We’re hiring
Shorebird is a small, venture-funded startup (est Jan 2023) trying to make Flutter the default way to write apps. So far we’ve built and shipped Code Push for Flutter to let businesses over the air update their apps instantly on users phones.
Having worked at both large and small companies, I can tell you, startups feel very different from big companies and big teams.
Working at a startup means:
App development is broken. The default answer to “write an app” is write it once for iOS, once for Android, and once for the web (possibly more places). Businesses write the same app at least twice at 2x the necessary costs, with redundant code-bases, teams, bug lists.
This is bonkers. Not only is bad for businesses (lots of waste) and developers (headaches in re-implementation and coordination), but also users (why can’t my friend install your app because their phone has a different brand or why does it run so much better/worse than my copy of the app?). We’re wasting countless years of human life on this problem, for bad reasons.
I (and many others) tried to make the Web (PWAs, etc) solve “write once; run anywhere” a decade ago and failed. Hence we built Flutter to let Google and everyone write high-quality app experiences and have them go everywhere.
Flutter is now the most popular solution for writing multi-platform apps. Over a million developers use Flutter every month, and growing. Flutter has proven that high-quality multi-platform is possible.
However, still most apps don’t use Flutter. And even some that do, sometimes struggle. Adopting Flutter can be challenging since the default offerings from Google are sometimes an ill fit or incomplete for those operating outside Google.
The Flutter project itself is also sometimes a funny fit inside Google (the home of Android, Ads and Chrome) and long term would benefit from an economic entity wholly aligned with Flutter’s goals (not just trying to use it to sell Ads or Cloud).
All these problems are why, after taking Flutter as far as I could within Google, I left to build a company around Flutter: Shorebird.
Shorebird is filling in the gaps businesses need to be successful with Flutter development. Just like how businesses “buy” Linux with Redhat, most businesses will chose to buy Flutter solutions from Shorebird rather than cobbling together Flutter solutions themselves. That means we’ll offer a suite of products to ensure you have a GREAT experience delivering apps to your users. The first problem we’ve solved is code push.
Aspiring to be “the Flutter company” means building an economic entity whose success is tied to Flutter, to finally help the world stop writing everything twice.
Google has been great to Flutter, but Flutter within Google is bound by Google’s own incentives, which don’t always align with that of Flutter’s millions of customers outside of Google. We’re trying to build a company whose success is aligned with the success of the businesses and developers using Flutter. A company trusted to provide high quality services around Flutter, and eventually fund the development of Flutter itself, if necessary.
If we’re successful, Shorebird will eventually be synonymous with Flutter. We hope to support every one of the millions of Flutter developers and the businesses behind them.
Shorebird incorporated January 2023. We’ve shipped our first product (code push) and now support around 2000 monthly active users, with about 300 paying customers and strong growth. We raised several million dollars from a top-5 VC and great investors who care about our mission. We’re not profitable yet, but have two years of cash on hand.
We’re only 3 people right now. All of us have engineering backgrounds. As our customers have grown, so has our engineering load and we’re seeking to hire another full-stack engineer to help us scale to even larger customers. We’re also seeking to hire a “business generalist” to work with Eric in building out the non-software parts of the business.
In comparison to two years ago, we’ve dramatically de-risked the product and market — we have a working thing, that people want to buy. But there is still much to do, so many choices to make, and so much to grow. That’s where you come in.
Recently we’ve focused on growing monthly active users. During our latest in-person summit in NYC, we did planning for next big features and products and now that we’re back to our respective cities, we’re burning through that list while supporting incoming customers.
We see about 40 new accounts sign up per day, about 3 of those become “active” (create a release/patch every month) and 1 of those buys a plan. We also get a couple of inbound SMB/enterprise sales calls per week through which Eric is learning enterprise sales.
The first hour or so every morning is spent working through the support queue which often results in small changes to the website, docs or code to avoid future customers hitting the same issues. The rest of the day is spent building. We have no meetings, no calendars, no perf reviews.
Most of the time we hang out on Discord video calls, but sometimes someone drops off to jam out to their music, get coffee or lunch, etc. We use the same Discord for private company chats and calls, private large-customer support channels, and our public community, which makes it very easy to talk to customers anytime we want to.
Engineers work across the whole stack. Our websites are in React (Astro), our backend and command-line tool are in Dart, our Database is postgres. We use Google Cloud, Redis and Cloudflare. We have our own fork of the Dart runtime and compiler (C++) and Flutter engine (C++) as well as an updater library (Rust) and a small Flutter package. Some of us prefer certain layers to others, but ideally you should want to work on most of the above and more as you help us add more products!
3-4 times a year we all get together in person for a week. We occasionally attend meetups or fly to visit customers. Engineers aren’t expected to attend any meetings, Eric has several customer meetings a week (and sometimes per day).
We’re a default-public organization, we operate on a public discord, our source and planning are public. We’re an all remote, distributed team.
More information about the company we’re trying to build can be found in our public handbook
We’re fully remote. Current team members are located in California, Illinois, and New York (GMT-8 through GMT-5).
