Launch HN: Ontop (YC W21) – Easily hire and pay remote workers in LATAM

A couple of questions: 1- Do you think you will ever integrate with remote job boards like remoteok.io? 2- Did you consider adding Venezuela to the list of countries, or are things too difficult to do legally?

Also, which countries do you cover? I'm assuming Colombia is one of them.

Companies could already use freelancers on other platforms in many cases, but the main issue is ensuring the work is completed and to a high standard.

First, yes, companies in US/Canada and Europe will look for different regions (including LATAM) to source their talent needs. And I do believe that many companies will rely on middleware like this to handle contract and payments. It's great that you're setting up yourselves to be the leader of this model in Latam.

The problem I see is that your successful trajectory only makes sense to me if you guys handle dozens of contracts for a single operator a time. Meaning having something like 500 companies with ten or more remote Latam employees each.

Now, as an agent you have extraordinarily little leverage for retention. You generate all the contracts and boilerplate, and handle payments. But once a business has set certain employee footprint in a region, what will prevent them from cutting you off?

The way I see it, your path to success looks like having hundreds of companies that just need an employee or two per country, but that sounds like an incredibly intense operational overhead. Maybe that's how you have been thinking about it and have ideas for addressing this at scale with technology, idk.

In general, it seems that there are two potential paths, but one will be harder than the other one. One with long-term relationships which means more recurring revenue and a more predictable financial horizon. The other one is with short-term relationships (short-lived contracts, low footprint, small labor) and that path is more convoluted and with a less clear trajectory towards profitability.

This is of course a problem that all the companies operating on this model need to figure out. Not only you.

The other problem I see is with a foundational thought of your business: "quality at a fraction of price compared to what they can get elsewhere."

I would thread lightly with that. It almost seems like you're saying: "feel free to exploit the already undervalued and underpaid talent of Latam. We will make it easier"... My concern is that you're setting up your brand to have the same reputation as companies like Cognizant, Infosys and TATA. Yes, you could be generating value for stakeholders but at the expense of facilitating the exploitation of Latam professionals.

I would hope that this model doesn't become an alternative to the H1-B fiasco that was pervasive in the US. As a US immigrant that had an H1-B visa I will always remember those companies as the worst type of companies because they exploited Indian tech workers for years to the detriment of other immigrants like me that had to compete for the same visas.

Not saying that's what you're doing, but words matter so I would re-evaluate how you talk about the value you bring.

P.S: Also, as a fellow Colombian and Technologist please know that I'm rooting for you. One word of advice regarding HN etiquette. Please don't have other team members commenting as random commenters. It looks disingenuous.

So we have Ontop for LATAM.

We have Manara (https://manara.tech) for MENA (Middle East and North Africa). It's backed by YC as well.

We have Andela (https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/23/connecting-african-softwar...) for Africa.

Honorable mentions: Pesto (https://pesto.tech/), Turing (https://turing.com/), Youteam (https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/23/youteam/).

Now I wonder whether I should make one but for South-East Asia (I live there)? :)

Funny that this didn't get much discussion than I thought this would. Would this mean that developers living in high-priced areas in North America would just need govt assistance since their salary would not be able to meet cost of living?

I'm curious about the trend of choosing .ai domains. Is this to signal state of the art technology is being used?

Which part does AI play in your infrastructure/service?

Thanks!

Most of these engineers take that option. They'll do "work experience" in their country of origin for a year or two, then head overseas. So most talent left in developing countries is usually not as good quality as what you'd find in developed countries that have attracted all the good engineers. Developing countries are known to have a big "brain drain" for in demand skills as they generally can't pay people well enough.