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Remote Means Freedom. Being struck by a world-class pandemic, businesses are trying to adapt themselves to help companies solve business problems by building digital products that their customers love in delta less time than anyone else in the world. The spread of the illness has helped draw attention to systems and processes that help remote workers, which so far have worked on the fringes of the global tech industry.
CrewScale is one such community, connecting dots between businesses and corporates. CrewScale is a community of the best for the best. They connect top companies with the best of global talent to help them accelerate product engineering.
CrewScale- Company Highlights
| Company Name | Crewscale |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | San Francisco Bay Area |
| Founders | Raghu Bharat, Dheeraj Lalchandani, Shubhanshu Srivastava, Nirmaan Agarwal |
| CEO | Raghu Bharat |
| Sector | Talent Acquisition |
| Founded | 2017 |
| Website | crewscale.com |
CrewScale- About & How It Works
CrewScale- Founders
CrewScale- How It All Started?
CrewScale- Name, Tagline & Logo
CrewScale- Vision & Mission
CrewScale- Core Belief
CrewScale- Products/Services
CrewScale- Target Market Size
CrewScale- Business & Revenue Model
CrewScale- Startup Launch
CrewScale- Challenges
CrewScale- Competitors
CrewScale- Acquisitions & Mergers
CrewScale- Future Plans
CrewScale- FAQ’s
CrewScale- Conclusion
CrewScale- About & How It Works
CrewScale connects startups, unicorns, and global companies to a large network of pre-assessed and domain-relevant tech talent around the world. They are problem solvers, team builders, high achievers who have come together with a common philosophy and their single focus. To scale! their work together to power today’s engineering teams and invest in tomorrow’s leaders.
Crewscale is very helpful if you are looking for top 1% remote talent starting at an hourly rate of $30.
At CrewScale, the screening process (enabled by the proprietary assessment engine called Talscale) ensures that only top-tier engineers are able to access their platform. This means that these pre-vetted engineers get to work on some of the most niche projects with the best tech companies across the world.
Rishabh Rathi
CrewScale- Founders
CrewScale is founded by Raghu Bharat, Shubhanshu Srivastava, Nirmaan Agarwal and Dheeraj Lalchandaani.
Raghu Bharat is the CEO while Dheeraj Lalchandaani is the COO and Shubhanshu Srivastava is the CTO. They have a team of over 180 people, not including the thousands of top-tier talents they represent. Their hiring strategy is simple and two-fold, centered around their mission to connect the right talent with the right opportunities.
Two of the founders Raghu Bharat and Shubhanshu Srivastava met each other when they were working together to scale Housejoy. They’d both run their own startups before which were then acquired by Housejoy. The third founder Dheeraj was batchmates with Shubhanshu in IIT Roorkee. Nirmaan and Raghu are both BITS Pilani Alumni.
Raghu Bharat (CEO), a BITS Pilani alumnus worked at key engineering roles at MyParichay and Avaya before turning entrepreneur with MyWash. The startup was eventually acquired by Housejoy, where Bharat worked as Product Manager for a while — navigating the company through a phase of rapid scaling up.
Dheeraj Lalchandaani (COO), has worked in consulting and program management roles across companies like Vyomo, Encrest, and Greentech Knowledge Solutions. He has also founded Polishlane, an at-home-salon startup, which was eventually acquired by Housejoy.
Shubhanshu Srivastava (CTO), has been a senior software engineer at Newgen Software, followed by Senior Innovation Engineer at Snapdeal. He also founded (and was the CTO for) a fitness-tech startup Orobind Fitness which was acquired by Housejoy.
Nirmaan Agarwal (CMO & Head of Sales), an engineer from BITS Pilani with an MBA in Marketing from HEC Paris, before taking over as CMO of GoScale Group. Like the other founders, this is his second foray into entrepreneurship as well. He founded EdTech startup Unbound Learning before this.
Rishabh Rathi
CrewScale- How It All Started?
The sad truth is that most startups fail, either they fail to take off, or they fail to sustain.
