Ep. #15, Empowering Upward Mobility with Devin Cintron of Comun

Eden Full Goh: Hey Devin, thanks so much for joining me on the How It's Tested podcast.

Devin Cintron: Yeah, super excited. I've been looking forward to this.

Eden: Just so everyone has a good sense of who you are and also the startup that you're working on right now, I would love for you to give an intro about yourself.

Devin: This is fun for me because I recently turned 27, so I'm now old enough where I feel like I have a career story to share.

It's a funny age for a couple reasons. First is there's this like 27 club thing, so you feel like Google around. There's all these celebrities that died at this age, which is obviously quite a bit scary.

I've also now been out of college, like longer than the duration of college. So I'm starting to feel, you know, a little bit older. Because for a long time you could feel like, okay, I just graduated.

My story's interesting. I've been working at Comun for two and a half years now, which for me is actually a long duration and we can get into the specifics of what we're building here in a minute.

The only consistent thematic thread for my career prior to here is pretty much consistency around consumer FinTech. I did quite a few things in school. I studied computer science, so did kind of like the software internship thing to kick off.

I ended up doing some bigger internships at like kind of the FAANG companies and a little bit earlier stage kind of startups just coming around to like the unicorn level. That was early stuff for me.

But after that I did a few things that are consistent with FinTech prior to working here. Right around the time I was graduating from school, we had COVID, so everyone kind of left campus.

I was able to not do my last semester 'cause I had accumulated enough credits. So I started a student lending company with somebody I had met through my school.

I worked on that for like three or six months, I think it was almost half a year before ultimately determining that for me at that point in time I wasn't quite ready to build that kind of experience.

I remember like the first, I was the technical co-founder in this relationship and I remember the first day we like sat down to kind of build towards it an MVP, which was going to be like allowing alumni to kind of lend to students of their alma mater.

I remember I scoped out an MVP where I said, okay, I'll spend one day on the front end, one day on the back and then one day on like the payment infrastructure and that should be sufficient to get things going. So wasn't quite there at that point in time.

After about half the year of that I gave my equity back to my co-founder. I think I sold him to him for like a hundred or 200 bucks or something just to make it super official because, you know, it wasn't the right thing for me to pursue at the time.

He is actually still working on it, they pivoted into a much better business and doing pretty well in the city. And then I kind of found myself in this interesting position where, you know, I liked tech but the things I had done prior didn't really work for me.

I had done like the big tech internship and found it to be a little sleepy, like great mentors, great team, but maybe not the right point in time for me. I had done a bit of like a bigger startup, I was an intern at Cameo, the like celebrity one, during Covid, actually alongside while I was building this other startup.

So it was like the hottest time for that kind of market 'cause all the celebrities were not able to work. Like they weren't doing new films, they weren't doing new TV production so they were just growing like crazy.

Eden: Yeah, I remember that.

Devin: So they became a unicorn while I was there as a summer intern, which is like a like bizarre experience 'cause then you're like whoa, this is like, this is easy. It's super easy to become a billion dollar company 'cause I'm an intern and this is happening.

So when you're like N equals two, that can seem super, super attainable. I actually won the hotdog eating contest that summer there. So like that was my positive experience. I kind of had the interns doing some fun stuff while we were all remote.

Eden: That's amazing.

Devin: All this transpires. I came to the end of that experience and kind of the venture that wasn't for me and in school I had this bad habit of like not knowing exactly what I wanted to do.

So I tended to just kind of look at the peers around me and kind of use their interests as a compass for what makes sense to do so. Like I did the big tech internship 'cause that seemed to be a popular thing to do.

Worked really hard on it. Got it, and then turned out not to be a great fit. I didn't learn from that mistake. So like in my senior year of school I then oriented around, okay, what else is this?

What else is everyone pointing at? Okay, so there's this consulting thing like they have cool water bottles and like all the career fair tables are super popular.

So I ended up pursuing that and after that cameo internship, after the venture, I worked a year at Bain, big consulting company doing like slides and Excel sheets.

