Thomas will tell you the product was never the problem.
He had obsessed over it for two years. He knew every edge case, every competitor weakness, every reason a customer would choose him over the alternative. When the funding came through, he felt ready for the first time in a long time. What he was not ready for — what nobody had warned him about in the way it actually needed to be said — was that building the thing you have been imagining requires people, and people, it turns out, are harder to find than product-market fit.
The role sat open for four months. He interviewed. He rejected. He got rejected back. He watched the third candidate he genuinely wanted sign somewhere else while he was still in internal deliberations about the offer. His team, which had been stretching to cover the gap, was starting to show the strain. Not in the work yet, but in the way people talked in standups. In the things that didn't get said.
Eventually someone on his team asked the question Thomas had been avoiding: are we looking in the right place?
Europe has a shortage of developers. It has an abundance of companies looking for them in exactly the same place.
It is a deceptively simple question and it is the one most European founders never ask, at least not until something has already gone wrong.
57% of European companies cannot find qualified tech staff. More than half. That number includes everyone from the bootstrapped two-person operation in Lisbon to the Series B company in Stockholm wondering why its engineering headcount is still wrong nine months after budget approval. There are over 500,000 unfilled tech roles across European countries right now, carrying a projected cost of more than €750 billion in missed economic output.
Germany's numbers read like something someone made up to illustrate a point. 124,000 unfilled tech positions today. A skilled worker shortage projected at seven million by 2035. France is heading for 1.5 million by 2030. Sweden needs 70,000 more specialists just to hold what it has. And across all of it, the same instinct keeps surfacing in boardrooms and budget conversations like it is the only logical response to a problem that is clearly more complex than it:
Pay more.
Raising the salary band is not a strategy. It is a bidding war nobody wins.
To be fair, it is not a stupid instinct. For a while, it worked. The talent was local, the market was moving, and a better offer was usually enough to tip a decision.
That era is over and the market has not fully processed it yet.
A senior engineer in Germany or the Netherlands can cost a startup more than €10,000 a month when everything is factored in. A €65,000 salary in Germany becomes over €81,000 in real employer cost before recruiting fees enter the conversation. Companies keep raising offers. They keep losing candidates to whoever can simply go higher. And the developers who have options — the ones actually worth the number on the offer letter — know exactly what kind of leverage they hold right now.
The friction is not really that talent doesn't exist. It's that expectations have stopped lining up. Companies want more from fewer people. Candidates are cautious in a way they weren't three years ago. The whole dynamic of the market has shifted and most hiring processes are still running on 2021 assumptions.
A recent survey of 30 tech leaders found not one who described the current environment as easy. Over 90% called it difficult. The most candid ones described it as a trap — vacancies create overwork, overwork creates burnout, burnout creates more vacancies, and there is never enough breathing room to actually fix the pipeline because you are always managing the consequences of it being broken.
The trap is real. But the reason most founders stay stuck in it is not that it is inescapable. It is that the way out requires questioning an assumption so embedded it barely feels like an assumption at all.
The talent exists. The problem is where you've agreed, without realising it, to stop looking.
Thomas's team member asked if they were looking in the right place.
Thomas did not have a good answer. He had been looking in the same places everyone else looked — the same job boards, the same recruiters, the same radius. He had been competing for the same pool of candidates in the same city as every other funded startup with a backend role to fill. He had been paying more each round for access to a pool that was not getting any bigger.
What changed was almost accidental. Someone in his network mentioned a platform that sourced engineers from Africa — not as a cost play, not as outsourcing, but as a genuine route to assessed, verified technical talent that was not already being pulled in seventeen directions by competing offers. Thomas was sceptical in the way anyone is sceptical of something that sounds too clean. He tried it anyway, partly out of options running low.
The engineer he hired was based in Accra. Backend experience, strong fundamentals, had worked inside a distributed team before and understood what that actually meant in practice. The timezone was closer to Munich than Thomas expected — West Africa runs within a couple of hours of Central European Time, which meant standups worked, reviews worked, the kind of back-and-forth that remote collaboration actually depends on worked. The cost was meaningfully below what he had budgeted for a local hire. The first sprint together removed whatever residual doubt remained.
He will tell you now, a year later, that the question his team member asked that afternoon was the most useful thing anyone said to him in 2025.
While European founders debated the shortage, a continent was busy producing the answer.
The thing that stops most European founders from getting to that question sooner is a mental model that feels so reasonable it goes unexamined. That the talent market is local. That the right person is somewhere in their city, or at least their country, and the problem is just that finding them takes time and money. That looking elsewhere is a compromise — the thing you do when the real option isn't available.
Africa is producing one of the fastest-growing pools of digital talent in the world. A young, increasingly educated, remote-native workforce that has quietly moved past the point where "emerging" is the right word for it. Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Cape Town, Kampala — these are not places where you find cheaper versions of the thing you wanted. They are places where you find the thing you wanted, assessed properly, available, and not currently being counterbid by six other companies in your industry.
The timezone works. The English works. The experience of working within European product teams, for many engineers across these cities, is not new — it is already part of their professional history.
What was genuinely missing for a long time was the infrastructure layer — the ability to find this talent efficiently, verify it rigorously, and build working relationships across borders that do not require you to become an expert in international employment law before you can make a hire. That infrastructure now exists. The founders who found it early stopped talking about the developer shortage entirely because they stopped experiencing it the same way.
ProDevs is part of that infrastructure — built specifically around the idea that the match is only as good as the verification underneath it. Assessed capability, not claimed experience. Evidence of what someone can actually do in conditions that resemble real work, rather than a profile that reflects what they have been coached to present. It is the difference between hiring with confidence and hiring with hope, and for a founder three months into a bad hire with no easy exit, that difference is not abstract.
The founders who cracked this did not find a better candidate. They asked a better question.
The companies that have genuinely solved this — not managed it, not worked around it, solved it — made one shift in how they think about the problem.
They stopped treating global hiring as the fallback. The thing you try when local hiring fails. They made it the starting point — not because it is cheaper, not because they ran out of other ideas, but because they looked honestly at where the best available talent for what they needed actually was, and the answer wasn't exclusively in the city where their office happened to be.
The average time to fill a technical role in Europe is 66 days. For a startup with a runway and a roadmap and investors watching both, 66 days is not a statistic. It is a cost. The founders cutting that number are not doing it by working harder at the same approach. They are running a different process with a different pool and making decisions in days rather than weeks.
EU-based companies report labour shortages at almost 30% higher rates than their counterparts in North America and Asia. The companies elsewhere not experiencing the same rate of shortage are not in easier markets. They are in markets that normalised global, distributed hiring earlier — and are now competing for talent that most European startups have not yet thought to look for.
That gap closes slowly, then fast. The founders who move now are competing against companies that haven't moved yet. That window does not stay open indefinitely.
Thomas shipped six weeks after making the hire in Accra.
Two more engineers joined through the same pipeline over the following months. His burn is lower than it would have been. His roadmap is moving. And the Monday morning conversation he and his co-founder used to have — the one about the open role and the slipping timeline and the plan that kept not quite coming together — is a conversation they no longer need to have.
He will also tell you, if you ask him, that the thing he regrets is not taking the question seriously sooner.
Are you looking in the right place?
It is worth sitting with that for longer than feels comfortable.
