Qrvey’s founder had a vision for an embedded analytics platform but zero team members and no product. Building from scratch in the Washington DC area meant competing with government contractors and consulting firms for talent, with senior engineers commanding $180k-$220k before benefits. Hiring even a small team locally would burn through their runway before they could ship an MVP.
They needed to build a product from zero and scale an entire engineering organization without the chaos and cost of traditional hiring.
Team scaled from scratch
Savings in payroll costs
Partnership and counting
Built product before scaling
Building an Analytics Platform and Team from Zero
Qrvey needed more than just engineers—they needed a product. We started with an MVP team: 1 senior full-stack engineer, 1 product designer, and 1 QA specialist. The goal was to build a working embedded analytics platform that could be demoed to potential customers and investors within 3 months.
The MVP team built the foundation: a React front end, Node.js back end, and AWS infrastructure. Within 12 weeks, Qrvey had a functional product that could embed analytics dashboards into other applications. They signed their first 3 customers within 60 days of launch and closed their seed round shortly after.
That MVP team became the foundation of a 4-year partnership. As Qrvey gained traction, we scaled the team in phases: first the core product engineers, then specialized roles for data pipeline engineering, DevOps, and QA. Over 4 years, the team grew from 3 people to 82 team members working through Ideaware, spanning front-end, back-end, DevOps, QA, and data engineering roles.
Scaling from MVP to Enterprise Platform
Scaling from the MVP team to 82 team members doesn’t happen overnight. We grew Qrvey’s team in phases: first expanding the core product team, then building specialized squads for front-end (React), back-end (Node.js), data pipeline engineering, and infrastructure (AWS). Each new hire went through Qrvey’s interview process, and only engineers who met their bar got offers.
The tech stack is complex: React on the front end, Node.js on the back end, and AWS for infrastructure. The data engineering team processes millions of analytics events per day, which means performance, reliability, and scalability aren’t optional—they’re the product.
We didn’t just throw engineers at the problem. We helped Qrvey build team structure: dedicated squads with clear ownership, embedded QA engineers in each squad, and DevOps engineers who automated deployments, monitoring, and incident response. The result is a team that ships fast without breaking things.
The Results
Qrvey saved 55% in payroll costs compared to hiring the same roles in the Washington DC area. That’s millions of dollars per year redirected from recruiting and salaries into product development and go-to-market. But the financial impact is only part of the story.
The engineering team shipped Qrvey’s v3 platform on schedule, scaled infrastructure to handle 10x traffic growth, and reduced customer-reported bugs by 40% through better QA coverage. Today, Qrvey serves enterprise customers across North America and Europe, processing billions of analytics events per month.
The partnership is still going strong after 4 years. Qrvey’s VP of Engineering recently told us that nearshore hiring transformed how they think about team scaling—not as a compromise, but as a competitive advantage. They’re not just saving money. They’re moving faster than competitors who are still stuck hiring locally.
"We were able to expand our team constantly and deliver more with every monthly release."
