Capacitor – On Demand Tech & Marketing Teams

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Ed: This solves a real problem. The problem is that most of the providers on sites such as Freelancer are companies who want to provide outsourcing services to you, they normally have a business development person who assures you the work will be fantastic and they have many skills in this space.

You have no idea who is a part of their team and in fact the backroom could be filled with 14 yr olds who are skipping school to code in Javascript and MongoDB or worse 40 yr olds who spent the last 15 years coding in PHP/SQL and are quickly trying to learn the latest tech ie JS/Mongo/Reddis/Nodejs etc. Immediately they want to push you down a traditional systems life cycle of requirements gathering and specifications, typically this is unsuited to Lean Startup methods.

When you start to grow quickly the ability to hire quality team members is a key indicator of future success. (See Hunter Walks great post on Hiring Momentum) If you can’t find people then you can’t scale the business.

What Capacitor has done is to create a platform to self organise teams of federated freelancers and make them available for hire as a team.

It appears that the platform started life as an offshoot from a consulting group called StarterSquad.com who provided teams of their contractors to startups, but has now progressed to allowing other teams to form up and offer their services on the platform.

Having posted a stack of Freelance jobs in the last few months, I can tell you finding Freelancers that are good is challenging, if you were trying to scale up a team quickly in a particular discipline this would be extremely challenging if not impossible.

Especially if they are all remote, possibly culturally misaligned and have completely different motivations.

It’s comforting to me that the teams have already joined forces and know each other, either have complimentary disciplines or know how to work as a team and are publicly declaring they are happy to work together, this de-risks the process of hiring significantly.

I can see this being used as a way to manage parts of a project for either a startup or corporate where the talent needed is not a core competency of the company, where your hiring focus needs to be on other parts of the business, yet you still need to plug a gap in Growth Hacking, Prototyping or implementing a particular technology stack.

On the downside, its not clear what the team is going to cost me, perhaps an improvement would be to be a bit more transparent about pricing.

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