How US Polling App Anketa Saved $200K on 2 Engineering Hires

Company Background

Anketa is a social intelligence research platform based in Atlanta, Georgia, led by CEO Kush Akotia. Anyone can create a poll or survey in about 60 seconds, on social, political, environmental or cultural questions, and share it locally or globally. Results update in real time and are recorded on the blockchain, so vote counts can be checked rather than taken on trust.

The product is built around what it calls privacy-by-choice voting, which keeps an answer separate from the identity of the person who gave it. It supports more than ten poll formats with images, video and article comparisons, adds messaging and community channels, and rewards active contributors with streaks, badges and tokens. Anketa runs on the web, iOS and Android.

The company launched its MVP in late October 2025, aimed first at creators, community leaders and campus organizations, with researchers, analysts, journalists and brands as the longer-term audience. Its roadmap includes wallet integrations, a move onto the Base blockchain network and a research intelligence product for business customers.

Challenges Faced

1. A live product on three platforms with a small core team

Launching on web, iOS and Android at once means every feature ships three times and every bug can surface in three places. With the MVP in users' hands, Anketa needed engineers who could own whole features end to end, not specialists who would each need a separate hand-off.

2. A backend that has to be trusted, not just fast

A polling platform lives or dies on the credibility of its counts. Anketa's ASP.NET Core backend handles real-time results, identity separation for private votes and the link to on-chain records. That is senior work: a mistake here does not just slow the app down, it undermines the reason the product exists.

3. Hiring speed and burn rate after launch

The weeks after a launch are when a startup learns the most and has the least time to spare. A drawn-out search for two senior engineers would have stalled the roadmap at exactly the wrong moment, and paying US senior salaries for both roles would have taken a large bite out of an early-stage budget.

Solutions Delivered by Second Talent

Second Talent opened the first brief, a full-stack web engineer, in November 2025, within a month of the MVP launch, and the second, a senior backend engineer for ASP.NET Core, in December. Both searches drew on Second Talent's pool of pre-vetted engineers from Asia, so Anketa reviewed a short list of screened candidates instead of running an open job ad.

Each shortlist was matched to the stack Anketa already runs. For the web role, that meant engineers who could work across the front end and the API and ship features without a hand-off. For the backend role, it meant senior ASP.NET Core experience with real-time data and a track record of building systems that other teams depend on.

Both roles reached an accepted offer with an average time to hire of 24 days, short enough that the founding team kept shipping while the searches ran. Teams with the same need can hire full-stack developers or hire .NET developers through the same pipeline.

Results Achieved

The headline result is cost. By hiring both senior engineers through Second Talent, Anketa saved $200,000 in hiring costs, money that stays pointed at product and growth in the period when a young platform needs both most.

Speed was the second result. At an average of 24 days from open brief to accepted offer, both roles were filled inside a month on average, and the engineering team was in place while the product was still finding its first audience.

The two hires cover the two layers the product depends on: the web experience users see and the backend that makes the results trustworthy. That gives Anketa senior ownership of both, ahead of the wallet, blockchain network and business product work on its roadmap.

Team Composition