Remotely Works: 300 developers, $25M in annualized revenue
Looking back to our first 4 years as a company, as we continue to build our marketplace.
Four years ago, we placed Fran and Mauri, our two first developers, on Minded, our first customer. 6 months earlier we had started customer research that would lead us to launching Remotely Works, a developer-centric, transparent, talent marketplace connecting Latam-based software developers and US-based software companies. We intentionally settled for a transparent business model, similar to a cost-plus model, were the hiring companies knew how much the developer was making as opposed to opaque traditional outsourcing models (we’ll go deeper on the pricing decision soon).
We were not the first in the market, and we had not built a marketplace before. What we had going for us was the experience of having built a US VC-backed SaaS company with a large engineering team in Argentina that had been successfully acquired.
Why did we decide to go for it? in short, we believe investing in Developers was a good long-term business proposition, and it fits in our long-term journey as entrepreneurs (that is also a future post). The lack of supply/talent (6x less than the demand posted in the US) is well documented, and so we thought most US software businesses were not finding their ideal partner to open the doors to remote talent.
It was 2019, the talent market was very tight so our main worry was our ability to scale talent supply to be able to attract the demand. It's the classic chicken and egg problem: why will a customer trust you have talent, and why will the talent come to you if you don't have customers. We understood we had a small network of engineering talent we had previously worked with before (as was the case with Fran and Mauri), but if we had to build a large network we would need an unfair advantage to jump start it. Our first hires were a team of senior software engineers that had been building infrastructure to analyse open source repositories at scale. Their startup had failed after burning through millions in VC money and their expertise could help us crack the chicken&egg problem. We built gitsight.com, a massive open source analyzer that would identify promising talent globally. With more than 48M profiles analyzed globally and hundreds of thousands spent in AWS and google credits we narrowed down on 350,000 Latam based strong developers that would be interesting for our potential customers. We probably over engineered our way into a tech enabled service business like remotely but that over investment has ended up paying off (more to come on that decision)
After having all the top developers in LatAm identified based on their open source code, it was all about finessing our operations, and re-engineering our process to attract and vet talent at scale. Today thousands of developers apply to join our network every month, with a small 1-3% being accepted.
In our first year, we managed to get to 58 developers working through us. In our second, to 147 developers. In our third, to 220. And now, 4 years after our first hire we have crossed the 300 developer mark.
Our marketplace currently manages more than $25M in annualised revenue or GMV (salaries + fees). We have $4.5M in ARR, so our take-rate is 18%, much lower than the incumbents as we have a small and mighty team that is supported by technology. We will keep our GMV, ARR and Take-rate public as our grain of salt to help change the industry from opaque to transparent.
Since those two first hires, we've paid out $37M to developers and we are proud of that!