Looking for Lightning in a Bottle
The Vision
What would it be like to wake up whenever you want, perform any task you want, and get paid for the results of your labor instead of your time?
With the trend toward remote work and ever more people flocking to the field of software engineering, we think it's the perfect time to build this type of system.
The goal of Cottage is to provide autonomy to freelancers while also allowing startups to augment the capabilities of their existing engineering teams.
Below is an account of our first attempt at facilitating this type of interaction between freelancers and startups.
Our First Attempt
We worked with an existing startup named Tabella to test the on-demand aspect of our platform. We also built a startup named Piggybank to test the ability of Cottage to protect the intellectual property of client startups and simplify freelancer onboarding.
Tabella
- Tabella is a platform for Catholic communities to connect with one another: https://jointabella.com/
- Tabella required assistance with a bug in their mobile application
- Cottage contracted a developer within 24 hours
- Engagement lasted 5 days while freelancer worked in his spare time
- Result was consulting advice that helped Tabella make progress towards a bug fix
- Amount paid to freelancer: $375 for 6 hours of work. We're still working on the ability to accurately price tasks, thus we're defaulting to hourly payments.
What we learned:
- Cottage needs to onboard many more freelancers if we want to offer an “on demand” service
- Cottage also needs to reduce the time required to for a freelancer to obtain the correct permissions for a given project
- Stripe makes it simple to bill startups and pay freelancers without writing any code
Piggybank
Piggybank is a financial SaaS app created by Cottage for the purpose of testing our platform: https://piggybank.dev
– Piggybank needed to implement a “contact us” form as well as user authentication for the web application
– Purpose of the engagement was testing Gitpod (https://www.gitpod.io/) as a way to protect the IP of client startups and simplify freelancer onboarding
– Engagement lasted 3 days and required dedicated time from a freelancer so that Cottage could observe development
– Result was the discovery of performance bottlenecks in Gitpod that could lead to churn among freelancers. We also discovered that we will need to self-host Gitpod if we want to protect the IP of client startups.
– Amount paid to freelancer: $810 for 18 hours of work. We're still working on the ability to accurately price tasks, thus we're defaulting to hourly payments.
What we learned:
- Gitpod has unresolved performance issues that could lead to high turnover among freelancers, but could simplify freelancer onboarding
- We will need to self-host Gitpod if we want to protect the IP of client startups. Gitpod doesn't offer this functionality and has not responded to requests to implement this.
Next steps for Cottage:
- Onboard additional freelancers via LinkedIn job post (173 applicants at time of writing)
- Find an alternative to Gitpod
- Create standard operating procedure for helping a freelancer get started on a task