Founding Engineer
About Perch
The mission of Perch is to make reading free. The best way to understand what we're building is to try the app for yourself and read these two essays:
In terms of initial funding, we've raised over $6 million from some of the best venture capitalists in the world, including Reddit Co-founder Alexis Ohanian's 776 Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Ashton Kutcher's Sound Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, Kygo's Palm Tree Crew, and more.
The founding team currently consists of Mike (CEO), Matt (CTO), and Will (Founding Engineer).
The Role
The promise of Perch is to analyze all of the writing on the Internet and show you the best thing you can possibly read every time you open the app.
As a founding engineer, you will be responsible for helping us deliver on this promise. Here are just a few of the engineering problems we need to solve:
- Index every blog and newsletter on the Internet. This involves building a web crawler, perfectly parsing all of the terrible HTML out there, and monitoring millions of websites for new posts with near-zero latency.
- Clean and organize our reading data. We are collecting tremendously useful data to gauge article quality and relevance that will help us better serve our users. For example, we know for any given article how many people opened it, finished it, bookmarked it, shared it, etc.
- Gather other useful data. The most significant AI breakthroughs typically come from identifying or creating new sources of data, not inventing new algorithms. Google's page rank is a good example - the key insight wasn't algorithmic work, it was identifying backlinks as an incredibly valuable data source. Backlinks could be quity useful for Perch too (e.g. if your favorite writer frequently links to another blog, you'll probably like that blog too). What else? Article shares and comments on social media, PageRank scores, LLM quality scores for every article, are just a few ideas that come to mind.
- Build an article recommendation and search engine. We basically have to solve a lot of the same machine learning problems Google, Meta, Spotify, and TikTok are working on.
- Full-stack features that remove friction from the reading experience. Some examples include text-to-speech so users can listen to articles on-the-go and AI summaries that save them time.
Our current tech stack is React Native, Node.js, Express, and Postgres.
We are biased, but we genuinely believe this is one of the most exciting engineering opportunities in tech. It's an opportunity to do the best work of your life and build a product that impacts billions of people, while making the whole world smarter. Financially, you can view it as compressing 40+ working years into 2-4 really intense ones. Here are the assumptions that have to hold for Perch to be a $100 billion company, using Spotify's $125 billion market cap and 640 MAUs as a comp:
- 640 million MAUs: Hundreds of millions of people already read blogs and newsletters, and we think we can grow the market to 1 billion+ by removing discovery/cost friction from the user experience.
- $30 ARPU: Spotify's revenue per user is $30. Instagram's is $50.
But beyond monetary rewards and potentially impacting the lives of billions of people, we believe this is a rare opportunity to grow as a designer and as a person. You will work with a fantastic group of teammates on some incredibly hard problems, and in the process, you will become a better designer than you ever could've imagined while cultivating friendships with your colleagues that last a lifetime. If this resonates, we'd love to talk with you.
One More Thing
We built two blogs called the Startup Archive and The Founders' Tribune that have hundreds of thousands of followers across Instagram (SA, FT), X/Twitter (SA, FT), LinkedIn (SA), and two newsletters.
It began as a way to dogfood our product and put ourselves in the shoes of people who write online, but it has grown into this powerful owned-media asset that reaches millions of people every month. The plan is to build a media company within Perch that can be leveraged in three important ways:
- Improves Perch experience and is aligned with our goal of making great writing accessible. The more great writing there is on Perch, the more useful the product becomes. The Startup Archive and Founders' Tribune are some of hte most read publications on Perch, and if we can profitably launch more great publications, that means more great stuff to read for our users.
- Reduce customer acquisition cost for Perch and future products. One simple example of this creating Perch playlists (e.g. “Top 100 Startup Essays of All Time”) and sharing it across the Startup Archive socials. We haven't done this yet because we are focused on retention and frequency of use before turning our attention to growth, but it's a powerful growth hack that will be available when we need it.
- Profitability. Despite quite a few inquiries, we haven't monetized the media properties with advertisements. More money is always nice, but we're not cash-constrained right now and time spent selling ads would detract from our focus on Perch. However, the ability to sell ads and get the company to profitability when when we need to is a nice lever to have that makes us less reliant on VC funding. Over the long-term, we plan to monetize these publications through the Perch revenue share to better align our incentives with writers and improve company profitability.