But there, like the lending company, I did get to work on some FinTech projects that I found pretty interesting. And like that early in your career you can start of, kind of start to like build an internal monologue and definition of yourself where it's like, oh okay, like my career is FinTech.

It's been like 18 months since I've had completed school, so it's not that meaningful of one thus far. But that started becoming like a thematic consistency for me.

After about a year at Bain that also too, you know, didn't feel like the right fit. I got into that thinking it was going to be like the right kind of background for entrepreneurship and solving problems.

Figured I have, you know, I got the technical side kind of figured out from undergrad. Maybe this will round me out. I think that that career is like really solid, especially when you go in longer and you start solving more meaningful problems.

But the like post undergrad role is a lot of slide and like Excel sheet stuff, which I started to think probably wasn't the perfect background for building.

So I went and worked actually in a product role for about one year after that I worked at a company called Caribou which was doing a, I think they are still doing this, it was auto refinancing.

And this was like peak ZIRP, like zero interest rate period. So like refinancing made a ton of sense. Like any loan you had, you should be refinancing. So same thing happened, no eating contest this time.

But we did become a unicorn while I was working there for my barista. So now I'm like, I've worked at like four places, half of which became a unicorn while I was working there. So I'm starting to think...

Eden: You have a magic touch.

Devin: Yeah, no I mean it's, this is probably something I should feature more distinctly in my resume. But year into that I started talking to the Comun team who had just, you know, kind of incorporated and started thinking through what they wanted to build.

I think the first conversation I had with Abiel, I completely misunderstood what he was working on and just like with where I was at in time and what problems I was working on, I think I concluded, oh, he is like exclusively doing like underwriting for consumer loans for immigrants which, we'll talk more about our business, is just not at all like the core focus.

But then I had a second conversation and I started to understand what the team's working on here and like the TLDR is like consumer mobile banking for Latinos who are living in the US, you know, as immigrants or people who have a tie to LatAm, living in the US and we we'll go into more detail on our business in a moment.

But that started getting me really excited. My family's interesting, my mom is, you know, American, she's actually from West Virginia and my dad's from Puerto Rico so I'm, I don't know how many people there are with that background. I think that's relatively rare of the West Virginia and Puerto Rican pair.

But that does build for me some affinity with, you know, LatAm and Latin America overall. So I got really excited about the problem Comun was tackling and I talked to the team more, did the interviewing and then joined as a software engineer I think like three or so months after things first got started.

So like very much pre-product, the code base had a few commits but we were really on the kind of early stages of things. It's now been two and a half years right now.

I am an engineering manager here. I work on our mobile team. It's been an amazing experience and I'll get now into like the, the, well not TLDR but a little bit longer and more detailed to what Comun is.

We're a consumer mobile bank for Latinos who live in the US like checking account, debit card, transitioning people out of the, you know, unbanked economy into the digital economy with a banking bundle.

We have also an app, the ability to send money back home. So if we take a big step back, the best way to think through this is like looking at what's the experience with the incumbents.

So how is our banking bundle different from them? If you go to like chase.com/espanol, you'll find a website that has like some Spanish but then if you print it out and you take like a red pen, you can start drawing circles around all the English copy.

If you go through their application flow for most of these banks you'll find that there is no Spanish equivalent, it's English only. And then if you try to talk to customer support, you're going to find somebody speaking English where you have to wait a really long duration to get Spanish.

Beyond that, if you don't have a social security number, it's going to be near impossible to get approved. And these businesses that have a brick and mortar footprint, tend to have mechanisms built in to try to drive their customers to be more upmarket. So that might look like overdraft fees for example. But basically if you're Spanish speaking, if you don't have a social security number and if you're not going to maintain like a really big deposit account, if you're not at a higher income level, it's going to be a painful experience even if you can get an account.

That's just the the main primary banking experience. For our population there's also, obviously, like the high degree of need for international transfers.

We're talking about people who have like come from Mexico or living in the us have their family back home, been here for a couple years, super important transaction for them is sending money back home, right?

