We met and realized we had the same idea — Pierre Klobb (Needelp)
Needelp is a trustfully “jobbing” digital marketplace that matches freelance labor with local demand. Consumers find immediate help with everyday tasks, including handyman work, moving, cleaning and delivery.
- Founded: 2014 by Guillaume de Kergariou, Pierre Klobb
- City: Paris, France
- Funding: 1.5M€ raised in December 2016
- Company size at time of writing: 11 (hiring fast)
- Tech team: 4— CTO, Full stack developer, traffic manager (UX) and front-end designer
What’s on your pizza?
Arugula, Reggano, Mozzarella, tomatoes at La cerise sur la Pizza
Co-Founder and CTO
We met and realized that we had basically the same idea
Who were you before Needelp ?
I studied in a multimedia school to become an IT engineer. I worked in consulting from 1995 to 2001, and then became the director of a web agency (Synapsys Multimedia) for 4 years.
I then worked in the financial world at Société Générale from 2005 to 2012, building the front office applications as head of IT Sales in Paris. In 2013, I launched two dating sites that end up gathering several hundred thousands of users.
In 2014, I met Guillaume and we founded Needelp.
How did you guys meet?
I had a few ideas before starting Needelp, and went to a bunch of meetups to see if I could find somebody that could be interested in building one of them with me, as a CEO.
I met someone there that forwarded the info to Guillaume, who was at the time basically working on the same idea, without having the technical part figured out yet. We met in a café and it clicked pretty fast.
3 months later, the first version came out. We first worked from the free coworking space at NUMA, then moved up a floor.
What’s your job now, in 2017?
I wear several hats. I’m a founder, so I need to work on the company’s organization, as well as manage the dev team and anything tech related.
One of my main tasks is to prioritize the product’s features compared to the business’ needs.
How much has your job changed since the beginning?
A lot. At the beginning, you code like crazy, as it’s an MVP. (note: Minimum Viable Product).
Now with the growing team, it’s getting a bit more management oriented, but I still keep about 60% of my time dedicated to coding so far.
Let’s dig into tech
I had experience building from scratch and learning a framework takes time that I didn’t have
What’s your stack? And why?
PHP/MySQL, and bootstrap on the front-end. No framework whatsoever. It’s just how I used to build sites, so I had experience building from scratch and learning a framework takes time that I didn’t have. It can also have performance constraints that I’m not really comfortable dealing with just yet.
The sysadmin part is all managed by GANDI. We don’t consider server management to be part of our core value, so we delegated it and are very happy about this choice.
Have you had to change your stack ? I believe not, but will you?
We’re mostly thinking about building a mobile app, which means that we also need to add a REST API on our backend.
We haven’t benchmarked any framework to switch to yet to know if we would benefit from a switch, but we will likely move towards Docker for smoother deploys.
Have you ever faced a crisis?
Before Gandi, we used to be hosted on OVH. We had a lot of trouble with the servers not being accessible from some geographical parts in the country, that we never really understood. It’s really hard to fix a problem that you don’t see yourself! We realized the real issue with the number of people calling to tell us the site was down.
So when this started happening, we quickly migrated to Gandi to see if that would fix the issue, and it actually did.
Your CTO life now
You need to zigzag, you can’t go in a straight line
What’s your biggest challenge right now?
We want to build a better platform than every single one of our competitors, but with it being stable and robust. So there’s a fine line going too slow and going too fast, where you start breaking things.
We have a ton of potential ideas, and we could just hire 10 people to code them, building a huge code factory. But that’s not how we work.
What is your main responsibility?
Analysing customer feedbacks to make the product better, and prioritize what needs to be done regarding those.
I then orchestrate each feature’s development until it’s deployed to production.
If you had to change anything since you started Needelp, would you?
I would do a lot of small tech changes that I never really had time to do. Database architecture, things like that. And now we have a quite important technical debt on this side.
We also had quite a lot of functional changes that we had to roll back, which made us lose time. When it’s done, you can see all the errors you’ve done and say that you’d like to have built your product directly how it is now, but it’s not realistic.
You need to zigzag, you can’t go in a straight line.
The people at Needelp
It’s better to know to search for anything than to search to know everything (P. Mendelson)
Can you describe your tech team?
Pretty open minded, we don’t have any dogmas in the team. You don’t have to come from the best schools or anything, you need to be good at your job, and be pragmatic.
We don’t want to hear “let’s do it like this because I’ve seen it done like this somewhere else”, so nobody in the team has been, everybody is aware of what is best for what they are working on.
What’s the one thing you’re looking at when hiring?
I like the saying “It’s better to know to search for anything than to search to know everything” (P. Mendelson)
I don’t really want to hear things such as “That’s how I learnt it” — I’m looking for people that can analyse problems.
Do you have a hiring tip for a startup?
Everybody needs to do what they think is best. The only rule is success.
Vision
Where do you see Needelp in two years?
We’re hoping to be the leader in terms of services to individuals, with strong verticals on DIY in France, Switzerland and Belgium
What will be the hardest challenges to face to get there?
It’s going to be a matter of communication and partnerships. We signed a big partnership with Brico Dépôt, which brings a big traffic directly from their points of sale.
Our biggest challenge will be to maintain the offer/demand balance. Jobbers are screened and checked for quality, while customers can just flow in. So we’ll have to find a technical way to validate jobbers faster somehow.
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