Simbiosis

Problem: Talented software engineers in LATAM needing to leave their hometowns for better opportunities. DevShops in LATAM unable to grow or even going bankruptcy because of the lack of projects at their local area, having constant downtimes resulting in software engineers being constantly available affecting the payroll directly.

Solution: Web platform as a marketplace for connecting tech companies in America with vetted and specialized software engineers working at DevShops in LATAM but available for being assigned full-time to remote projects. With this we are helping DevShops to access a global market and their engineers to become world-class competitive without having to leave their hometowns.

Impact: Having access to a global market will allow DevShops in LATAM to grow and become profitable hiring more well-paid software engineers, incentivizing the pursue of technical careers among young people. Also to inject money into small and medium size cities across LATAM, helping the economy.

LATAM is growing fast in tech. It passed from $500M USD in VC investments in 2016 to $2.5B USD in 2018 [TechCrunch]. With this comes more tech companies and more software engineers. According to Stack Overflow there are more than 1 million software engineers in LATAM, but this number is growing fast, with Brazil and Mexico leading the region. 

Many of these engineers work at small DevShops (3-15 engineers on average) under a highly volatile condition where they could lose their jobs on a daily basis. This happens mainly because these DevShops are good on finding and hiring local talent but struggle a lot with having constant sales giving they are limited to their local market. With this situation result almost impossible for DevShops to grow, improve and help their employees to learn new technologies or become specialized in one. They are always on survival mode.

A common practice is that these engineers leave their hometowns and relocate to main cities with more opportunities, creating a huge centralized unbalance and increasing the economic gap between cities. Nearshore companies like Softtek or iTexico built their model on this principle of relocating engineers to their HQs, leaving small DevShops unable to compete.

We are focused on helping small and medium software development companies around LATAM, this in order to create better possibilities for their software engineers, meaning they will be able to perceive a higher income and also keep learning and improving on new technologies and new working methodologies. They will be able to remain at their hometowns with their families, instead of having to leave to other cities or countries for better opportunities. 

With Simbiosis all these Dev companies will have access to a global market which allows them keep the payroll on time and to hire new engineers for more projects. They will receive constant training from us on how to work remotely and will have access to online english lessons. Our goal is to raise the standard.

We started Simbiosis because before we founded a software development company (DevShop) in 2017; with offices in Monterrey, Mexico and Austin, Texas, and we understood the dynamics that these companies face everyday. It was common for us to have software engineers available even though we had operations in EUA. We talked with other DevShops and realized the problem persisted on all of them, this is when we started building a solution.

We are building a web platform as a marketplace for connecting tech companies in America with software engineers working at DevShops but being available for working full-time on remote projects. The process we designed is pretty simple, the tech company completes a form with the technical profile it's looking for and after we review it and talked with the company in order to clarify all the details surrounding the project, we publish it on or platform. All the partner DevShops that match the requirements are able to apply with one of their engineers for a one on one interview with the tech company. After the tech company reviews all the profiles received from different DevShops decides which ones will interview.

After the interviews if the company decides to hire an engineer, they will pay trough Simbiosis on a monthly basis, creating a recurrent business model. As a marketplace we charge a 10% fee to the tech company over the total cost. All the lessons provided to the DevShops are for free, and we are looking to partner up with an online english learning platform so they can get a significant discount. 

One of the most important parts of our model is recruiting the parter DevShops, this process is being done manually by reaching out to them directly and after a couple of phone calls if the DevShops meet the requirements we visit them at their offices and evaluate in person. Currently we are doing this process only in Mexico, given our economic possibilities at the moment, traveling to small and medium size cities around the country. As today we have 8 partner DevHouses and more than 70 engineers from them. Our idea is to expand fast to other countries in LATAM and increase the value offered to all the region.

All the development of our platform has been made internally by our co-founder and CTO Marco. In order to keep growing the platform fast we will need to hire more software engineers soon. Currently we are using Weblium for building and managing the landing page, and PHP Laravel for the backend part of our platform as well as JavaScript for the front end. 

This is our platform: www.simbiosis.app

By following a sharing economy model, we are using all the infrastructure and resources that already exits in DevShops in LATAM and connecting it with a global market. This allow us to scale fast with out being limited to the resources we are able to hire but instead to connect. Similar to Uber and AirB&B models.

The impact we are creating with this solution is huge given that this infrastructure and resources are currently unused, resulting in many of these DevShops being unable to grow and hire more engineers. By connecting them with the global market they are not longer limited to their local area and by increasing their sales they can now start hiring more engineers, paying them better and improving the standard of software development in LATAM.

LATAM is growing fast in tech with 5x more VC investment is just a couple of years, the conditions are set for this region to become highly developed, our platform is aiming to accelerate this process by incentivizing young students to pursue technical careers with great job opportunities without having to leave home and their families.

The software development industry in LATAM has a unique advantage for the US market given the same timezones and cultural fit, we are creating the tools to accelerate and facilitate the connection between clients y suppliers, eliminating borders. 

The best way of directly impacting the economy of cities is by creating high-end technical jobs available. This, because the jobs are well paid and incentivize young people to pursue this technical careers creating a beneficial loop. 

When DevShops are able to access a global market and start having constant sales, they will be able to pay their employees more and to hire more engineers which will directly improve the economy of the city by allowing them to spend more, creating also more jobs on other areas. Also, will help to create more specialized universities on software development and technical careers.

By creating a community of knowledge around our platform all the best practices could be replicated no matter where you are located, aiming to eliminate the barriers of frontiers among the countries of this region.