If you and I meet up today and we go to Queens, we could find like a million money transfer services. Every single one of them is going to be extraordinarily expensive and this is kind of the marketplace for this population. Extremely predatory.

So if you are like a medium average person sending money back home, it's completely expected that you could be eating like 1200, $1,300 per year end fees for these international transfers. Super expensive.

What other example, if you're doing like check cashing, I've talked to women who are working in the US on like agricultural pieces through the the H-2A agricultural program.

So that's like someone from, who lives primarily in Mexico comes to the US for several months a year to do agricultural job and then goes back home, comes back and forth for some period of time.

They get paid in checks, right? If they want to go to a check cashing service in the US I talk to folks who basically each time they do that every pay cycle.

So every two weeks they take a bus which is probably like four or five bucks, they go to a jet cashing location which in a lot of these less urban areas can be like pretty monopolistic.

Those can cost as much as like $30 per check. And that's like per pay cycle.

Eden: That's a lot.

Devin: So that's like easily 600, $700 a year, right? So you have like, we'll just call it like 1300 international transfers, we'll talk about like 700 for check cashing.

You're not talking about like 2K per year just for like the bare minimum financial that you need to do for your day-to-day life. That's a lot of money for a population especially that might be living paycheck to paycheck that's trying to build a better life for their family back home. So where does Comun enter all of this? What we're building towards is helping these people and their families on their journey through upwards of mobility.

If we get to the high number, high level like numerical stuff, I think that can be a good lens. We have 24/7 customer support in Spanish. That's across phone, email and app messaging, WhatsApp.

Our app is entirely obviously in Spanish as well. We support a hundred plus ID types from Latin America. So if you have a voter ID from El Salvador, if you have a driver's license from Guatemala, if you have a document called like a Matricula Consular from Mexico or you have a passport from Venezuela, like any one of these documents we can get you an account.

We have 90,000 locations to deposit cash in the US and that's the number's always increasing. And then our fee for international transfers is typically like 299. This month actually if you have a transaction bigger than 300 bucks is 0.99.

And that's compared to these money trades for services where it can be like $10 plus pretty commonly. Those are the numbers, but if we look at like the individual experience and I can like draw together an, you know, an example I think that can kind of give a more personal image of what it's like day to day.

I might imagine myself, I'm living in Queens, I've been in the the US for a couple years now and I'm living in the cash economy. Say it's like 9:00 AM Saturday morning, I get a text from my friend or WhatsApp from my friend and they're talking to me about this Comun account.

I'm in my apartment, I've got my wallet with me. So I download the app and I sign up online. I go through application flow. Five minutes in, it's 9:05, now I have a bank account. I've been auto approved 'cause I can do my geo location application in the apartment.

I can scan my ID, do the selfie. I am who I claim to be and now I've got my account, it's 9:05. I go downstairs, walk across the street to 7-Eleven and I've got like my previous cash accumulated from my checks this week.

Let's call it, like, I've got 500 bucks in cash that I want to deposit. I go up to the cashier, I scan a barcode in the Comun app, hand them cash. That's now in my account. We have this for, you know, all typical convenience stores in the US.

It's like what, 9:10 now and I have my $500 cash in my Comun account. Now I want to send money back home. So the example that comes to mind is like in Mexico there's a convenience store called Oxxo that's pretty much everywhere.

It's like 7-Eleven in the US. If I have someone back home I want to send money to, add an Oxxo, I can then do that transaction in the Comun app. Since it's this month it's going to be 99 cents, that goes to them.

They've received the cash in the local currency, same five minute period. So let's call it like 9:15. I've gone from unbanked to sitting on my couch. I drank my coffee, it's now 9:15 and I've sent money back home. I've got a bank account, I'm transitioning out of the cash.

It's pretty sweet what we built so far and we've been at this for, I think we're like two years since launch.

Eden: That's a lot of progress.

