It’s not uncommon that we are asked to spin up a dev team with a specialized skill set in a short period of time. In fact, it’s one of our key value propositions - we can quickly ramp up software developers with the skills you need but don’t have in-house. But we had never before been asked to literally spin up a team overnight.
It took some maneuvering, but we were able to get the first developer started within a few hours and the rest of the team up and running within a few days. We completed the integration, tested it, and delivered it in time for F8. GIF keyboard was featured at F8, quickly became popular on Messenger, and eventually accounted for nearly half of GIF Keyboard’s 200M unique monthly views (at that time).
GIF from Tenor
The lesson here is not that you should only use in-house developers for your startup, or that it’s ok to use external developers. The lesson is that it’s important to have options. There’s a saying - the more you prepare, the luckier you get. Luck is something that happens to people who are prepared to say yes to opportunities and that have a good intuition about which opportunities are worth going after. If you’re a technology company, you should absolutely have a strong internal engineering team. But you should also have external options to pursue opportunities that or either outside of your core competency, require more resources than you have available, or both.
If you don’t have that, let’s have an intro call and we’ll tell you more about how we work. You can keep it in your back pocket for a rainy day, or for the next big opportunity you come across.
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