Turtle
A full-stack solution for running an online agency
This one felt good!
Logged into Stripe today to see we just passed $1M in gross volume! We've bootstrapped our way here.
Feeling incredibly thankful to the devs and startups who made this possible and who were open minded enough to consider that part-time work doesn't have to be second class -- if the right infrastructure for working together (Turtle) is provided to all sides.
(note: a small portion of our volume is processed outside of stripe)
While keeping hyper-focused on startups working with part-time front-end web and mobile devs, we crossed over 50 startups "powered by Turtle".
We defined "powered by Turtle" as a startup that has used Turtle before and either currently uses Turtle or has expressed plans to use Turtle again in the future. One of the key benefits of Turtle is being able to flex a team up and down as demand changes.
Turtle was accepted into and participated in the 2017-2018 batch of Creative Destruction Lab (CDL)- https://www.creativedestructionlab.com/
The Creative Destruction Lab is a seed-stage program for massively scalable, science and technology-based companies. The program employs an objectives-based mentoring process with the goal of maximizing equity-value creation.
By the end of 2017, we focused in on Startups and front-end web/mobile dev. There are things that can be outsourced, and things that can't (like strategy, backend dev, high-security data transfer, etc).
With just under 10 customers, Turtle achieved over $20K in gross services volume.
A professor from Cornell became our first paying customer, purchasing 9 development hours on Turtle's platform.
Turtle is now hyper-focused on startups working with front-end web and mobile app devs, but the Cornell professor is still using Turtle.
Before we built any software, we manually matched a company in NYC with freelancers and used existing tools to manage the process.
We were paid $50K for this case study, which become our initial "funding" to start building.
Cofounders designed and built the backend, and used Turtle (as the first "customers" of our own product) to match with front-end web devs and build our prototype.
Turtle started out of a few frustrations:
- working with freelancers/part-timers lacks infrastructure.
- global talent is often neglected.
- 40 hours per week isn't for everyone.
We set out to build a platform that will make it easier for people across timezones to work together -- whether it's for 10 hours, 100 hours, or indefinitely.
2 Comments
Congratulation ,
Can you please explain me your business model? like 5 years old .
You made 1m , i went to your site , i saw its CRM/Chat for workers / managers
but how do you market it and what is your benefit ? over dono ... Slack?
Me as engineer what should i look in your site and why should i use it ?
Thanks
marketing to 1M is pretty interesting