We get potential candidates who are perfectly aligned with what we’re looking for, every time.
- Developers hired
- 4
- Years of partnership
- 3
Little Spoon is a D2C subscription brand that helps busy parents fuel their kids’ healthy development. The company has incredibly high standards for every food product they ship. In fact, Little Spoon is the first and only baby food in the US to set strict limits for 500+ toxins and contaminants – and no product is sold unless it passes rigorous testing.
Besides offering the highest quality meals and snacks for kids, the company also produces best-in-class content, with “Is This Normal?”, a newsletter and blog where parents submit their questions around anything from fertility to picky eating to vacationing with kids, and doctors, dietitians, and other professionals weigh in with support.
As the leading end-to-end platform to support modern parents, the engineering team at Little Spoon has a big responsibility: building and maintaining the infrastructure that enables a seamless learning, ordering, checkout, billing, and delivery experience. And whenever they need an extra hand, they reach out to Lemon.
Whenever it becomes clear we need a new resource, I say, ‘I got a guy,’ and then immediately send the JD over to Lemon to see who they’ve got in mind. We get back potential candidates who are perfectly aligned with what we’re looking for, every time. Eric Garside, VP of Engineering at Little Spoon
A hiring partner Little Spoon could count on
When Eric joined Little Spoon, the eng team had already been supplementing their full-time roster with several freelancers – including folks from Lemon. Before he started doling out new tasks, he wanted to get a lay of the land, to understand what roles each of these contractors was playing, and whether he could rely on their work for the long haul.
So he surveyed the team.
Lemon was super accommodating about taking those devs off the Lemon payroll and having us hire them full time, so it was a win-win-win. We hired four devs rapid fire, Lemon got compensated, and the engineers joined a stellar team.
The contractor-to-hire engineers continued to do great work, so Eric continued to keep Lemon top of mind, forming a closer relationship with the staff there.
Why Lemon is now Eric’s first call
Soon after he hired those four devs, Eric started leaning on Lemon as his go-to for staff augmentation. Whenever he and his team started to feel overwhelmed, he would reach out to the Lemon team, knowing he’d get production-ready talent. Here are four reasons why working with Lemon, according to him, “just works”:
1. It’s always a smooth process
One thing Eric likes is how straightforward the Lemon process is. If he, say, wants a QA engineer (his most recent Lemon hire), he:
- Writes a job description
- Hands it over to Lemon
- Receives a few relevant resumes
- Interviews the candidates he likes
The resumes we get back are totally aligned with our mission and what we’re trying to achieve. Maybe one of those resources isn’t available anymore, so we chat with the other engineers and hire one of them. That’s basically the roadmap.
Partly, that’s because the communication between Little Spoon and Lemon is so clear. Eric knows what he wants, asks for it, and gets it.
I've literally had no issues, and that makes them my favorite vendor, full stop,” he says. “If I have a problem, Lemon solves it, and they don’t create any new problems in the process.
2. It mitigates risk
Hiring software engineers, especially at a fast-moving startup like Little Spoon, can be an expensive risk. Hire the wrong person, and you may not end up knowing it until a few months in – and then you’ll have to start the recruitment, screening, and interview process all over again.
But with a partner like Lemon, Eric can hire someone part-time to explore a long-term working relationship. After a few months, he considers whether:
- The engineer could be a full-time hire → he invites them on full-time, pays Lemon a commission fee, and saves a ton of time and money on onboarding costs – the engineer already knows and understands the codebase.
- The need for the engineer is actually only temporary → he pays on a month-to-month contract and releases them back to Lemon when they’re done so they can work on other projects.
“I have an unwavering trust in Lemon,” Eric highlights.
Now, every time I need a dev, I reach out to Lemon and ask them for some CVs. I believe we have a 100% hit rate. Every time I've asked for a role, they’ve given me resumes, we’ve reviewed them, we’ve hired somebody from them.
The only exception to that 100% hit rate was a DevOps role that Eric originally reached out to Lemon for, but didn’t end up needing – he promoted someone internally.
“I’ve never had this experience before as a leader. I wish I knew Lemon’s secret sauce!”
3. It opens the door to all kinds of talent
Eric is one of those leaders who wants to see things get done on a weekly cycle – he doesn’t care when. Tapping into non-US talent has helped him see things get done literally overnight (and gives devs the flexibility to complete their work at times when they’re most productive).
With Lemon, we have access to engineers all over the globe. And because we’re using a modern language (JavaScript), using modern tech with modern people, it’s been pretty easy to find people who are in that sphere. As long as they can hand off and exchange the information that we need to keep the machines running, I don’t care when they work or where they work from.
Lemon’s been able to find full-stack, QA, and other engineering professionals, not only with D2C-specific experience, but experience in more granular areas like payment processing and complex ordering structures.
We’ve used Lemon to find people who can do the whole gamut of development work, from updating our homegrown ordering system to managing Stripe and other integrations. These engineers have to be able to understand a variety of internal logic and business logic, and that seems like the sweet spot Lemon recruits for.
4. It’s a fair price
Eric hadn’t had great experiences with staff placement agencies in the past, so his expectations were low when he first heard Little Spoon was using Lemon.
But for the level of quality talent Eric is getting, price has never crossed his mind in the three years he’s been working closely with Lemon.
From using people for several-month contracts to converting them into full-time hires, I feel I’m only paying for overhead with Lemon. They’re a class above. Literally, my first thought whenever a colleague at Little Spoon needs a new hire is to contact Lemon. I wish they had a pipeline for product talent, too. It’d be a dream to build an entire technical org with Lemon.
Not just a vendor, part of the team
Part of the reason Eric trusts Lemon so much is that they’ve taken the time to grasp the nuances in Little Spoon’s culture and the unique needs of their engineering team. Saving specific filters, learning from candidates that were passed on, and listening closely to Eric’s requirements have helped them present the best possible candidates, again and again.
That kind of deep relationship makes hiring a fun exercise instead of a tedious and stressful one. As Eric puts it:
The Lemon story, from my perspective, is one of great success. It’s to the point where I’m like, ‘Everybody else kind of sucks and Lemon’s great.’ I’m a Lemon man now. I’d be dead in the water with them.
Eric is confident that as Little Spoon keeps on delivering a top-notch service to their customers, they’ll need more and more top-notch talent, and Lemon will be his first call. We’re proud to find the right devs for companies like Little Spoon that are making a big impact in the lives of kids and adults alike.
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98% satisfaction rate
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Case studies More case studies
Fitness
For non-technical founder engineering is a black box. I’ve learned how important it is to have someone in my corner who can really be a partner to me. Lemon has really shown up. They weren’t just a matching tool. They really understood what I was looking for and found me someone I could trust.
Marketplace
The main thing was I wanted someone that I could trust because I have no developing experience. With my Lemon developer, I very quickly realized he was someone that I could have a lot of confidence in.
Software
Lemon devs implemented core functionality for our products like advanced analytics features, complex distributed systems, optimizations, maintaining infrastructure, documentation, refactorings – basically every aspect of engineering and product activities.
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Top-notch developers within 48 hours, hand-picked for your team.