Only 56% of the startups made it to their fifth year in 2018 due to issues such as: “No market need” (42%), “Ran out of cash” (29%) or “Not the right team” (23%).
Founder, Raghu Bharat, worked as a freelancer himself while travelling across the world. He experienced first-hand that finding quality talent was the bottleneck to innovation. So, like most startups, their idea also emerged from a personal pain point faced by the founders. On the one hand, this gave him access to some incredible global opportunities and the freedom to work remotely. On the other hand, the process was fraught with friction — whether it was finding new projects, convincing prospective employers about his skills, or managing the engagement. That’s how the idea of having a more seamless platform for tech talent to work remotely emerged.
They realized that they could help with the last two as affordable product-build by the right talent greatly increased the chances of success. Additionally, they developed their own proprietary talent assessment engine, Talscale, perfected by testing over 10000 engineers in the last 2 years to filter the top 1% of applicants to build an extremely elite talent pool.
Rishabh Rathi
CrewScale- Name, Tagline & Logo
The name is quite self-explanatory. They realized that the name should represent two central ideas. One was the fact that entrepreneurs would now be able to access easy-to-deploy teams — in other words, an entire crew would now be at their fingertips. The other idea was how the right team at the right time is critical to scaling up quickly. CrewScale perfectly encapsulates both these ideas.
Rishabh Rathi
CrewScale- Vision & Mission
The company solely connect high growth business with top-tech talent. As a company they are at a unique position today. Their product enables businesses to adapt much faster to a post-COVID world, enabling them is their short-term vision. They already have the tools and resources for a remote-first future — and are constantly trying to grow as quickly as they can to help businesses leverage this opportunity.
For a long-term goal, CrewScale works to shape the future of work to build a sustainable workplace. For a team like them, remote work means freedom. And it’s been incredible how they were able to provide that to so many others. Knowledge workers are really looking for a way of working that will help them become their creative and productive best. CrewScale aims to play a role in facilitating that transformation.
Avantika Bhardwaj
CrewScale- Core Belief
Despite having the right skill set, developers struggle to find the right remote opportunities— especially interesting roles globally. There are a few options — they can sign up on platforms like Upwork and Freelancer — but virtue signaling on these platforms is usually limited, and they usually end up becoming a race to the bottom. Plus, engineers are looking for stability of work as well as complexity of projects, both of which are hard to come by on these platforms.
Platforms like Crewscale also provide a very high flexibility in terms of the range of projects and the opportunities to work with cutting edge technologies across the world. Engineers who worked for tech titans like Amazon, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft work with Crewscale for the same reason.
CrewScale- Products/Services
CrewScale connects both startups and large tech companies with top percentile remote tech talent from across the world to help them accelerate product engineering. They fill the need of matching the best talent with the right projects and bridge the gap between the two – regardless of their respective locations in the world.
At CrewScale, their focus is on screening and assessing world-class developers, who then become part of the remote community. Employers who decide to work with them are able to view these verified, pre-assessed profiles and onboard the ones that work for them. They are working on to ship digital products in half the time as before by building next-generation software services engine and automating as much of the build cycle as possible.
There are problem solvers, team builders, high achievers who have come together with a common philosophy and with a single focus at CrewScale. To scale! They work together to power today’s engineering teams and invest in tomorrow’s leaders.
Vibhavari Madki
Their software also takes care of the engagement, onboarding, and management process. In this way, employers get immediate access to cutting-edge engineers from across the world, saving them thousands of dollars in recruitment and training. Candidates, on the other hand, have continuous access to global, long-term projects that enable them to get steady, handsome compensation while also working on complex, challenging problems.
CrewScale- Target Market Size
The IT staffing market in the United States alone is worth $33.64 billion, whereas the global staffing market size is $105 billion. While this includes both remote and non-remote opportunities, the company believes that remote will soon become the go-to in tech hiring across the globe.
CrewScale- Business & Revenue Model
CrewScale is a managed marketplace— so they charge an hourly rate from their clients but ensure that it translates into a fixed monthly remuneration for their remote workforce.
- Their revenue is about $4 Million/annum
- They want to scale to $100 Million in the next 5 years
- They’ve been profitable from Day 0.
