We had the pleasure to meet Claus Geissendoerfer at our last “Tales from the Trenches” dinner, on how to find the right tech for your team. We wanted to find out more about his startup.

What’s the elevator pitch for your startup?

Prehash is a hiring portal that enables companies to raise their profile in the tech community and attract more developers by hosting interesting yet challenging coding puzzles. Developers have the option to showcase their true engineering skills.  

What were you doing before you launched your startup?

I worked on several other startups over the last few years. Before that I was a management and IT consultant at Capgemini in the US and Germany.

Where did you meet your co-founder?

Met him through a common friend.

What’s your biggest ‘hindsight’ moment?

Realising the power of exposing databases and APIs through our web based coding editor.

What will 2014 bring?

I think we are very close to finding our product/market fit. After that it’s time to grow!

1 piece of advice for someone starting a business in the sector?

Experiment and prototype as much as possible. Quick and dirty and running experiments is more important than building a solid tech architecture at the early stage.

When you do CustDev interviews the ‘customer’ should in average speak 60% of the time or more. If not you are not doing CustDev but selling your solution.

Convince someone to use your product/service in under 50 words.

Hire developers by letting them showcase their true coding skills as opposed to how well they can craft a CV

What’s your favourite startup in the sector (not including your own)?

hired.com

What’s your favourite London restaurant?

Yalla Yalla

Thanks Claus! We hope to see you at the dinner table again soon.

Go here to see our new tables.