Hiring 20 Developers in 3 months during Covid-19
Covid-19 has literally turned the world upside down. Doctors are saying millions will die if we don’t stop everything; others say we are overthinking it, some are wearing masks while they sleep, and others are like we won’t wear a mask and just party. What Covid-19 has shown us how dumb we are on a grand scale like we can’t even agree on how to tackle a pandemic. I’m not here to argue on the response of governments towards Covid-19, I’m here to talk about how it affected our plans for BionicWP. I’m working on the platform with Michael Borgelt, our awesome CEO, and a fast-growing team of over 20 based out of Karachi, Pakistan.
Let’s start this journey in January 2020. One magical night me and Michael hanging out on Zoom discussed or re-discussed the idea of having a platform. I had finally convinced him that we needed that, and with the growth we were seeing in The WP Help, he finally agreed. We started working on a business plan and some financial projections. In February 2020, we finalized the idea and decided to move forward. To get the plan into motion, we had to start hiring our team; out of many options, we decided to set up a company in Karachi, Pakistan, where I’m based. That’s how Integrity Technologies was born, the name of our company in Pakistan. Why we chose the name Integrity is a topic for some other day.
During all this time, Coronavirus was spreading in China. It started to make inroads in Europe as well, while we were focused on ironing our team structure and hiring plans. Come March 2020 I got a Co-working Space and started meeting people, that’s when Covid-19 started spreading in Pakistan. I remember one day early in March when Michael and I had a call to discuss if we should move forward with it, as Covid-19 had started disrupting life worldwide. So we discussed the possibilities of halting the project until things became clear. Still, we both knew things won’t become clear soon, and do we want to wait until it all gets solved, which might take more than a year and then start the process of building? The WP Help was still growing, albeit with humble numbers, but that was proof we needed that the solution we want to build has its market. I think the call wasn’t more than an hour, and we both decided we will move forward.
As I started interviewing people, I ran across the panic of Covid-19 among candidates. Everyone was scared for jobs, and joining a new startup when even jobs at stable companies weren’t permanent anymore was a challenge I had to overcome in almost every interview. All candidates had questions on the stability and how Covid-19 is affecting the company. We were looking for high-performing people, people who were A class. The product we wanted to build wasn’t easy. It wasn’t simple. It wasn’t in a non-competitive market. It was a complicated product that required A players who could bring the A-game to the table. Those candidates are in high demand, so attracting them was a challenge as they had offers from more prominent companies. With Covid-19, they were nervous about changing jobs as well. Slowly but surely, we started finding people who were as ambitious as we were. They wanted to join a journey, they believed in our idea of what we wanted to do, they understood that what we want to do isn’t easy, but it would be worth it.
Our team started growing from 2 new people joining in April to 13 new members joining in May and then 5 new who joined us in June. We have been lucky to attract a great team with amazing talents. Who we know will help us create the Truly Managed WordPress Hosting Platform that our future customers would love.
We are still hiring and still growing, and the more we move forward, the more unstoppable we will become. We are not developing to be just one of the many industry players; we are coming to change the whole industry.
Fate whispers to the warrior, ‘You can not withstand the storm.’
The warrior whispers back, ‘I am the storm.’
It’s not that we were/are not scared of the whole situation and how it affects businesses around the world. There are so many uncertainties, but why did we move forward? Because we trust ourselves, we believe in the survivability of the human race. History teaches us that most big companies get created in times of uncertainty, so this is our time.
Why am I posting this? Just to document our journey and also if just 1 person is reading, I want to give them hope that what we all need to do is keep moving forward, that’s the only way we will come out of this with our heads high. If we stop, if we let Covid-19 destroy our lives and businesses, we would be short-changed by life, and that’s not a deal I’m ready to play for.