Challenge
Stuvia was facing an ongoing struggle to find quality developers who aligned with their culture of strong independence and rapid building that continued from their startup days. Finding the right mix of skills and personality in Amsterdam was taking months, even with the assistance of recruitment agencies, due to the high costs and competition from larger corporations.
It was absolutely impossible and very expensive to find the right candidates in Amsterdam, with everything taking months. Because of this talent scarcity, we were struggling with a huge backlog of work that never could really get done.
Although they had explored nearshoring in the past, the results had been unsatisfactory due to the short-term and part-time engagements. Without properly integrated members of their team, Stuvia was unable to get the quality of work they required. When one of their developers left the company, the leadership team took decisive action to ensure their development backlog didn’t spiral out of control.
Solution
After investigating several offshore partners, Stuvia decided to partner with The Scalers due to the long-term focus of their model. By integrating their offshore developers fully into their company, they believed they could address the issues they had struggled with previously.
The focus on longer-term partnerships and deep integration was the main tiebreaker for us. Unlike other sourcing companies who saw us as a replaceable customer, The Scalers ensured our new developers felt like genuine, dedicated colleagues.
Within weeks, Stuvia’s first offshore engineers were being onboarded into their development team. These new employees were treated as first-class citizens and worked alongside their remote counterparts in the Netherlands, Turkey, Spain and other locations.
The benefits were soon apparent as the new developers helped clear the existing backlog and freed up time and mental capacity for the existing team to focus on bigger problems. To maximise these gains, Stuvia decided to onboard an additional developer in Bangalore so they could separate their development into two teams: One focused on core product work (including the offshored team) and a second team in Amsterdam focused on long-shot projects and deep technical tasks.
Partnering with The Scalers effectively doubled our development capacity, and we’ve seen our operations move two to three times faster than before. The new capacity eliminated our huge backlog, reducing lead times for new significant developments from months to mere weeks”
Results
By partnering with The Scalers, Stuvia converted a talent-scarcity challenge into a significant competitive advantage.
Since doubling their capacity and splitting the team, Stuvia has seen their operations move two to three times faster, immediately eliminating a backlog of months of work. This has reduced lead times for significant new features from months to mere weeks and is helping them grow in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
