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Hire engineers who can also do backend or a second platform

Small engineering team ships a lot; with 50%+ EBITDA margins

Workedteam-process

What they did

Hire engineers who flex beyond their main area: iOS engineers also do some backend, web engineers some backend, or one person covers iOS and Android. All apps are native (no cross-platform). AI tooling adds leverage.

What happened

Kept the team small (host says four engineers) while shipping native apps; the business ran at over 50% EBITDA

In their words

Brett Bauman & Zack Hargett - COPY this ai app's $6.7m/yr marketing strategy

Play from 27:12
26:50

Joseph ChoiOkay, so we went back to the origin story, but uh we were talking about the product. You have this principle of like build for, you know, building Navy SEALs, not the whole Navy. Um and it seems like you apply that to the marketing side and the engineering side. Four engineers is like pretty a pretty small um team. How do you How do you accomplish building a great product with with a small team?

27:12

Brett BaumanZack and I have been doing this for a while and with AI being added on to it, uh we're able to get a lot done. We have a great team uh of engineers. Um and something that I always look for in hiring them is being able to flex uh across more than just their one uh like strength of ownership. So like what I mean by that is an iOS engineer needs to also be able to do some back end work, um or web engineer needs also be able to do some back end work, or maybe someone does iOS and Android. We have all native apps, and don't do any cross-platform stuff, but um that's been important for us to be able to get a lot done with a small team.

27:59

Joseph ChoiThat was really helpful. I think like seeing the inner workings of the marketing team, um it seems like that was like a pretty huge pillar of your success. Um and then on the other side, like, okay, so you get all this attention, you get a bunch of um people into the product, how do you actually make money? So, I'm You guys mentioned that you made your onboarding longer and that really affected conversion rates. Um, can we talk a little bit about …

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Tags: hiring, small-team, native-apps, ai-coding