What’s next for Toughbyte

It’s been almost three years since we incorporated Toughbyte. We recently had a chance to reflect on the progress so far and decide what to focus on going forward.

As Anton and I are both developers, we first wrote code for clients ourselves. Very quickly we had more work than we could handle, so Katya joined to help build our own team. At the same time, some clients were looking to take development in house, but were struggling to find talent locally. Rather than losing the clients, we decided to help them recruit from abroad.

The share of revenue from recruitment grew steadily, as did the size of our recruitment team. We also tried to expand our offering by getting involved in projects earlier and doing service design, but this proved harder to scale than recruitment.

We also began to contract out and more and more work to freelancers. We realized that the best people can work directly with clients without our involvement. Their services are also easier and faster to sell than that of a whole team. The challenge lies in quickly finding the right talent, but the process is similar to recruiting full time employees.

We experimented a lot as we sought product market fit by trying out different pricing models, going after new markets and much more. Some of these initiatives, such as bringing Aygul in to help with internal projects to help us grow, proved very successful. Our revenue has grown at more than 20% year on year and the team from just the two of us to 15 full time team members and 36 contractors. We’re now finding candidates both locally and from abroad in seven countries and have filed 55 full time and over 70 contract positions.

So, we’ve now decided to double down on recruiting full time & freelance developers and focus on scaling the business. We won’t stop experimenting though! We’re already automating a lot of the work we’re doing, such as sourcing candidates. We’re also starting to work with freelance recruiters. What we offer won’t change though — our clients will just get more relevant candidates, presented even faster than before.

So, if you’re looking for developers, whether local or remote, full time or contract, get in touch so we can help! You can be safe in the knowledge that all our efforts are fully focused on finding the best technical talent for you, as quickly as possible.