Strategic engineering partner for founders and teams scaling their products.
Engineering team scale-up
Faster release cycles
Countries Operated
Timeleft is a global platform organizing in-person social dinners across dozens of countries.
The product operates at the intersection of software systems and real-world operations, where failures are immediately visible and costly.
As Timeleft expanded internationally, the executive team needed faster technology expansion.
When Kunso joined to help Timeleft, their growth as a startup went beyond low-code platforms and ad-hoc scripts and fixes. It required a serious Technology Strategy revision and Hiring plan to support growing demand for stability of the product.
Timeleft faced compounding challenges as the startup scaled:
The key risk was clear:
Global startup can't survive on the legacy low-code without Tech Strategy.
Kunso partnered closely with Timeleft's leadership and engineering team to act as a strategic engineering extension, not just an execution layer.
The engagement focused on:
The priority of delivery was to define "where" Timeleft is heading with the concrete plan and address the P1 issues using extended team before going into extensive hiring cycle.
After the main bottlenecks were resolved and the process was defined and owned by stakeholders, the technology strategy was aligned. We accomplished a tech hiring execution to put the right team to maintain and develop the future of IRL Tech.
Kunso provided Timeleft with a Fractional CTO service to analyze the existing state of technologies and make tough calls which are usually hard to do from a non-technical perspective. Cutting off unnecessary spending and evaluating performance of the existing team and the scope of work.
We defined the clear process and ownership between teams to make sure the features and fixes have a streamlined flow from the frontline of operations to the final production fixes.
Technology strategy and Tech budget artifacts are one of the key outcomes from the first 3 months of the engagement to build a foundation for the upcoming achievements. They include the key roles and responsibilities and various scenarios on hiring based on the projected growth and future funding. These artifacts are not rigid plans but more transparent documentation which helps non-technical founders to be on top of their Engineering and costs.
After the foundational work was done by the extended team and the system architecture with the foundations was done, the team went into technical hiring sprint to cover the in-house needs for the engineering. This includes clearly defined roles, responsibilities using our internal "Reverse Hiring" methodology which was developed over the years of helping startups and enterprises to scale their engineering teams.
The engagement led to a complete rewrite of the legacy backend and low-code operations portal. It met the core need of the fastest growing IRL tech to be able to scale their operations without large overhead.
Key Results:
Timeleft gained confidence in technology which was based on real product and growth needs.
Scaling a fast-growing startup is always challenging because it requires considering multiple factors during high-velocity decision-making. You need to take immediate decisions to control budget and at the same time not sacrifice growth.
Timeleft is a great example of a startup where technology became a bottleneck only after the growth started to accelerate. Their leadership team was extremely supportive and accommodating on making hard decisions with trade-offs which are often required for a scaling product.
As a result they have fully sustainable engineering team working together with the product and operations on the clearly defined priorities to support their growth. We could not be happier to have clients like Timeleft in the future.
Strategic engineering partner for founders and teams scaling their products.