CMNTY is a data collection platform designed to make life easier for insights professionals. For over a decade, this global software as a service (SaaS) company has supported a variety of businesses – from market research agencies to brands from retailers to airlines.

Their platform enables market researchers to deliver insightful, strategic reports based on huge volumes of qualitative and quantitative data, helping clients to make informed business decisions.

CMNTY faced a challenge familiar to many software providers. On one hand, they could pour their efforts into talent acquisition, investing heavily in recruitment, and incurring an often long and expensive onboarding process. On the other hand, they could turn to agencies, paying the premium of high recruitment costs. Both of these scenarios offered relatively slow and inflexible solutions. So what was the alternative?

At this point CMNTY was dependent on a single developer based in India. But it wasn’t working. The team in the Netherlands was having to micro-manage – and was losing time. They needed a new set-up, without incurring the expense of recruitment, or using an agency.

That’s when the team as a service solution from Proshore presented itself.

At the CMNTY office in the Netherlands, they just couldn’t find the right people. It’s difficult to source the right developers in the Netherlands. They needed qualified professionals whose skills would complement their own. They’d looked overseas for talent, and remote teams.

But how do you integrate the right team with your current company?

Moreover, how do you work effectively and collaboratively with a remote team that’s not your own? CMNTY was looking for offshore development solutions, but they couldn’t find the right one. Until Proshore stepped up.

CMNTY had dabbled with some overseas capacity before, with varying results. When asked what his experience was with other oversea-solutions, CMNTY CTO Peter Nijssen said, ‘communication was key’. It wasn’t even the language barrier or the physical distance but the ability to actually listen, think ahead, and communicate properly.

What Proshore offered was a dedicated and ready-made team of developers who could understand a product and seamlessly integrate within an existing, in-house team. And that’s what happened with CMNTY. We looked at how they developed software and saw some issues with the partnerships they had, and a lot of the challenges.

So in collaboration with CMNTY we developed a tool to conduct online focus groups, and the ability to use the data to create visual insights. The great thing about Proshore is that we enable companies to scale their teams gradually. So we started out with two separate teams: CMNTY mainly added new features in the participant view and the administration panel, and we developed new features within the insights section. Nowadays, we operate as one big team and adjust the entire product and are in constant contact with each other.