Our hiring is currently focused in the US, but we hope to expand globally over time. We are willing to consider candidates in GMT-10 through GMT-3. We communicate exclusively through Discord (both in public and private), including often leaving video calls open in the background while we work independently.
We get together 3-4x per year as a company, all flying to some US city for a week.
If you’re interested in joining us, please email eric@shorebird.dev. You can also (and are encouraged to) hop on our Discord and chat with us there. We do pretty much everything in the public so you can very much see what we’re like without even needing to apply.
We write the tools others will use to build Flutter apps, including the compiler used to build them and runtime used to execute them. The ideal candidate should have at least passing familiarity with the “lower” levels of our stack including using a systems-language (like C++) doing programming on mobile.
180-220k USD salary, 1.5% equity, and benefits.
As one of our first engineers, you will wear many hats and work across many systems over time.
You
You will
Experience working on reused code (e.g. APIs, libraries, tools, build systems) or in systems which are too large for any single person to understand would serve you well in this role.
We’re most interested in your past projects/accomplishments (do you ship stuff?), your desire to work at a startup (on this mission in particular), and your ability to communicate clearly. We will do a technical screen, which involves writing code together (e.g. write a small Dart command line app to do X). You’ll talk to all 3 of us and check mutual references. If it’s a mutual fit, we’ll make you an offer.
Shorebird is currently 3 software engineers. The most pressing issues facing Shorebird are no longer “can we build it”, but “can we build a business around this”, which involves “can we market, package, sell in a way that the market understands.” I’m looking for someone to partner with in solving some of the non-coding challenges of the business.
We’ve done alright so far. Shorebird has had over 20k sign-ups in the last year, resulting in ~2000 monthly active users and over 300 paying customers. Revenues have been growing over 10% month over month for the last year, but could grow much faster with your help.
The biggest bottleneck for Shorebird that we do not have anyone consistently moving the non-code parts of the company forward every day. I (Eric, Founder) try, but I have a lot of responsibilities to track. I need someone to brainstorm with me on what would be our most impactful non-coding work, divide it up with me, and then go run!
I need someone who wants to work at a small startup, is comfortable working across many areas, and while able to talk to developers and care about developers & Flutter-using-businesses as customers, does not want to focus on writing code as their day-job.
Individuals with a variety of backgrounds and ambitions could be successful in this role. There are more things to do than you will want to do. That’s fine. The rest falls to me. Over time we’ll hire more specialists and divide the responsibility space, but to start it’s just you and I making the biggest impacts where we can.
This is an fantastic opportunity for someone eager and ambitious: we have thousands of customers, lots of inbound interest, a working product and great team. You’ll move the business tremendously just by picking the low hanging fruit.
Shorebird raised a seed round (from a top-tier VC and fancy angel investors) funding back in Jan 2023. We’re currently 3, with plans to grow by 2 people in early 2025. We have ~18 months of runway with that growth. I expect we’ll raise a Series A early 2026.
Shorebird currently makes ~200k AAR. Our goal is to at least 5x revenues in 2025 (+15% month) to ~1M ARR. We’ve seen consistent organic growth at ~10% per month the last year (3.2x y/y) even though our product was “beta” and Android-only until March 2024. 5x growth in 2025 seems very achievable, and you will have a huge impact on us doing that.
If you were to show up tomorrow, you’d talk to customers, skim through our (extensive) customer support logs, and sales call notes. Then you and I would brainstorm about what’s most impactful to work on, divide it up and go do.
I expect you’ll tell me we should focus on these 3 first:
We’re building a company to serve millions of developers and businesses all over the world with a suite of Flutter-associated products. We will have plenty to do over time.
Other things I expect we’ll work on together:
Regardless we will sit down together, figure out what’s most impactful and start there, and over time figure out what all needs doing to reach our 2025 goals and beyond.
We target 75th percentile All-US/Small-Companies market with our base pay and are able to offer very strong equity incentives.
This is at-minimum an early-career role (3+ years experience), involving involving nearly unbounded growth potential. More experience applicants are welcome, there is plenty to do and the role and compensation can flex to accommodate a variety of experience levels.
This role will be salary/equity compensated, not commission. Our incentives should be aligned to build/grow the business over a long time horizon.
170-220k USD salary, 1.5% equity, and benefits.
You’re not expected fill all our gaps (even everything listed above) but you will have nearly unbounded opportunity to be engaged in the business. We’ll work together to figure out what the business needs most, figure out who’s going to do it, figure out how to do it (most things I do I’ve never done before) and then execute.
You will be responsible for as much of the “business side” of Shorebird as you want. There is simply too much for Eric to do alone. You will be building out our business capabilities (not managing existing processes), including figuring out how best to reach customers, writing content, debugging our funnel, improving our website, deciding marketing/events/communications strategy, etc. I expect someone successful in this role to have a lot of opinions and we will figure out what to do and learn together how to grow Shorebird’s business.
We’re most interested in your past projects/accomplishments (do you ship stuff?), your desire to work at a startup (on this mission in particular), and your ability to communicate clearly. Since I am not a “business” expert, you will probably also meet with one of our investors or other other startup founders as well as our team. The process can be very quick (days, not weeks). If it’s a mutual fit, we’ll make you an offer.