We are looking for 1-2 people to join our technical business development team. This is a uniquely designed role for someone with technical skill who wants to learn go to market and business from the ground up at a mobile infrastructure company.
You will learn from some of the best in the business, people obsessed with building for builders, thinking about developer trust everyday. We will introduce you to a fast paced startup and teach you everything you need to know about business.
You will research some of the best mobile teams in the world, figure out what they are building, understand where Expo can help, and start useful conversations with engineers and technology leaders.
This post takes you through how we approached bringing Expo to companies don’t know about Expo Services, you’ll hear from Colin Hunt who pioneered the role, and you’ll learn more about the day to day work.
The bar is simple —> we want someone who built an app on Expo and now wants to talk about it with folks who don’t yet use Expo.
If that sounds like you, reach out.
This post will take you through why we built a technical BDR function at Expo, the experience of the role, and how we approached the work.
Colin Hunt pioneered this technical BDR motion
Colin became the first real owner of this motion. His job was not just “send outbound.” His job was to help us build the system with our GTM Ops leader. We wanted to reach out to these companies manually, like a human would, and offer help.
What Colin did:
- Research accounts
- Find the right people
- Write the first messages
- Engage on LinkedIn
- Offer guidance with Expo
- Learn what worked
- Route qualified conversations to AEs
- Keep improving the process
He has already shown the profile we want more of: curious, technical, persistent, and useful to customers. But what’s unique about Colin Hunt is that he built an app on Expo before working with Expo, so he knew the product intimately.
The best BDRs at Expo will not be generic sales development reps. They need to understand developers, mobile teams, and infrastructure well enough to be helpful before a call ever happens.
Let’s hear from Colin directly.
Why I took this technical BDR role with Expo
That’s me in the middle. Surrounded by greatness.
I took on this work because I'm obsessed with mobile apps.
Expo enables developers to create beautiful apps and deploy them everywhere.
From the moment I ran my first “Hello World” program in C++, all I wanted to do was figure out how to make something show up on my phone. There is just something so compelling about mobile. Your app is not just a tab in Safari. It’s on your home screen. It feels real.
I bought a Mac Mini and started following Apple’s Tutorials for Native Development.
It was too much too fast.
Learning this new environment was too cumbersome for me. I was studying Electrical Engineering, not computer science. I was contending with a new language, a new environment, and new tools. Needless to say, I gave up.
A year later, in 2017, I found React Native. A framework that would allow me to create cross-platform mobile apps in Javascript. Seemed promising. Javascript was a little more familiar to me, and there was this thing called Expo that allowed me to run my app on my phone within the first 10 minutes of discovering it. Magic - I was hooked.
I spent the next 7 years building Prospre, an app that generates meal plans based on your macro targets. We ejected from the Expo framework, but we used Expo libraries whenever possible, as we knew that we could trust the team to deliver robust and high-quality packages. I was grateful for everything Expo was building, but we didn’t consider ourselves an Expo app any longer.
But Expo had a vision for what the mature framework would look like that wasn’t clear to me from the outside. I started to see things happening, and the FOMO set in. It started with improvements to expo-web that allowed us to ditch our React App completely, and ship our React Native codebase to the web.
Then, I learned about Expo Services - Expo’s suite of CI/CD products made specifically for React Native applications. As a bootstrapped company, we built things locally, had minimal testing infrastructure, and deployed manually. Not because it was too expensive, but because it wasn’t clear if it was going to be worth all the set up. Expo Services was pretty much a drop in solution that let us forget about deployment and just focus on building our app.
At this point, the Expo vision became much clearer to me. Expo enables developers to create incredible apps and deploy them everywhere.
There is a moat to building mobile applications. Expo is building bridges across that moat from all angles.
Expo played a huge role in my ability to create mobile applications at all. And now, they are solving all of the problems that I personally encountered while building and shipping on mobile.
I believe in the vision, I believe in the products, and I’ve been putting people onto Expo for years. That is why I work with Expo.
How I approached the work of a technical BDR
My mandate was to generate new business. I had no sales background, but I did have a background as a founder and an app developer. I have received my fair share of bad emails and cold calls to my personal phone. This was not how I was going to approach generating new business. I wanted to treat it like a founder seeking investment instead.
Someone once told me “If you are looking for money, ask for advice. If you are looking for advice, ask for money”. The context is clearly around investment, but I see pitching your business to investors as very similar to pitching your product to customers. This saying reminds me that value is created when you solve a problem, and that the only confirmation you have solved a problem is when someone pays you for your solution.
This framed how I went out in to the world to spread Expo.
I reached out to folks working in React Native to learn what they thought about Expo in general. Are you using Expo in any capacity? Why? Why not? How is it going? Do you want to use Expo in some way but can’t? What’s blocking you? Are there issues that I can raise internally that will make your life better?
How can I help YOU?
How can we make Expo the obvious choice?
In a way, my goal is not to sell you on Expo services, it’s to learn why you aren’t already using them. If by the time we are done chatting you find yourself thinking “Huh, why am I not using Expo?” Then, we’ve built the foundation for a potential business relationship. If there are strong reasons you aren’t using Expo, I take those learnings back to the team.
If we are going to talk about paid services, you need to know that I am actually interested in what you are doing, that I am honest, and that I am knowledgable. If that isn’t clear, why would you listen to anything I say?
I love talking shop about building apps. I’ve been doing it for a high percentage of my waking hours over the past 7-8 years. In the past year, I have met so many incredibly talented engineers all over the world. They aren’t “leads”. They are mentors, peers, and friends. It’s important to me to be curious, passionate, and genuinely helpful.
Are you our next technical BDR?
Expo is all about building developer trust, and in sales you manifest that by deeply understanding the customer’s situation, and helping them to create valuable solutions using Expo products.
Our goal is predictable pipeline and to build a brand that is known for helping. We don’t use AI to write messages, we want humans who can really help our potential customers. Every touchpoint matters and we want anyone interacting with Expo to learn something that can help them build better apps.
We are looking for the next two Colin’s to join our team. Please reach out (joe@expo.dev) if you are interested!
- Colin Hunt and Joe Ryan
