Having graduated from the MIT Solve program with seed funding and recently receiving backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bandhu operates a digital marketplace which consolidates and provides jobs, housing and income earning opportunities to workers, employers, landlords and middlemen.
With the majority of Bandhu’s user base being on the go workers using low end Android phones, their engineering stack makes heavy use of Java + Kotlin, with PHP as a backend. Co-Founder Jacob Kohn has mastered designing wireframes and screens in Figma and handing them over to engineering to build out functional frontends.
The Bandhu-GitStart relationship began when founders Jacob and Rushil felt a need to add extra engineering capacity and greater PHP and SQL expertise onto the team to meet their product development timelines. In spite of there already being an India based outsourcing company working alongside the core Bandhu team to build the Android app, the founders felt that they needed a more seasoned team with solid experience and an organized engineering approach to assist them in the upscaling.
This was the cue for GitStart to enter!
After an initial 2 weeks of onboarding spent majorly in discovering the codebase, the database schema and executing backend logic oriented tasks, the founders were satisfied with the value added and decided to invest in the GitStart Startup package, so as to shore up the codebase further and start dramatically increasing their engineering velocity. The Startup package gives Founders and CTOs 1000 credits which can be utilised on-demand against engineering tasks.
Says Jacob Kohn, COO & CTO, “It took GitStart a few weeks to fully ramp up. Since then, we have seen a good acceleration in how quickly we are moving engineering tasks forward into production. GitStart has also helped us move over from Trello to Jira and get a better sense of how to prioritize features, delegate responsibilities and atomize tasks. Previously, we would give very large tasks to our extended engineering team, all at once. With GitStart’s help & expertise, we have been more disciplined in atomizing and breaking down product features and defining the scope of tasks clearly, which has overall helped us scale the organization better. ”
Over time, the Bandhu team have also given front end heavy tasks like implementing new Android screens based on Figma wireframes, which has resulted in increased usage and a more holistic collaboration between both teams. The developers at GitStart also helped set up a CI/CD pipeline, code versioning in GitHub and staging environments in AWS to make the engineering workflow tighter and more efficient, alongside implementing a feature which allows for generating preview links from a PR.
Says Founder Rushil Pallavajhala, “Earlier, we were using GitStart as a traditional outsourcing vendor but over time we’ve adapted to the task based, credits based model, which has actually helped us quite a lot. We’ve become more organized and atomic in the way we test and ship out new features, doing it in smaller incremental updates, rather than large batches. The communication from the GitStart devs has also been prompt and generally responsive. The slack standup bot has been helpful in giving us daily updates and visibility. ”
We are satisfied with how the relationship with GitStart has evolved and are looking forward to expanding usage to develop newer features around the housing side of our product - which is in the pipeline.
