quality. Customers get upset and refuse to pay, which causes a cash flow problem. The best way to keep your accounts receivable aging down is to do quality work consistently, and the best way to have consistent quality is to keep your scale of control small.

This is not a business model that lends itself to VC well.

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