General Information

Our co-founders are also very active in the tech community and are on the ground to interact with the users. He will personally reply to users' emails and enquiries. Engineers also join for some user interviews to hear the most unfiltered feedback from the users. Users' suggestions and feedback (both good and bad) are shared with the team and taken seriously. 

For example, one user previously shared that they are uncomfortable contributing their salary on NodeFlair Salaries because the submission date can be too exact by showing "2 months ago". It took the team one day to act on it and have similar submissions be reflected as "within six months" instead.

We believe that relying on marketing to grow a poorly-built product will backfire in the long run, and we stay away from it. This strategy is successful as our platform usage has grown consistently with almost zero advertising dollars spent since the start.

NodeFlair is building towards empowering the tech community to work where they love. So, naturally, we practice this ourselves! We are proud to share that we are "By Engineers, for Engineers" at our core.

Our co-founder Adrian comes from a technical background and leads the Product and Engineering team. The tech team are not ticket monkeys who solely exist to support the sales and business team. Unlike many companies who view the tech team as a cost centre, we see it as a (long-term) profit centre that innovates and breaks new grounds on how we can better serve the tech community.

One example of being engineering-led is being very conscious of engineering productivity and ensuring the team has enough time to focus on deep work. We constantly look into ways to improve, even iterating through many variations of "standups" before landing on asynchronous updates, which we think are the least disruptive to one's schedule.

The biggest enemy of a startup is time, so we have a bias for speed over perfection. We strongly believe in moving fast and breaking things (cliche, but true) and getting feedback rather than waiting to get things right on the first try. The first versions of our products were built and launched within 2 to 3 weeks before iterating hard to improve them. 

For example, we turn NodeFlair Salaries from an idea into reality in less than a month. Re-iterating rapidly, it quickly became Singapore's largest repository of verified tech salaries, backed by offer letters and payslips. 

We also constantly look into empowering the team to build fast by stripping down unnecessary processes. It is the norm for new joiners to ship to production in their first week. 

Unlike many companies, we pride ourselves on not having full test coverage. Yes, you read that right. We acknowledge the trade-off between writing tests and speed, so we write tests only if they help us move faster. They consist of two primary situations. Firstly, too many cases to test manually. Secondly, the code is potentially catastrophic (How badly can this piece of code mess up our day + How difficult is it to recover from the worst-case scenario)

Our co-founders, Ethan and Adrian, were from Softbank-backed ShopBack. Ethan grew ShopBack's tech team by 2x and launched their Vietnam and Taiwan tech hubs from scratch, while Adrian helped launch V2 of the mobile app and have mostly single-handedly built our current platform.

We are also fortunate to be backed by many angel investors who believe in our mission. These investors include executives and CTOs / Engineering VPs from high growth tech companies like ShopBack, Carousell, Airbnb, Nium, 99.co and more.

We highly value and enjoy working with the craziest and most brilliant people. Unlike many companies, we designed our interviews to give all applicants an equal chance, even if they did not come from "branded" companies and schools. Some software engineering interns did not have prior internship experiences or have yet to attend university even! Nevertheless, alumni joined companies like Indeed, Google and OpenGov, known to have high engineering standards.