Zerocracy: Sales Kit

I was talking to a few people recently, who wanted to join our team and help us sell the platform to potential customers—software companies. They all asked me for a “sales kit” document or a package of documents, which were supposed to answer their most important questions and help address the pain points of those potential customers. Anyway, instead of a fancy PDF document I decided to write up this blog post. Here it is, feel free to use this information when you sell Zerocracy:

Pain Points

Traditional software teams, no matter, whether they are co-located or distributed, experience similar problems with the effectiveness of their human resources, like programmers, testers, designers, etc., which are:

Costs-vs-Results Misbalance. Salaries are high, while the productivity of an average programmer is rather low. A lot of time is spent on learning, meetings, trainings, rework, vacations, and social activities, while code writing and features delivery is constantly behind schedule.
High Turnover. The demand for good programmers is very high on the market and that’s why they have the luxury to choose who to work for. The best programmers quit, very often even without a notice, and the problems they leave behind are difficult or impossible to solve for newcomers. Junior programmers also leave, but later, after they get enough training.
Low Maintainability. The source code programmers create is as good as its authors. While the project is young and the team is motivated, the code seems to be good enough. However, after a few personnel rotations, it becomes very difficult of impossible to maintain what’s left.
Low Quality. Any software has bugs, but most software teams don’t know how to control quality and make sure customers don’t see defects before we fix them. Customers complain about quality issues in the product and programmers complain about “spaghetti” code they have to deal with.

These four problems hurt the business and make it lose time and money. An inexpensive, reliable, and predictable software development process is the key success factor of any tech business. However, most companies continue to suffer because they can’t resolve these problems using the solutions that exist on the market.

Existing Solutions

In the exiting market, where the demand is twice as high as the supply of good programmers, any tech business suffers in finding good software developers, retaining them, motivating, and making sure they deliver the quality the business needs. In a desperate attempt to put things under control a business owner can do many things: above-the-market salaries, equity sharing, team bulding, etc.

However, none of them really help, until the key roadblock is removed.

Pay by Result

According to our 20+ years experience of managing software projects and working with over 400 different programmers in co-located and distributed teams, the ultimate solution means changing the motivational mode from pay-by-time (also known as monthly salary or hourly pay) to pay-by-result.

Instead of paying programmers by the end of the month, no matter whether they were working or doing nothing, and hoping that they will be very productive and will care about the objectives of the business, we suggest to pay them for the results they actually deliver, in microtasks.

However, it is easier said than done. We’ve spent almost 10 years to research and develop a management model and a set of instruments, which make it possible to manage a team of programmers so that they get their compensation only when they deliver what they are supposed to: a high-quality working software code. We even created a chatbot to let programmers communicate with our software tools. Zerocrat, our chatbot is supposed to automate the majority of routine management operations, which are inevitable when working with microtasks.

There is a number of benefits a business is getting when switching to the pay-by-result management model.

The Benefits

If the business manages to switch its software team to the pay-by-result, a number of obvious advantages will be gained:

Higher Efficiency. The amount of code programmers deliver via microtasks is many times bigger than what they deliver in a traditionally managed setup. Even though their rates are higher, the ROI of each dollar spent is 5+ times bigger.
Higher Motivation. With an obvious and transparent motivational scheme good programmers feel more interest in contributing to the project, in delivering higher quality, and in staying in the team.
Higher Maintainability. The very idea of microtasking is designed to handle high turnover and keep the quality of code at a high level, no matter how many people is working with it. Thanks to that, the readability of the source code is always high.
Higher Quality. Software defects and user-facing defects stay under tight control, thanks to the principles of our Policy of work. In the end, the quality is a few times higher than in traditional teams.

In order to start the transition a potential customer has to fill out this online form and one of our lead programmers will get in touch with them. They will discuss the on-boarding procedure, the customer will fund the project with a credit card and the journey will begin.

If there are any concerns left, read this.

Good luck!