CrewScale- Startup Launch
The company has seen hockey-stick growth from the very beginning. They got their first few clients through their network. With just 3 active clients in 2017-18, the company grew 6X to 17 clients in 2018-10 and then 3X to 50+ active clients in 2019-20.
Similarly, Revenue has gone up 5.5X from 2017-18 to 2018-19 and then 2X from 2018-19 to 2019-20. Perhaps the biggest scale has been achieved in the growth of their remote tech talent community.
CrewScale now has a community of over 61000 engineers — across 80+ countries including India, South East Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
CrewScale- Challenges
The biggest challenge in the early years was to convince both candidates and employers about the efficacy of remote hiring. Candidates felt like going towards project-based remote-first work might be detrimental to their careers in the long run.
At the same time, companies were hesitant to choose remote workers over in-house employees. Initially, they needed to work a lot on shifting the mindset of both candidates and employers.
Avantika Bhardwaj
With the COVID situation, though, remote working has become completely mainstream. Employers and employees both have realized that remote work can be just as productive as in-office work, if not more.
CrewScale- Competitors
We’re a premium talent marketplace, Toptal and Turing are some of CrewScale’s direct competitors. We are strong contenders for general marketplaces too, such as Upwork, Freelancer etc.
CrewScale- Acquisitions & Mergers
CrewScale has acquired Indiez.io, an AI-powered tech-talent community, in January 2020. The remote marketplace is based in Washington DC. The US-based, VC-funded freelance tech talent platform boasts of a very strong global clientele including Domino’s Pizza, Uber, and Aditya Birla Group. It also comes with an amazing talent community from 50+ countries.
Avantika Bhardwaj
CrewScale- Future Plans
When CrewScale started out, they were bootstrapped, their focus was entirely on building a sustainable business with strong unit economics. From the very beginning, they grew organically and were profitable from the get-go.
Having said that, COVID-19 has cut the remote adoption curve by 10 years, perhaps more. They believe that this is the perfect time to scale rapidly, building the biggest remote tech workforce across the world. Which is why they’re now open to raising money and going for hockey-stick growth. They also recently acquired a US-based remote tech hiring startup called Indiez earlier in the year to consolidate their growth and hit the ground running.
CrewScale- FAQ’s
What’s Crewscale all about?
Crewscale connects the top 1% of the tech talent with the tech companies across the globe. They have a community of over 50000 developers and more than 100 companies as their partners from more than 20 countries. They are proud to portray themselves as a one-stop solution for remote talent who facilitate end-to-end talent acquisition.
How does your hiring process work?
Once you sign up using your email or LinkedIn, Crewscale will collect your basic details like Name, Experience, Skill Set, Geography, and available working hours. Post that we will send out an assignment according to your tech stack. Once you clear the assignment, Crewscale will onboard you onto their platform and start matching you with relevant opportunities.
How long does the hiring process take?
Crewscale typically places a new developer with a client in 0-2 weeks! However, as most of CrewScale’s developers are pre-assessed, they are remote-ready to take up opportunities as soon as they arise.
How’s Crewscale different from other remote work platforms?
As a remote worker/freelancer how many times have you been frustrated at the cumbersome process to land a good job?. Crewscale make the process quick and smooth for both clients and candidates. With an end-to-end talent management platform, they assure you are placed at the company in just two weeks!
Do we have to sign any binding contracts?
For approving your application, Crewscale doesn’t enforce any contract. However, for you to start working with any client, there might be a few mandatory agreements like NDA and Statement of Work.
CrewScale- Conclusion
CrewScale focuses on building high-performing and distributed teams that can help a company thrive. CrewScale follows a comprehensive hiring process keeping in mind to not just find the best talent with the required tech skills, but that with relevant domain expertise too. They believe in finding the right fit for the companies specific requirements so that they start hiring without any hesitation.
CrewScale has a 4 step hiring process through they make sure they have a pool of the best tech talent in their community from around the globe. The selected candidates are sourced from online tech communities, as well as organic networking. The profiles of those candidates go through automated parsing, for initial vetting.