Conversation With Andy Singleton, Assembla President

Assembla is easiest to describe as a project management service. They have an interesting blog which combines product announcements with other important industry conversation similar to how AdaptiveBlue’s blog combines product announcements with semantic web discussion.

Assembla is based in Boston, has 10 team members with 6 full-time and has raised $400k in founder funding and one angel investor since they began. To learn more about the company, I spoke with President Andy Singleton. Andy believes their tools are "great" in terms of form and function. 

The workspace product has several thousand current customers with most using the free version. Workspaces can be set as public or private (sample workspace) and have a full set of project management tools included. One of the features they recently added is basically a clone of ConceptShare, one of our favorite tools around these parts. When they spoke with their customers, they found that many were using ConceptShare (or similar tools) and built the functionality into Assembla to help keep the customer on-site.

Their policy on free vs. paid is similar to Zoho in that all small team features are free and they are charging a fee for larger features and for larger companies.

The other piece of Assembla service is the staffing side. Andy is quick to note that while most of their talent is offshore, it’s not the same as oDesk, but more like an outsourcing company but with lower fees and higher productivity. You can read about my opinion on oDesk. Here’s a blog post from Andy on why offshoring is dead.

They are working on very large projects of the $100k scale and are looking to build longlasting teams. They use a trial method by using a small project to begin with rather than using monitoring as oDesk does. Assembla can also help you qualify employees for a small fee and they also manage distributed teams across the world. So far they have 600 practitioners have signed up to be included in the talent directory.