When Pickleheads closed its $2.5 million seed round last December, CEO and co-founder Max Ade knew what needed to happen next: scale the engineering team—quickly and efficiently.

Pickleheads has become the leading online platform for pickleball players, helping people find places to play, organize matches, and run round robins as the sport surges in popularity. For years, the company operated lean. But with fresh capital and strong momentum, Max needed to expand the engineering team from two people to around six.

“Once you model out your hiring budget, it becomes really obvious,” Max says. “To get the most from this round, we needed to tap into international talent pools.”

Max’s background running a talent marketplace gave him a clear view of the industry—and why typical hiring paths would create problems.

Recruiting agencies charged large one-time contingent fees, sometimes in the five-figure range. “If you’ve paid 15 grand and the person isn’t a fit a month later, you’re starting over,” Max explains.

Talent marketplaces, meanwhile, often carried steep ongoing markups. “Some platforms add 100% in some cases to these rates for South American talent,” he says. Before discovering VanHack, Pickleheads hired through one such marketplace and found themselves paying around $70 or $80 an hour while the engineer received only half. “And that’s just reoccurring forever.”

For a startup, those economics begin to rival U.S. engineering salaries—undermining the purpose of hiring internationally.

At the same time, building their own direct hiring pipeline in South America wasn’t realistic. “I don’t speak the language,” Max notes, adding that AI has also made it harder to vet candidates—even for English proficiency.

Pickleheads ultimately chose VanHack*, attracted by its flat-fee subscription model. Instead of paying per hire or absorbing large markups, the team gained access to a pre-vetted talent pool and could run their own process.

“We were thrilled to find a subscription model that let us tap into a marketplace without paying huge rates,” Max says. “It fully lets you take advantage of the difference in cost of living.”

Just as important, it allowed them to trial candidates directly—working together on a paid basis before committing longer term.

Pickleheads posted their roles and received a stream of recommended candidates from VanHack’s pool, with suggested matches refined based on their feedback. The company ran its own interviews with support from a fractional recruiter who temporarily acted as their internal talent lead.

Candidates who advanced completed a coding evaluation and additional interviews.

The company made three hires:
— Two full-stack engineers
— One QA test engineer

One full-stack engineer wasn’t the right long-term fit, but the other two hires have become core contributors. The QA engineer has taken ownership of writing tests and improving app stability—reducing the amount of manual QA Max was doing himself.

“He’s helping us improve the stability of the app by writing tests for everything,” Max says. “It’s taken a lot off my plate.”

For Max, the combination of a curated talent pool and a flat-fee pricing structure is rare—and highly effective.

“I think people are going to figure out this is the best possible model for recruiting,” he says. “I talked to a lot of companies and several recruiting firms. Nobody is offering this combination.”

He recommends it especially for startups and for larger companies that have someone internally who can run interviews.

“If you have that ability, this is by far the best model and the best solution I’ve seen,” Max says.

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*VanHack is a global tech-talent platform that combines AI matching with human expertise to help companies hire senior software engineers fast. Its talent pool of more than 500,000 vetted developers spans over 100 countries, enabling companies to hire internationally with local expertise guiding the process. Teams use Vanhack to shrink hiring cycles from months to weeks through AI-curated shortlists, human-led evaluation, and structured support across interviews, offers, and, when needed, relocation and visa processes.