Last wednesday we had the pleasure to visit Tiendeo & Letgo offices. It wasn’t your typical sightseeing tour, it was a “technical tour” guided by the companies’s CTOs. We were a group of software developers living in Barcelona interested in discovering the backoffice behind these tech companies and, who knows, maybe even join them in the near future.
Meetup participants of Find a Tech Job in Barcelona.
First we stepped in Tiendeo a startup with some history already. To sum it up: It is leader in the mobile and web catalogue spanish market, present in 36 countries, with a team of 80 permanent people and 235 between freelancers and collaborators, and 17 million uniques per month…quite a feat!
Second we visited Letgo, a startup that just raised $100 million dolars to conquer the US market. Its product? a pure mobile geolocalized second hand marketplace, something very similar to Wallapop, who already dominates the spanish market.
Curiously enough, Letgo and Tiendeo are neighbours, their offices are in the same building, the historical Palau de Mar (Palace of the Sea), a place on its way to become a new startup hub for the city. Thanks to this we could visit both startups and get this precious insight for the developers that accompained us.
Tiendeo has had a longer path than Letgo, it was born in 2011 whereas Letgo has been founded in 2015. However, their growth pace has been totally different.
Tiendeo has experienced big growth from day one, but gradual and organic (in 4 years it has received “just” $1 million in funding), It has reached black numbers a long time ago, its systems carry no less than 17 million uniques per month – half of them through the app – and they count 20 people on its technical department. Tiendeo has been built on .NET, a framework not much used in startups nowadays but that, acording to Tiendeo’s CTO Jordi Mas, it’s been performing at a good level.
Nevertheless the challenges facing Tiendeo are many but much different from those of Letgo, a startup following the route of explosive growth through brute force.
Letgo is an 8 months old startup that within this short period of time has gathered a technical team of 30 people and plans to increase it to 40. The app is built on PHP, internal chats are supported by Scala, and everything is hosted on SOLR servers, of which they use 20 at this time. (more info post)
Both Tiendeo and Letgo seem great palces to work with good ambiance (despite that, we have to recognize, it was a bit late and there was’nt much movement at that time) and both projects seem to be going in the right direction, with good perspectives af achieving big things. Will Tiendeo overcome Bonial 1st position in the catalogue market? Is Letgo going to win the battle against Wallapop and OfferUp for US and World dominance? These will be interesting battles to follow in the near future.
If you are interested on getting and insider look into tech companies from a technical point of view, join our meetup group.
If you feel like joining Letgo chek its open positions here
If you would like to work at Tiendeo instead look here