Devin: Yeah, it's amazing. And I think what's exciting about this space is you basically like build this surface area and you know the world's are your oyster, right? Like there's a million different directions we could go.

We have a really good team that's really good at prioritizing but, you know, in a long enough time period you're building just amazing products that help transition these people across what upwards mobility, social mobility looks like for them and their family.

The last piece I'll talk to you too is something that right now I'm interviewing a lot of people so my whole spiel is pretty tight and tighten. But I think the piece that's most meaningful is that we really do serve like a very noble user.

We're talking about people who have gone through a really hard experience to come here and it's not like it's super easy when you get here, you're working super hard but the motivation for them is to improve their family's wives and their own together.

That's a highly motivated person. And I use this term noble user. 'Cause if you think about like, hey, I'm joining an early stage company, I'm going to be working hard.

You want to be doing that for someone who you think is ethically motivated, right? That that can be really meaningful for you if you're, like, I often will commute to the office and, you know, we're doing things that are hard.

We might be working a lot but I might encounter on my commute, you know, 50 plus people who could be a target user for us who have much more challenging professional lives than myself. So that can be for me a strong motivator.

Eden: Yeah. I will just say like I think you're one of the engineering leaders that I've spoken to that has the best connection with the product. You fully understood, the way you described the user experience.

I mean it's very complex. There's like physical dependencies. Someone literally has to get off their couch and go to a convenience store but like, you know, the user experience inside and out and I can imagine that helps you when you're thinking and working with your team on, okay, how do you actually build this product and make it a reality?

If you can picture it so viscerally in your head that makes you better at building the product. So I'm curious like what is your current role as an engineering manager?

Like what is your team like, how do you guys kind of translate that vision that you just painted into like the tactical every day of, you know, releases every week, web versus mobile. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

Devin: Yeah, it's a, there's a lot of cool stuff that we do here. I'll start with the, but the first question, it's only actually very recent that I transitioned into like, you know, official management but I've been on our mobile team doing a little full stack stuff, but primarily on like our front end mobile team for quite a while now.

I think what I've, what I've met folks is like I had the easiest transition into management of anyone 'cause I have like a rockstar team. So it's been very low effort to have to do much at all. I mostly just have to get out people's way, which is easy.

Our team is, I think the things that distinguish us is the emphasis we place on being like product minded and really understanding this business. And maybe that's why, you know, I feel comparatively like I have, I appreciate the compliment.

I hope I do come across as understanding what we're doing because there is a piece that me try to emphasize in our hiring. There's like a million really solid engineers out in this world. I mean no there's actually far more but there's a lot so to speak.

I think what we've historically found important is that we hire people with really strong fundamentals like rockstar engineers but that also appreciate, understand and are curious about the business priorities too.

That typically puts us in a place where we can maintain like a really flat team where folks have a lot of say over what they're working on. So what I tell people is a lot of the engineers here I think could be product managers elsewhere with relative these and then we have a really lean product team but they're, you know, top class.

Like obscenely, obscenely rich understanding of our users. They're kind of like walking around notions, like human notions, like the knowledge base website, like they literally know every single fact and can regurgitate it. They're amazing.

And then our team operationally tries to stay really startup-y, like right now we're working at hexes for planning. So it's like the six week period. I think Basecamp was like one of the first teams to start talking about that and kind of hide public view. It works well for us.

So we eat up like two week periods of work that are composed into larger like six week periods where usually in the six weeks you have like a project you're trying to ship, people operate in kind of independent pods working on those from like one 10 people typically like pretty full stack.

And then those six week periods are essentially derived from like a quarterly planning. So we'll plan like a quarter at a time. We really do like two. So like each quarter we plan for the immediate proximity three months and then the latter four to six and like the fidelity of those two can obviously.

You'll get like a crisper image of the proximate 12 weeks rather than the following. But then when you repeat that process every three months, you get a pretty good idea of like, okay, these are the things we should anticipate.

There's going to be some delta but it helps you bake in a lot of the requirements early on. So that's worked well for us for planning, hiring people that are able to work in that environment is important to us.

