The partner
Niche Business Management Systems (BMS) designs a back-end software suite for insurance brokers, healthcare companies, and other specialty businesses.
Niche BMS is always evolving. Recently, the company expanded into Energy APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Acting as a bridge between applications and energy company servers, Niche BMS gathers information from US-based utilities and delivers the information to companies to help them save money on energy usage.
The problem: Timezone concerns
To keep pace with dynamic business needs, Niche BMS set out to expand its developer team. When the company transitioned to fully remote during the pandemic, Niche BMS decided to explore international candidates.
First, Niche BMS hired a Ukrainian dev through a contractor firm. Soon, however, the team ran into issues with the vast time zone difference.
"We decided to expand our search for developers to South America to avoid timezone problems," said Alex Ball, President and CTO at Niche BMS.
Seeking a unique hiring partner specializing in LatAm, Niche BMS discovered Howdy.
The Howdy solution: Eight expert devs
Howdy supplied Niche BMS with eight expert devs. The hiring platform helped the Niche BMS team through every step of the hiring journey, from sourcing to interviewing to onboarding.
The devs were experienced in working with a Python Django AWS stack, which was important to the team, according to Ball.
The results: A quality, made-from-scratch API
Working with the Niche BMS product team, Howdy engineers helped Niche BMS create an Energy API from scratch.
"Howdy devs were very important — nearly pivotal — in our most recent pivot to install our utility data API," Ball said. "They were able to understand not only what to build, but the 'how' and the 'why.'"
Howdy engineers took ownership of the project, Ball said.
"They took a proactive interest," Ball said. "They took the quality of code to heart, making an effort to ask questions and even push back to suggest doing things a different way."
