It's been 10 years since I launched Babylist as a side project on HN. We're now a team of 100. Babylist is a top 1,500 visited website in the US, generating $500M in attributable commerce across retailers. We're stable and profitable. We're looking for talented Engineers across all levels that are excited to build out a world-class consumer and ecommerce experience.
Our web application and backend systems are at the center of the Babylist experience - an experience our users love as they prepare for one of life's biggest events. The Babylist engineering culture is one of learning and knowledge sharing. We are passionate about experimentation, automation and shipping value to our customers. Our stack is based on Ruby on Rails and React. We continue to expand our toolbox to use the best technologies for the job.
I have a lot of thoughts about this! A lot of effort over many years has gone into our content. It's very good and I'm very proud of it. We have an in-house editorial team (including video) that currently reports into marketing but for years reported directly to me as peers to marketing. A couple of lessons over the years that has made this successful:
- Our editorial team has some content marketing goals, but their primary goal is long-term audience development. (We want you to keep opening our newsletter over years.)
- There is a lot of operational work to keep this content up to date. (Our content is primarily about product recommendations. This gets stale over time.)
- I believe in good, better and best content and that this can be qualitatively evaluated. Content development hasn't gone as well when we looked to the data to tell us is content was good or not.
- An intern wrote the first version of our guides. She sent out a survey to users about their favorite products and used that as the editorial basis for our "best product" guides. We tracked that they were making it to the front page of Google and decided to fund an in-house team.
Over the entire 10 years it's always felt like we have been too slow to hire and needed a person in a role 3-6 months earlier.
We were a team of 5 when we hired our first full-time customer service agent. Until that hire, we would each take a day of customer support which eventually meant that our iOS engineer was answering user emails for ~6 hours a week.
Great question. I really struggled with that decision. For me it was really whether to raise a seed round or not. I went back and forth about what kind of business I wanted to run.
I finally made the decision to raise the seed round and grow a team because I felt that I would learn the most. I optimized for my own learning and growth.
Are you facing a similar decision? It's a steep and long learning curve to actually lead a team, but now it's the part of my job that I love the most.
It's been 10 years since I launched Babylist as a side project on HN. We're now a team of 100. Babylist is a top 1,500 visited website in the US, generating $500M in attributable commerce across retailers. We're stable and profitable. We're looking for talented Engineers across all levels that are excited to build out a world-class consumer and ecommerce experience.
Our web application and backend systems are at the center of the Babylist experience - an experience our users love as they prepare for one of life's biggest events. The Babylist engineering culture is one of learning and knowledge sharing. We are passionate about experimentation, automation and shipping value to our customers. Our stack is based on Ruby on Rails and React. We continue to expand our toolbox to use the best technologies for the job.
It's been 10 years since I launched Babylist as a side project on HN. We're now a team of 100. Babylist is a top 1,500 visited website in the US, generating $500M in attributable commerce across retailers. We're stable and profitable. We're looking for talented Engineers across all levels that are excited to build out a world-class consumer and ecommerce experience.
Our web application and backend systems are at the center of the Babylist experience - an experience our users love as they prepare for one of life's biggest events. The Babylist engineering culture is one of learning and knowledge sharing. We are passionate about experimentation, automation and shipping value to our customers. Our stack is based on Ruby on Rails and React. We continue to expand our toolbox to use the best technologies for the job.
It's been 10 years since I launched Babylist as a side project on HN. We're now a team of 100. Babylist is a top 1,500 visited website in the US, generating $500M in attributable commerce across retailers. We're stable and profitable. We're looking for talented Engineers across all levels that are excited to build out a world-class consumer and ecommerce experience.
Our web application and backend systems are at the center of the Babylist experience - an experience our users love as they prepare for one of life's biggest events. The Babylist engineering culture is one of learning and knowledge sharing. We are passionate about experimentation, automation and shipping value to our customers. Our stack is based on Ruby on Rails and React. We continue to expand our toolbox to use the best technologies for the job.
It's been 10 years since I launched Babylist as a side project on HN. We're now a team of 100. Babylist is a top 1,500 visited website in the US, generating $500M in attributable commerce across retailers. We're stable and profitable. We're looking for talented Engineers across all levels that are excited to build out a world-class consumer and eommerce experience.
Our web application and backend systems are at the center of the Babylist experience - an experience our users love as they prepare for one of life's biggest events. The Babylist engineering culture is one of learning and knowledge sharing. We are passionate about experimentation, automation and shipping value to our customers. Our stack is based on Ruby on Rails and React. We continue to expand our toolbox to use the best technologies for the job.
It's been 10 years since I launched Babylist as a side project on HN. We're now a team of 100. Babylist is a top 1,500 visited website in the US, generating $500M in attributable commerce across retailers. We're stable and profitable. We're looking for talented Engineers across all levels that are excited to build out a world-class consumer and ecommerce experience.
Our web application and backend systems are at the center of the Babylist experience - an experience our users love as they prepare for one of life's biggest events. The Babylist engineering culture is one of learning and knowledge sharing. We are passionate about experimentation, automation and shipping value to our customers. Our stack is based on Ruby on Rails and React. We continue to expand our toolbox to use the best technologies for the job.
Open roles: https://www.babylist.com/jobs
SOFTWARE
- Senior Software Engineer, React/Web
- Senior Software Engineer, Rails/Backend
- Software Engineer, Android
- Site Reliability Engineer
- Director of Engineering, Consumer
- Software Engineering Manager
(Here is my HN side project post 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175757)
Email [email protected] with any questions.