CASE STUDY · LOGISTICS SOFTWARE
IMPARGO: a core team of five remote developers – in under two weeks and at around 50% lower cost
IMPARGO digitizes transport logistics for freight forwarders and manufacturers. To ship new product features, the Berlin startup needed more development capacity fast – without blowing its budget.
- < 2 weeksto a working core team
- ≈ 50%lower annual cost per developer
- 18.5 monthsrunway instead of 8 months
- 5full-time remote developers
The challenge
IMPARGO was founded in 2017 by Gerhard Hänel and Julian Labeit to digitize transport logistics for industrial and transport companies. Its software makes dispatchers and transport managers more efficient and automates the process from incoming order to proof of delivery.
A tech team in Berlin was working on the early versions of the product. New features needed more capacity and expertise – but the budget didn’t allow a big increase. Through recruitment agencies, every hire cost €15,000 to €18,000 in placement fees alone, and filling a role took weeks.
Our solution
Remoteplatz first provided three vetted backend developers who worked remotely alongside the Berlin team. This grew into a permanent core team of five full-time developers.
The team worked within IMPARGO’s own processes – sprint planning, retrospectives, daily check-ins – with clear rules for data protection and information security, supported by Remoteplatz’s GDPR guide.
The result
The core team was in place in less than two weeks. New features reached the market faster, the annual cost per developer dropped by around half – and the company’s runway grew from 8 to 18.5 months.
RemotePlatz was an existential part of Impargo’s success. It was only within 2 weeks that we had a fully motivated core team working on our logistics SaaS platform.
Gerhard HänelFounder of IMPARGO
Traditional hiring or Remoteplatz? Per developer and year
| Traditional hiring | Remoteplatz | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to fill | approx. 40 days + notice period | approx. 2 weeks + notice period |
| Salary | approx. €53,000 | approx. €30,000 (all-inclusive) |
| Equipment & office | approx. €4,200 – €6,600 | included |
| Company runway | 8 months | 18.5 months |
Figures from IMPARGO at the time of the collaboration, based on an average annual salary of €53,000.
What made it work
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Management
Output over hours: weekly sprint planning, retrospectives, daily check-ins and monthly feedback sessions.
-
Communication
Over-communicate: daily syncs, the whole team involved in decisions – and everything important documented.
-
Data protection
Device and email encryption, remote device locating and regular security checks – GDPR-compliant from day one.
-
Team culture
Make shared goals transparent and build closeness – for example with a team retreat in El Gouna, Egypt.
We used to work with recruitment agencies to hire developers, which used to cost us between EUR 15K - EUR 18K per developer as recruitment fees only. Not to mention the long time we had to wait until the developer is hired. We found that the longer we wait, the more cost we had. So, going remote sounded like the perfect option to reduce expenses and the time to hire. At first we hired 3 backend developers with which we could decrease our yearly cost tremendously compared to local hiring.
Julian LabeitCo-founder & CTO of IMPARGO
Tools in use: Jira, Trello and Asana for tasks · Slack, Google Meet and Zoom for communication · Google Drive for documents · FileVault, FlowCrypt and 1Password for data security.
Source: Remoteplatz case study “How IMPARGO hired its core team of 5 developers at 50% less cost”; figures as provided by IMPARGO.
