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Find jobsIt blows my mind that people are still going to platforms like Fiverr when there’s something like Lemon.io. In sales, you’re supposed to tell the story of how the client will be transformed. The Lemon.io folks pulled me into the story and walked with me through the whole thing.
Pirch is an AI-powered curriculum builder that lets homeschool parents create custom, one-off curricula — personalized lessons, book lists, projects, writing prompts, quizzes, even field trip itineraries — tailored to their child in seconds.
Built by homeschoolers for homeschoolers, its edge is turning a child’s real interests into a usable weekly plan, so parents stop curriculum-hopping and homeschool with more confidence. Founder Raven Van Stratten saw the opportunity while using ChatGPT and set out to build a platform parents could design around their own child, but she couldn’t bring it to life without technical help.
The dev team she hired through Fiverr got the app live, yet after demoing it at a homeschool conference, she saw how clunky and buggy it was — nowhere near her vision.
Without a reliable team to fix it, and after cycling through several agencies, Pirch’s growth depended entirely on getting the platform rebuilt properly.
I feel so bad now that I asked so many questions about delivery and timeline, but it really felt like I was leaving an abusive relationship, and I wanted to be super sure about who I was hiring next. There was nothing Lemon didn’t have the right answer for.
When Raven searched Google, ChatGPT, and Gemini for a reliable dev team, Lemon.io kept surfacing no matter how she refined her queries. She put Lemon.io through the wringer with questions about delivery and timelines, and it had answers for all of them.
Rather than simply match on technical requirements, Lemon.io scheduled a video call to understand her work style and personality — a step Raven initially resisted, but that proved decisive. Lemon.io’s Head of Talent read her personality on that call and steered her toward Gabriel, an engineer she knew would be more patient and had startup experience, rather than the developer Raven she had first had in mind.
Because Raven had been burned before, paying a full month upfront felt like too big a leap, so Lemon.io structured payments week-by-week, broke the project into clear deliverables, and set up Friday check-ins with payment released after each reviewed phase.
That flexibility gave her the security the founder needed to move forward. And on budget, the outcome surprised her: Raven assumed she’d pay double, but got Gabriel for the same budget she’d paid Fiverr — this time for a product that actually worked.
Lemon.io offered this approach because it treats developer fit as a match of technical excellence and founder work style, backed by managed contracts, flexible billing, and active collaboration support.
Lemon’s Head of Talent got on, and we just got to chit-chat. Beyond figuring out the type of dev I needed to rebuild Pirch, she was reading my personality. That really helped because at first, I wanted a different developer, but she knew Gabriel would be more patient and had experience with startups. She understood what I needed on a deep level.
Where the platform had limped along for months with the Fiverr team, Gabriel, the dedicated developer hired from Lemon.io, delivered a clean, stable, ready-for-real-users rebuild in four weeks.
Raven didn’t arrive with scoped feature requests — just a list of what wasn’t right — so Gabriel reviewed everything, delivered the hard truth that the app needed rebuilding, and even drew out the tech stack she didn’t know she needed.
Knowing a backend-first roadmap might feel too abstract for a non-technical founder who’d been burned before, he sprinkled in frontend work so she could see visible progress; by week two, she was seeing real results, and by week four she fully trusted him.
The developer built Pirch so Raven could own it, designing an admin panel for no-code changes and documenting everything so thoroughly that she’s added features herself over the following 30 days using AI-assisted coding.
Even after the contract ended, Gabriel kept answering her emails for another four weeks, never leaving her on read.
The result is a working product the founder can grow on her own foundation, with a trusted engineer she plans to bring back for more complex work. She’s already referred another homeschool founder to Lemon.io and offered to reassure nervous prospective clients firsthand.
Looking back, I do think it increased his workload. But it made me feel so much more secure. By week two, I was like, 'Okay, wow, I'm seeing so much stuff,' and by week four, I was like, 'I would trust you with my child.'
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