This week, I had the pleasure of interviewing David from Grow.Jobs. What an inspirational entrepreneur! He believes in hard work and pushing hard...now that is my type of person!
-What encouraged you to work on grow.jobs?
I have firsthand experience searching for individual developers who can build an application end-to-end, also known as full-stack developers. Finding one was virtually impossible. Full-stack developers are becoming more and more of a unicorn, a mythical figure because, there are so many aspects needed to make a product work. Both function and design are equally important.
When looking for a development partner, I ran into the next issue: there are so many of them around! They all say they are the best in what they do and have a ton of experience; so this becomes a dead-end.
If you take into consideration that there are 18.ooo companies starting each year in the Netherlands, there are 12.000 open developers positions and only a couple of thousand students graduating each year, you can see the problem isn’t going to go away anytime soon!
We need to push our government to change the current curriculum for the schools to teach our kids how to code at a young age. Learning French and German is still a standard in schools, where coding language has proven to be much more important for the last decade at the very least.
-What do you enjoy most about what you do?
I love talking to Dutch entrepreneurs, helping them describe their technology plans, and translating them into RFP’s. This process is very creative & challenging, which is something I really like.
I also enjoy talking to about 20 different development companies each week, which translates into meeting a huge amount of people from all over the world and from different cultures. I like to understand what drives the CEO’s and Business Development Directors from each and every company on our platform. Insights like these helps the platform to add value to both user-sides.
-What is your personal philosophy in business?
Being fair, over-delivering and constantly adding value in any possible way to your clients will make them want to stay. I’ve noticed this in the conversations we’re having with some of our larger clients who are asking for services we normally wouldn’t provide. It’s their commitment to us (and visa versa) which triggered these opportunities. Of this I’m very proud.
-What advice would you give to aspiring innovators?
Push hard! Keep pushing even when others tell you to stop. If you believe in your idea, truly believe you can add value to others, then go for it.
And, if you can’t code, please make sure to do your best to make sure you find the right partner. Don’t take the easy road because this is a long-term decision. Pick the right partner and go!
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