The World’s Fastest Growing Fundraising Platform Turns to Adeva to Help Execute their Product Roadmap

Skilled engineers with unbeatable experience needed to scale an overtasked two-person engineering team.

When you operate the world’s fastest-growing fundraising platform, it makes sense that you are going to need extra hands on deck to boost your engineering capacity. In early 2020, Givebutter’s engineering team comprised just two overtasked people who were building out the entire platform while attempting to bring new features to market.

“At the start of 2020, it was just me and one other engineer,” explains Liran Cohen, Givebutter’s co-founder and CTO. “We desperately needed to bring some additional people on board to expand our capacity and implement projects. Specifically, we needed to refactor large parts of our code base to be more scalable, robust and cleaner, so we could bring more engineers in and have them be able to work on parts of our code independently without affecting each other. This was necessary to prepare us for our next phase of growth.”

To fill these needs, Givebutter started looking into the many hiring options available to them, from bringing in full-time colleagues to outsourcing to a development agency. “There are pros and cons to every option, but it came down to wanting someone who felt like they were part of the team,” Liran says. “We didn’t really want to outsource the work to a dev shop. We wanted the relationship to be more personal, where we get a true team effort — that’s Adeva’s business model right there.”

Use Adeva to find the right tech talent who could ramp up quickly, readily contribute as core team members, and cross off every box on Givebutter’s checklist

Givebutter heard about Adeva through Laravel’s community. “I was hearing good things about Adeva, so we decided to reach out to them,” Liran says.

“The number one thing that impressed me is the speed at which Adeva brings candidates and allows us to hire. If we need any type of capacity, whether that’s a Laravel engineer or a React engineer, Adeva has a really impressive candidate available for us in just a couple days. The candidate always caters to exactly what we need, not just technical skills but time zone requirements, language fluency, background, years of experience and communication. Adeva’s screening is excellent.”

As for the placement process, Givebutter found that to be incredibly streamlined, too. “We get a candidate file that checks all our boxes, have a call with the engineer and, if we think it’s a good fit, we onboard the engineer with our tools and go from there,” Liran confirms. “Engineers are up-and-running straightaway. They’re on our internal team calls, they access our support tools and our Slack tools, the other people on the team know them. It really feels like they’re part of the team.”

New team members, cost savings, and a measurable boost in executing the product roadmap.

Givebutter’s early focus was to refactor the code base, setting the stage for the platform to scale. Now, their goals are focused on executing on the product roadmap. “That is never ending!” Liran says.

“One of the big areas we’ve been working on is digital events. Almost 100% of the events on Givebutter moved to digital when the health crisis struck, so we launched a big update to our digital live streaming product. Supporters can not only buy tickets to online events, but they can also donate in real time and interact with the other supporters in real time on the web page.”

“Now, as people are getting back to normal, we’re focusing more on hybrid events which let you run an in-person event with a digital event at the same time. We think that hybrid events will be how most fundraisers are run for at least the next couple of years.”

Looking forward, Givebutter’s customers will see redesigns of the product and some significant product launches in the coming months. Internally, the company is growing significantly and expects to increase their team size by at least 50% over the next year.

“On the engineering side, growth will be a mix of full-time and part-time staff and Adeva will definitely be part of the picture,” Liran explains. “We have moved so much faster with Adeva than we would have been able to on our own, and there are clear benefits in having more capacity and more really smart people on the team. Using Adeva over hiring in-house has also led to some cost savings.”

“Overall, I’m so pleased that we started working with Adeva. It all comes down to helping us move so much quicker, on budget, and smartly execute on our roadmap.”