There’s an oft-quoted, frequently misattributed, and rarely heeded piece of advice that goes something like this:

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

Four years ago, we started our journey…

…but in the intervening time, we’ve only moved 0.8 miles.

From the attic of a grocery store, down the street to our current abode: the headquarters of Crew has only moved a couple of blocks. But our product?

That’s a different story.

Announcing Dream Crew

20 thousand projects submitted. $30M in contracts. Apple keynotes. Today Show appearances. Apps that have ballooned into tens-of-millions-of-users territory.

It’s a thousandfold difference from our first few steps, years ago, when we patched together a Mailchimp newsletter, Wufoo form creator, and a bunch of free Stripe trial accounts in order to process our first projects.

An App Store feature, Business Insider article viewed 3.3 million times, and Today Show feature for Companion — an app made on Crew. Just one of the many projects we’ve been working on lately.

Despite our humble beginnings, we’ve managed to assemble one of the most formidable design/development teams in the world, hailing from more than 30 countries — and having worked at every unicorn startup you can think of.

If Uber is the biggest “not a taxi company” company in the world, then Crew is the biggest “not a tech agency” agency around.

However, the supply-and-demand dynamics are a lot different for $11 cab rides vs. $11,000 dev/design projects (our average project size). Understandably, we spend a lot more time than Uber vetting our professionals.

…and our customers.

“I have $20. Will that get me from Philadelphia to Los Angeles?”

Most unicorn startups you hear about are lucky to have a single big app. Okay…. maybe two. But as a platform for making apps and websites, we can’t rest on our laurels when a customer manages to take their product from MVP to MTV. We have to be in production mode. Every day.

Not only do we screen every project proposal that comes in (we won’t build you Tinder for dogs no matter how much you pay us) but we also screen every single person who wants to work on Crew projects.

Reliability, skill, and friendliness are all prerequisites for getting approved to work on Crew projects. Luckily, we’ve found some of the best (and most fun-to-work-with!) people in the world to help build the app and website ideas submitted to Crew.

Our members are top coders, award-winning designers, and veterans of places like Dropbox, Facebook, Uber, Pitchfork, Apple, Twitter, Medium, Google, and yes — even Tinder. (The real Tinder).

So when it came time, earlier this year, to update Crew’s own app, the bar was set kinda high.

Crew members are awesome. Crew customers are awesome. And while the existing Crew app was good enough to get the job done, it was hardly the omfg-generating machine that we knew it could be. Just in time for summer, we’ve revamped everything.

Humbly, we call it Dream Crew.

New: Real Time Everything

Whether it’s for the bus, a doctor, or the bathroom at that bar, few things are less pleasant than having to wait.

And yet when people came to our site, looking to hire, that’s exactly what was happening.

We’ve since decommissioned our old email-dependent chat service, and (inspired by our friends at Slack) replaced it with real-time everything: real-time chat with our Happiness team, real-time chat with the collaborators on your project, and online/offline indicators so you can tell who’s awake, asleep, or AFK.

Since launching real-time chat, the time it’s taken to start a project has plummeted from 48 hours to less than fifteen minutes.

Of course, you can still correspond via email. But who would trade a Tesla for a horse cart?

New: Design

If you’re a designer on Crew, you’re probably the type of person who agonizes over the typography of street signs, blows blood vessels at misaligned wall art, and sheds tears at the phrase “font keming”.

We’ve updated our design to appease your (slightly worrisome) perfectionist habits. Behold, our new triple column layout: