Windsor.io’s innovative product that makes it easy to create personalized videos using artificial intelligence. Users can record a video of themselves, for example thanking a customer, as a template, and then personalize it like any email marketing tool.
Winsdor.io had just raised a round and needed to go fast, using its fresh funds to ship a backlog of features. They needed a product designer to help them convert their ideas into high fidelity designs that could be implemented by Windsor’s software engineers.
But Windsor was in a bind. “Y Combinator tells you this all the time - how Airbnb famously took 3 months before they made their first hire. You do want to take your time to find someone awesome, but also you need someone really fast”, says Pranay Prakesh, CEO of Windsor.io. “One great way to solve that is you find something in the interim because you need some help immediately. So we took the contractors.”
While contractors can be an excellent solution to the “move fast / hire slow” puzzle, Windsor.io struggled to make it work at first. Their problem? Quality.
“We went through two months almost, of trying to find designers on vetted freelancer platforms. We eventually had to bail because they kept giving us bad candidate after bad candidate. It took so much of my time sifting through nonsense candidates, it was crazy.”
Frustrated that he couldn’t find good candidates through existing talent marketplaces, Pranay turned to NUMI. “The first person we found through NUMI, we hired. I was on the call with Jakub”— the product designer Windsor found through NUMI — “for 45 minutes and was really impressed right away.”
"We didn’t do the full interview process”, Pranay explains. Rather than spend multiple hours trying to assess Jakub’s soft skills over contrived interviews, Windsor.io took advantage of the two week trial period baked into NUMI engagements. “He started kicking ass from the very beginning. It just blew my mind. What he did on his own in his first two weeks, most other designers I’ve worked with I’ve had to push to produce in two months.”
This set a new quality bar for the Windsor team in what they expect from their product and engineering contractors.
“From now on if we ever need a contractor for design or engineering, we’re going to come to NUMI first”
"NUMI was instrumental in our early days when finding our first product Designer. Harrison understood our time pressure and worked really quickly to help us find the right designer for our team."
