swaroooooop

Hi HN,

We recently launched Fieldproxy - a product that helps anyone with an on-ground team better manage their operations.

We have built a simple interface in the front end for managers that helps them create and assign workflows, tasks and routes for the field team. The field team has an app which helps them focus on what to do next - so that they can cover a maximum number of locations in minimum time.

We have beta clients across multiple use cases include field sales - where they use it as a CRM (similar to salesforce) or for field servicing appointments (similar to servicetitan) or for assigning deliveries to their field teams

Would love to hear your feedback and answer any queries.

Hi. Thanks for your response. So far we have noticed that the time we spend in overheads for these small tasks is very minimal compared to the larger projects we take on through our other agency. Over here it is very cut to the chase, and we only need to know to know the files and logic for the microtask. We are not interested in the overall vision and roadmap of the product. We just cut to the chase. Whereas for larger projects - in addition to tons of project manangement, a lot of time is spent on trying to understand the product, figure out the industry, UI/UX, user testing and research and maintenance.

Hi. Thanks a ton for your thoughts! All very pertinent questions, and some food for thought for us too.

Completely agree with your positioning of us trying to be an "off-shore development agency for small tasks". We realized that no one does it - and currently the only route is through freelance platforms, where probably 40 hours is spent to find a dev for a 2 hour job.

With respect to project/task management - we are trying to eliminate the project management layer and keep it to a bare minimum. So once a user posts a microtask, there is an account manager and developer assigned automatically basis their existing workload and skillset. Ideally over the long run the developer utilization should still be > 70-80% for it to give us good enough margins, and hopefully we do get there.

At this stage, we feel the well defined and constrained nature of the microtasks would work to our advantage, since we really are not too worried about the macro picture of the product. We ask for very clear requirements and would only need to know the files and logic for the microtask. And if the developer is familiar with the tech stack and the code is well structured we have noticed there is not much of a learning curve involved.

In larger projects - like in the other agency we run - there are months spent trying to understand the product, figure out the industry, UI/UX, user testing and research and maintenance - all of which lead to a lot of additional overhead, which at many times are not billable to the clients too.

Having said that, even we are still understanding the market and testing out the above hypothesis! So fingers crossed!

Thanks a ton again for your valuable thoughts.

Really excited to share a product we have been working on.

We launched Boringcodecompany 5 months ago, after successfully running a product development agency for 3 years. A lot of times we would get requests to complete really small tasks (integrate this api, create this report, create this plugin, push the app to the playstores, fix this bug etc) which we would have to turn down, since the entire team was built in a way to handle larger projects.

Boringcodecompany focuses on fulfilling these microstasks - any dev work which would take around 1-5 days, with lesser the time, the better. Initially it was an email only service, but we have now built a full fledged product where users can post these development microtasks on the platform, get estimates, track the status and communicate with our team - all through the portal.

haha. Thank you! we want people to think of us when they feel like that. Hence the logo.

Hi! Thanks for your response. Agree completely. We just wanted to put the point across that it should be a really small task - though I agree the time would vary hugely from developer to developer too. But the idea is once they send the requirements across - we estimate the time/cost it would take, and stick to the cost estimate even if we are to overshoot the time.

And thanks a ton for the heads up on the copy! Will take a look at it.

Really excited to share something that we launched recently.

We have been running a successful product development agency - codemycompany - for over 3 years, and a lot of times we get requests to complete really small tasks (integrate this api, create this report, create this plugin etc) which we would have to turn down, since the entire team was built in a way to handle larger projects.

But now we have launched boringcodecompany, which focuses on these microstasks (any dev work which would take <5 days), where we look to go from enquiry to onboarding a dev from our team to work on the microtask within 6 hours.