A Tinder-like App for Business Networking

The Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF) is the largest Russian venture capital fund. IIDF assists digital and technology startups, at the idea and MVP stages, by providing investments for rapid growth.

Some challenging questions that new companies face include how to hire employees for a startup and where to find the right co-founder. For an investor, these are important aspects that directly affect the size of the investment. With startup recruitment, two problems arise:

• Not everyone wants to work at a just-launched or developing startup. It can be difficult to find a programmer for a startup, because the working conditions are unstable and success is not guaranteed.
• Since these companies are essentially engaged in innovation, there are no experienced personnel on the market, and inventive specialists with a wide variety of competencies are needed.

Startup founders learn about these human resource management issues, and many other challenges, in the pre-accelerator stage. One of IIDF’s products is an online training program for those who are at the idea or MVP stage. Company founders learn to look at everything through the eyes of potential investors. They look for weak points, study the market, and compare their product to that of competitors.

To register, the applicant needs to fill out a questionnaire, which is then checked by experts. As a result, IIDF ended up with a base of both startups and people who would like to work at them. So, they decided to create a new product — Cofoundit — a service for finding employees for startups, as well as co-founder matchmaking and entrepreneur matchmaking. 

With Cofoundit, startups could find ideal employees, based on a wide range of parameters, from their city of residence to their professional interests. At the same time, the candidates themselves could be confident in the companies they send their resumes to.

The task

At first, IIDF’s own team developed the product as an internal service. After testing the hypotheses, they decided to turn it into a full-fledged recruitment app. To do this, they needed a team with experience that could build HRM software through hypothesis-driven development. 

So, they turned to Evrone for help creating a platform for finding a startup co-founder or team members. The development team had to create a web-based solution that took into account the business logic and was linked to the existing IIDF system. This platform also functioned as a dating app for entrepreneurs and dating site for entrepreneurs, specifically designed to match startup founders with potential co-founders and team members.

The solution

In 3 months, we developed a complete web application and also tested customer scripts to make sure that all functions worked as expected for hypothesis testing. This project was aimed at becoming the best dating site for entrepreneurs and the best dating site for business professionals.

The frontend of the project was developed in Angular, and on the backend we had a Ruby on Rails application. PostgreSQL was chosen for data storage, while background tasks were processed using Sidekiq and Redis.

We chose a fairly conservative, classic technology stack because it allowed us to focus on functionality and business logic rather than technological experimentation. This approach was crucial for creating a dating app for business owners and dating sites for business professionals that would reliably meet the needs of the startup community.

We are not against the introduction of new technologies on projects, but if we are talking about quick tests of hypotheses or simple products, we always recommend a classical approach to our clients. After building the classic core, we can add experimental parts to the project, if it is necessary or can speed up development. 

Here are three reasons to choose the classic stack over the latest solutions:

• There is a lot of legacy code or technical debt in your project. In this case, some new solutions may simply not work with the old parts.
• Speed and reliability are the most important aspects of a project. An experiment can cost tens of hours of development time, especially if it turns out that the technology does not fit your requirements 100%.
• The project is not super complex, and the client does not have their own development or support team. We understand that support teams can change often, so we recommend the classic stack for those who do not want to look for new specialists any time soon.

In this case, the stack choice was dictated by the client's requirements.

The result

We managed to launch the entire web service for IIDF, which they later further developed and refined on their own. The service has gone through two iterations of hypothesis testing and has gone beyond just a website to find new employees. Through IIDF’s service, many startups meet great team members who are an excellent fit for the company. 

After testing new ideas, Cofoundit has solidified its identity — a Tinder-like service for finding the ideal co-founders and employees for a startup, akin to a dating site for business owners. Thanks to the detailed questionnaire they have, it is possible to match the expectations between candidates and companies that are looking for employees.

If you are also looking for an outsourced team that can transfer your hypothesis into an MVP or a full-fledged product, contact us through the form below to discuss your ideas.