After a couple years of fairly quiet existence, application-development startup Gigster made big headlines this week by announcing a $10 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Gigster uses an on-demand development model and is equally a concierge service for highly-skilled developers, matching them up with the right client projects and handling the overhead. Here are the details from Gigster's announcement:
With Gigster, customers can click a button, chat with a product manager, get a fixed-price quote, and hire a top-tier development team within minutes. Working with Gigster is a seamless experience that grants access to engineering talent that is otherwise very difficult to reach and can consume an enormous amount of an organization's resources.
Built with the developer in mind, Gigster boasts top engineering talent trained at universities such as MIT, Stanford, and Caltech and with work experience at tech titans like Google, Facebook, and Pinterest. The company's founders, Roger Dickey and Debo Olaosebikan, both long-time developers, had both experienced first-hand the pain of working with development shops and agencies, and wanted to build the best experience for the developer, knowing this would in turn, create the best experience and product for the customer.
Gigster is working on building a higher level language for software. Every project it works on feeds back into a central brain that uses AI and machine learning to optimize efficiency, resulting in both shorter project turnaround times and lower costs for customers.
Former SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard, who entered the venture capital world after leaving SAP, has joined Gigster's board. The $10 million will be used to help scale out Gigster's business.
Pricing information on Gigster's site gives cost examples for apps developed for Facebook, Instagram and other consumer-oriented sites, but Gigster's actual client base has shifted from entrepreneurs and startups to enterprises, according to a report in Techcrunch.
On paper, Gigster's production process certainly has features with appeal to CxOs. After conducting project scoping and collecting requirements, a customer is assigned a dedicated product manager. Payments are made in progressive fashion based on agreed-upon milestones. Customers "will never pay for overages" and Gigster says its work is guaranteed: "If you're not happy, we'll fix it until you are." The company also offers ongoing maintenance services.
All of that should seem like manna from heaven for any customer, particularly those with a history of overpaying for software that underdelivers.
However, as the TechCrunch article notes, one of Gigster's biggest challenges moving forward is maintaining quality control as it grows. The company accepts only 5 percent of the applications it receives from freelancers, according to the report. That's a high standard for staffing that would be put to the test by a rapid increase in business.
The Bottom Line
"As we expect enteprises to build more software in-house in the next 10 years than they have built in-house in the last 25, Gigster fills an important role for enterprises to build their next-generation applications," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "We expect more 'developer for hire' offerings coming to market in the next few years. They ultimately will compete with tools that empower business users to build what they need to run their business."
Like any approach to application development, the Gigster method faces the challenge of user requirements getting lost in translation, Mueller adds. "Only when business users can directly build, see and experience the software will that risk will be short circuited," he says.
Still, "in the immediate future Gigster and similar offerings will help transition the market away from the typical providers of apps, putting business users with budget more in the driver's seat."
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