Expanding the flock - Dawn Parzych joins Shorebird
Introduction
Hi, I’m Dawn and I’ve joined Shorebird to lead our marketing efforts and help raise awareness around the world of what Shorebird can do. My career has spanned many roles, but a common theme has been storytelling and teaching. I spent the first two years of my career teaching and that passion has not left me. While my titles may have the word “marketing” in them, I see the role as being more about teaching. In the developer tools space, I see marketing as being about authenticity and creating educational and engaging content to help developers be more successful.
What I was looking for
I love the challenge of building something new and working on new and emerging products. I am very used to going to an event and having people ask “What is it that your company does?” Seeing momentum grow over time as awareness increases was high on my list of priorities. This likely meant going to a seed-stage or early stage start-up. I wanted a place where I could help define a category and raise awareness.
I was looking for a place where I could solve real problems with excellent people. The word “culture” is thrown around a lot; for me it’s about having the space to be creative, to collaborate, and to support one another. That support may mean celebrating successes but it also means being able to say no. I found that in Shorebird. Through the interview process with the team, the interviews felt like conversations, and those conversations felt too short.
Why Shorebird
As I spoke with the team and learned more about the company, I became increasingly convinced about their potential to improve the mobile development experience. Although I’ve not previously worked with Flutter or on mobile application development, the problems they are addressing were familiar to me.
- How to prevent duplicating work.
- How to move faster without breaking things for users.
- The struggle with being forced into a specific ecosystem and not having the flexibility to choose the tools that are right for you.
I’ve been watching what Expo has done for React developers providing a suite of services to help them build faster and I believe Shorebird has the potential to do that for Flutter.
The fact that Shorebird builds openly in public and spends time with the community was a huge selling point for me. Connecting with users and customers is one of my favorite things to do. Being able to quickly hear where they’re encountering friction or celebrate something they’ve built is motivating.
Having a clean slate to experiment with and build something as employee #5 presents a unique set of challenges and experiences. I’m eager to dive into what’s next.
What’s next
I’m in full learning mode talking to customers, meeting the team, and exploring what’s been done. The main priority is to put plans in motion to get more Flutter developers aware of who Shorebird is and how we can help. Part of that includes tackling the common struggle of effectively measuring awareness and attribution.
A lot of marketing is about metrics, and attribution. But sadly a lot of metrics are vanity metrics and don’t always show the whole picture. And when the focus is on awareness, how do you measure whether somebody knows you exist? A purchasing decision doesn’t come after a single touch point. Think about a recent purchase you made. How much research did you do? Who did you talk to before purchasing? Did you have a brand in mind before purchasing? Did you ultimately purchase from one of those or from somebody else? Most people do research before making a purchase and it typically takes multiple touch points, especially for larger purchases.
Over the coming weeks I’ll be looking to answer the question of what we need to do to make more people aware of Shorebird and how to measure that awareness. A huge part of that means talking to people in the Flutter community - developers, vendors, and content creators. If you’re open to having a conversation about what you’re building with Flutter (whether you use Shorebird or not), I would love to connect.