How PodKeeper Built and Scaled a SaaS Product With a Nearshore Team as Their Only Engineering Department
The situation
Essentially, PodKeeper is a group collaboration platform — think shared calendars, messaging, and coordination tools — serving schools, scout troops, sports teams, and community organizations. However, as a lean startup without in-house engineering resources, they needed a trusted development partner who could function as their entire engineering team. Specifically, this meant owning the product technically, making architecture decisions, and continuously improving the platform as the user base grew.
The challenge
For an early-stage SaaS company without a CTO or internal developers, the risk of an engineering partnership going wrong is essentially existential. Therefore, PodKeeper needed a team they could trust to manage all technology decisions, handle scaling and DevOps, and iterate on UX and backend performance. Above all, this meant working without requiring constant supervision or direction. In short, they needed a partner who would think ahead, not just execute tickets.
What Kambda did
Ultimately, Kambda became PodKeeper’s dedicated engineering department. Over eight years, for example, the team handled continuous frontend UX improvements, backend performance and reliability work, infrastructure scaling, and DevOps operations. Moreover, when scope or requirements were ambiguous, engineers sought clarification before building. In addition, they frequently proposed alternative approaches that improved on the original requirements. As a result, communication remained direct and consistent through virtual meetings and messaging tools.
“Kambda continues to be an excellent partner. All the people at Kambda are excellent at communicating with us, which is a key differentiator from other software development companies we have experienced. When there is ambiguity, they seek to clarify before building, and will make alternative suggestions to the requirements, which adds value.”
Frontend UX/UI
Backend Development
DevOps
AWS Scaling
Application Management