CodersClan started out as a marketplace for easily outsourcing small coding tasks. Now, the company is setting its sights on allowing its customers to request full development projects and it’s announcing that it has raised an $820,000 seed round to fuel its expansion. Investors in this round include CrunchFund (which was founded by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington); Entree Capital, which also invested in Meerkat; Kima Ventures and the founders of Wix ,Quixey and ClarityRay, as well as incubators UpWest Labs and The Junction.
The Tel Aviv-based company currently has about 6,000 coders on its service. Its founders told me the idea for the service came from their own experience with code outsourcing. What they were looking for when they did their first startup was an easy way to get small issues solved — the kind of problems you would usually ask developers on Stack Overflow about. At the time, though, there wasn’t a fail-safe system to do this on the market.
A service like CodersClan is only as good as the programmers that offer their services on it. To vet coders, the team looks at their Stack Overflow reputation, as well as their GitHub and LinkedIn profiles. Using this information, the company’s automated dispatch system then matches the customer with the right coder. Non-technical customers don’t usually talk directly to the coder. Instead, CodersClan helps to make sure that there isn’t any miscommunication between the two.
More technical users can use CoderClan’s integration with tools like Jira, Trello and Asana to manage their projects right from inside the platforms they already use. In its early days, CodersClan focused only on small tasks. That, the team told me, ensured projects weren’t too big to fail. Now, however, developers can use tools like Trello to manage a team of outsourced coders to work on larger projects, too.
As the team tells me, coders on the site now hail from all over the world. Most of the tasks tend to focus on web development using Rails, PHP, Node.js and WordPress, but the demand for help with iOS and Android applications is also increasing.