1.- We currently have 8 clients (tech companies in both Mexico and the US), 8 partner DevShops with more than 70 available engineers among them.

2.- In one year we are expecting to have more than 200 clients in the US and LATAM. Around 60 partner DevShops across LATAM, resulting in more than 500 software engineers being available.

3.- In 5 years we expect to be the top option for hiring remote engineers in the US, with more than 12,000 engineers from LATAM assigned; generating a net economic impact of $500M USD to this region.

We are focusing on three things right now, first to create awareness in the US market reaching out to tech companies there in order to create demand. The second is to increase the number of partner DevHouses across Mexico and LATAM. The third is to finish building a robust software product.

Our goal for the next year is to have these 3 areas on a good position, with a stablished market share in the US for hiring remote engineers, a well stablished community of DevShops in Mexico and main software countries in LATAM, and a fully automated platform where all process for recruiting, hiring and paying are made directly by clients and partners.

In 5 years we are aiming to have a strong sales and customer service in the US with offices in main tech cities. A strong base of DevShops around all LATAM, receiving full benefits for being part of our network (free lessons, discounts with other companies for improving their english, etc). By scaling our model we are aiming to impact the lives of more than 12,000 software engineers in LATAM in this period of time, and keep growing until we reach a strong size of the total +1M software engineers in this region.

Our main barrier now is financial, we are fundraising our pre-seed round now, we just got accepted into Capital Factory, an accelerator based in Austin Texas; They are helping us to connect with angel investors there, but the current situation of Coronavirus is slowing things down a little. 

We need to get as much exposure as we can right now in order to access to these funds we need. With this capital we will be able to positionate our product in the US and to gather more partner DevShops to join our community.

We are fine with the technical side given that Marco our CTO has more than 10 years developing software products. We just need the resources to hire more engineers for growing fast.

Given that we are from LATAM and aiming to the tech industry in this region, the cultural barrier is minimum, we speak the same language, meaning both Spanish and Tech.

In the long term we will need to see how legal matters change regarding nearshore activities, we are aware that this is a barrier that we might find in the future, with different laws in each country, we will pay special attention on this point.

Omar has previous experience raising capital from investors, we are connecting with them again in order to accelerate this process. We are also applying to other accelerators in the US and Mexico, and taking advantage of the Capital Factory community in Texas for raising the first round there. 

We already started selling in Mexico, with 5 current clients from here and other 3 from the US. In order to expand to other countries we first need to have a strong position in Mexico as a good proven opportunity for DevShops, this will make it easier for other companies across LATAM to join.

Once we have this strong position here, the idea is to expand the offer to other main software countries in the region, like Brasil, Colombia, Chile, Argentina and Venezuela. The best way for doing this is to contact them once we have a client with a specific requirement they could fulfill. 

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3 full-time co-founders.

Omar: B.S. Industrial and Systems Engineering, ITESM (#3 University in LATAM), México, 2015. Former co-founder of a tech startup that raised more than $400k USD in investment.

Efrain: B.S. Mechatronics Engineering, ITESM, México, 2012. More than 8 years defining and launching software products to market.

Marco: B.S. Computer Science, ITESM, México, 2014. More than 10 years of experience developing software products.

We know each other since 2012, we complement our abilities.

Efrain and Omar started a company in 2013 focused on helping foreign students and workers to find a place to live in Monterrey, MX. Being one of the most visited cities in Mexico, Monterrey did not have a reliable easy-to-use platform for allocating people (Airbnb wasn't around that time or at least not popular there). We lacked a ton of experience.

Efrain and Marco founded a digital marketing agency in 2014 focused on politics. In 2015 they led the digital campaign (managed the social media and created software platforms) of Jaime Rodríguez "El Bronco", who later became the first independent candidate (without any political party) to get elected as state governor (Nuevo León).

Efrain and Omar met 8 years ago (2012). We met during college, we were both having the entrepreneurship concentration at ITESM by the time and working on different projects at the same college business incubator.

Efrain met Marco in 2014, and introduce him to Omar by the same time during social meetings.

Two partners: First DevShops across LATAM, as mentioned before they are our key partners for offering our services. The second partners we have are accelerators and incubators, given that they are helping us to access to more funding and also to promote our services among the other tech companies that are in their community.

As a marketplace we charge a 10% fee over the total cost per engineer assigned: $350 USD from the total average ticket of $3500. This is our main revenue stream.

As our platform grows we could provide more value to our partner DevShops by providing them with specialized courses and charge for it. Also by hosting all the interactions between client and partner. Like AirBnB with all the information registered in our platform for the safety of both parts.

Our main cost is the team's payroll, and will continue to be. Secondarily are the sale costs, traveling for making new partners and advertising.

Our main costumer are tech companies in the US looking to hire more vetted and specialized software engineers fast in order to meet software development milestone.

Our strategic partners are DevShops in LATAM whit available software engineers.

Increase our revenue by assigning more engineers to tech companies. Also we will look for new revenue streams on parallel offerings.

Before we reach financial sustainability we will need to raise a seed round of $2.5 million USD.

We are looking to get as much valuable feedback and advice we can at this stage, also we need to get a ton of exposure with the tech community in the region. We believe we have a strong value proposition and we need other agents in the industry to help us reach our goal for raising the standard for software development in LATAM.

Our main barrier as mentioned before is financial, we believe that the TPrize could help us a lot to overcome this part and accelerate our growth, also to introduce us with potential investors.

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DevShops and Accelerators/incubators