Sure the latest initiatives from the Teslas, Apples and Googles of the industry tend to dominate the tech news space — and with good reason. Still, the tech titans aren’t the only ones bringing innovation to the sector.
In an effort to highlight up-and-coming startups, Built In has launched The Future 5 across 11 major U.S. tech hubs. Each quarter, we will feature five tech startups, nonprofits or entrepreneurs in each of these hubs who just might be working on the next big thing. You can check out last quarter’s Austin round-up here.
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Early in his career, Hunter Hodnett struggled with impostor syndrome. Although he graduated with a software engineering degree and landed an engineering job with The Home Depot, he never felt confident in his coding abilities.
Hodnett went on to work at Amazon Music and Reddit in San Francisco. After working with software engineers at big tech companies, though, Hodnett realized that his goal of becoming a “10x engineer,” someone who works 10 times faster than other engineers, was not realistic.
“I realized that we’re all just kind of faking it,” he said. “I decided to stop chasing this idea of engineering fame.”
While at Reddit, Hodnett started mentoring at a local coding bootcamp, where he enjoyed boosting student’s morale and helping them when they got stuck. Inspired by the joy of teaching, he went back to The Home Depot to teach at a coding bootcamp for the company’s employees.
While teaching, Hodnett said he realized there was a gap that needed to be bridged between graduating from a bootcamp and landing a software engineering job. At the same time, he said he was contracting with several early-stage startups that had massive workloads and slim budgets.
That’s how Hodnett came up with the idea for Cottage, a marketplace that breaks up a company’s software engineering projects into smaller jobs that can be completed by junior engineers. The first engineer to finish a job, or “competition,” wins a cash prize of at least $75.
Cottage’s startup clients use no-code tools to create a prototype of their project. Custom components that can’t be developed with no-code tools are parsed out into smaller Cottage competitions. The custom code generated by the winning engineer is then injected into the no-code tool using Cottage’s proprietary technology.
Austin-based Cottage has received a large amount of contract work, but because competitions have to be uploaded by the company, not all of it can be uploaded to the Cottage marketplace. Hodnett said he plans to create a self-sustaining platform in December that allows startups to upload their own prototypes or development work to be turned into Cottage competitions.
Because he is unable to post all of the competitions to the website, Hodnett said he often finds himself finishing client jobs, which he said is unsustainable.
To help finish client work, Hodnett hired two engineers on a contract basis, and he expects to hire another three engineers in the near future. These engineers previously participated in competitions on the Cottage platform. Hodnett said he is transparent with them about what clients are paying and what percentage he can offer to junior engineers. As these startups grow, he hopes his contracted team will be hired for full-time roles.
Hodnett is also in the process of creating public profile pages for contributors so they will have the ability to show off their coding abilities on a web portfolio.