I think it's, that can be counterintuitive is like somebody could be a top class engineer in terms of technical skills but if it's hard for 'em to like understand the why behind what they're building, I think they could be challenged to work on our team.

So that's like the kind of fluffy strategic hand wavy stuff. What it looks like on mobile team for releases is pretty interesting. Our team's really lean. So we've tried a few different things around testing over the past couple years.

I think what's been consistent across the board has been having rigorous, like, control regression testing and unit testing of course always makes sense. Like those things being easily executable doing that at CI time.

So like anything going to Maine goes through those. I find that to be like a good starting point. We obviously have all the the basic static tests in place too. Like for anyone listening we're a react native app, you know cross platform we're built on expo.

I've talked to a lot of teams that are like they don't use Type Script and then you like listen to podcast and people are talking about like, oh yeah, like we're 20% of the way into our Type Script migration and that's just like insane to me.

Obviously we started from scratch using Type Scripts. It hasn't been a concern but terrifying to me that so much of this world is built without types. So for releasing what we've probably had the most changes on along the way has been like how do you tackle QA end-to-end tests.

And, you know, we've evaluated my show, we've evaluated tools built on top of it all under the sun. So like kind of more managed things like AI based stuff in the cloud, all kinds of stuff. Like we've done a ton of manual QA in the past.

Like none of these things up until our relationship with you guys have been like the answer. Like it's been, you know, painful to, I think I probably manually curate our app like 60 times.

We try to do like a weekly release, find that cadence to be helpful. And then for us, like, you know, thinking about our product, I don't think it's too hard to grasp that like a lot of what we're doing is integrating with partners, right?

And I think like for, if you think about FinTech in terms of decades, like the one that precedes ours is like hey let's take all these experiences and make them available as an API. Consumer FinTech, why don't you guys go off and like start stitching those things together.

That's why like in 2021 during like the highest hype period you would see like banking for corgi owners and like insane, insane variations. But for us in our present state, we manage all these integrations yourself, right?

So like having robust and end-to-end tests that are going to run on each releases like pretty critical. There's a lot of pieces of that set of integrations that if they break, like, I personally will have a terrible day, right?

So when we do a release we want to test those. A lot of them have like physical requirements like using the camera, going through this whole process, geo location's another piece we use.

So a lot of different variations explored and I think what we've enjoyed with Mobot so far is like we can pretty much not think about any of that and our current setup with you all, like I actually forget about you sometimes and then just like when I come back to like, we're setting up an automated sequence so like have a cron job that's going to like run overnight, build it, goes to you all.

When I come on like say a Thursday or something it's like, oh, it's everything's tested, good to go, I'll submit and I just like quickly see the green check marks from you guys. Whereas the process previously would take quite a while.

So what we like to have is like this baseline suite of tests that's like always going to execute. I think what's important is it just like lowers this like manual burden of thought for your team and like effort. I've talked to so many people about this and like so many teams in the city and it's kind of crazy how many different variations there are.

Like I've talked to teams where it's like, okay, they'll say like we were release every two weeks. The whole team QA is the whole lab. So like they have base test cases and then they test everything new and people test each other's crap.

Like maybe there's like a psychology around that where if you're doing this rigorous testing, everybody gets a good understanding and they like the product well, but it's pretty like high effort, right?

And like if you're doing those base test cases, it's like how much benefit are you getting from going through like one critical flow a hundred times in a two year period? Probably not too much.

Eden: Yeah, it doesn't scale well and I feel like people are going to cut corners. They're like, I did this last week. It's probably fine.

Devin: Yeah.

Eden: I mean I'm guilty of that.

Devin: And I would assume you're pretty high on the ethics and trust spectrum. But I've had that experience, like, I think I mentioned to you like we're pretty nomadic and there was a period of time where we were living in like Tahoe and like kind of SF kind of Tahoe kind of SF.

And like we would be driving to San Francisco that's like a three hour drive where you're like pretty much completely offline. I remember once I was like getting in the car and I saw something come up in like QA, like evaluating a new release, I was like, wait, why is this not working?

