AirPair

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AirPair is a service and eponymous company that connects people who need help with programming issues (usually, programmers at small technology companies or at finance companies that use technology products) and people who can help them. Unlike services such as oDesk and Elance, AirPair is not a service for outsourcing programming tasks, but rather a service that facilitates one-off knowledge transfers from people with highly specialized knowledge of particular technology stacks or programming issues to people who are in need of specialized help. [1]

Contents

History

AirPair launched in March 2013, with founder Jonathon Kresner, who hails from Australia, working full-time, and it soon hired three other part-time developers to work alongside him. [1] [2] Kresner had previously founded two other startups: Preparty, a social invitation and event-booking service based in Australia, and ClimbFind, an online rock-climbing community that reached a million users. Kresner was inspired to work on AirPair because he saw the need for outside expert assistance with programming issues arise regularly at these startups. [1]

In November 2013, founder Kresner describes the company's initial success at bootstrapping itself to "Ramen profitability" in a blog post. [3] In December 2013, AirPair was accepted into the Winter 2014 Y Combinator batch. [4] [5]

In March 2014, AirPair announced it would launch partnerships with Stripe, Twilio, and other companies that had their own application programming interfaces, allowing developers having trouble with the APIs to seek help over AirPair from experts on the APIs. [6] [7]

AirPair presented at the Y Combinator Winter 2014 Demo Day on March 25, 2014, [8] and successfully raised over $1 million within the next 48 hours. [9]

Reception

A review of AirPair by Will Lam stressed that because payment was based on time rather than results, it was important to use it for clearly thought-out questions where one had high confidence that the session would help. [10]

Dennis Beatty, who met AirPair founder Jonathon Kresner in March 2014, wrote in April 2014 a glowing review of AirPair's vision of connecting people and its business success. [11]

AirPair has been compared with other peer-to-peer coding help sites such as Codementor and HackHands. [12]

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Miner, Zach (May 2, 2013). "Airpair plays digital matchmaker between startups, developer experts" . Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  2. ↑ Perez, Sarah (March 4, 2013). "Airpair Connects Startups With Expert Developers To Get Help With Code Via Online Sessions". TechCrunch . Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  3. ↑ Kresner, Jonathon (November 19, 2013). "How We Bootstrapped AirPair to Ramen Profitability". Archived from the original on March 4, 2015. Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  4. ↑ Bailey, Michael (December 2, 2013). "Aussie entrepreneur's AirPair accepted into Y Combinator". Financial Review (Australia). Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  5. ↑ Kumparak, Greg (February 4, 2014). "Trouble With Your Code? AirPair Connects You Live With Expert Programmers" . Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  6. ↑ Ha, Anthony (March 3, 2014). "AirPair Expands Its Live Programming Assistance By Partnering With Stripe, Twilio, And Others". TechCrunch . Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  7. ↑ "AirPair's network of pay-per-hour API experts want to make your next integration a doddle". The Next Web. March 3, 2014. Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  8. ↑ Lawler, Ryan; Wilhelm, Alex; Constine, Josh (March 25, 2014). "Y Combinator Winter 2014, Batch 1: Meet CareMessage, Boostable, BatteryOS, And More". TechCrunch . Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  9. ↑ Bailey, Michael (April 10, 2014). "Aussie's AirPair raises $1m-plus after Y Combinator demo day, including from Quora co-founder". Business Review Weekly . Archived from the original on January 7, 2015. Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  10. ↑ Lam, Will (February 10, 2014). "Review of Airpair: First impressions from a Rails newbie". Quantifire. Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  11. ↑ Beatty, Dennis (April 5, 2014). "What I Learned From AirPair Founder Jonathon Kresner While in San Francisco. The journey of a thousand miles continues with one more step". Archived from the original on December 31, 2014. Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  12. ↑ Shu, Catherine (March 24, 2014). "One-On-One Programming Help Site Codementor Raises $600,000" . Retrieved January 16, 2015.
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