And you go to like the manual process and somebody like checked it off that they tested it and it was like immediately clear that they didn't, right?

And then I'm like getting into the car for three hours where there's like literally nothing I can do about this except just like be frustrated.

Eden: Yeah.

Devin: So yeah that happens. I've come to think too, like I used to be a little too gritty and like hardo about this kind of thing.

'Cause like I had done the manual QA like 50 times and I, you know, I come to think of it as like, oh, I know I can do that in like n hours and minutes and like that's not that much time so like other people have, you know?

That which is a terrible mentality. I think what I've started to shift my thinking to is like what's going to eat up energy and focus from the team and like let's optimize for that.

Because like if we have good engineers, they cost money, right? So like we're going to be paying them to spend their time doing something that has like no carryover into the rest of their experience and talents.

Makes a lot more sense for us to externalize that to you all. You're specialized for it. You have your cool robots in the Chrysler building. I mean that's like insane. That's like going to a really funny visual too. But that's worked really well for us.

And I think overall it's like how much can we externalize that's going to be a distraction so we can like expend team focus and energy on critical things because even if you just like say it was a short period of time, just like balancing that in your head is going to make you perform, you know, less effectively on everything else.

We had like a talk with the Nubank CTO, Vitor. Nubank for listeners who don't know, there's like a $50 billion plus market cap bank in Brazil. Gave a talk at Comun, which was interesting.

And one piece he mentioned that I think was kind of as stuck in my head was this, essentially, this analogy of like, if you have a really fast car, nobody's going to drive it fast if you don't trust the brakes, right?

So like you can compile this team of really effective engineers who can contribute really quickly, but if they're in some way anxious that like something fundamentals to an app could break and won't be tested, they're going to hesitate a little bit.

That's an analogy I've been using in our team. It's like the first time I've heard that verbalize like vocalize that way.

Eden: I love that.

Devin: It's a cool analogy

Eden: I think for you guys, like your app experience, like I know for different teams there's also like the prioritization of like how much do you invest in this, you know, picking the right tool, picking the right process.

But in your case there's like such a huge level of business criticality and complexity. You mentioned it's all these SDKs that you're implementing and APIs you're implementing.

There's like, yeah, the physical check deposit and the QR code scanning or barcode scanning at the convenience store. There's like price, some location stuff and complexity around that given you physically have to kind of leave your house.

And so this isn't something that like would just work in a web app. I'm curious like as you're thinking about, you know, and this kind of goes back to just like the end user, the product experience.

Like how do you gather that feedback from your end user? Like are you watching them go to a convenience store and seeing how they use it?

How do you guys learn from your users when you're deciding on new features and kind of making sure that everything works correctly and then making sure it all lines back up when engineering implements it and then you test it and QA it.

Devin: That's it. It's a really good question. I think it is one piece too that distinguishes us more on the product and design side too is like the vast majority of our team is Spanish speaking, from LatAm and now living in the US typically.

Like a lot of people that came here for school, we have a few like Americans and Europeans too who like lived in Mexico say for like several years before coming to Comun. So we have a population that fits the bill.

Our founders are both from Mexico and to the US for university. That's a really good starting point too. Like, just like Spanish speaking as a important quality as somebody like interviewing customers obviously makes a lot of sense, but if you don't like think about it firsthand, like you could, you know, find yourself not thinking that that's an important requirement.

I'm probably one of the worst Spanish speakers I come in. But we have a team that already like understands this population because they, you know, have the same characteristics themselves.

But then we also build in a ton of different mechanisms by which to be constantly iterating, have a deep understanding. I mean this week, like I can go and find this schedule where I can see exactly how many customer interviews are happening and like the subject matter that those are focused on.

That's always been an important piece to us. The things we work on here, like aren't that hard to think of. Like I think if you put anyone in a room and you're like, oh, we're building banking for a population, what do you think we should build?

The selection of things like enumerating what makes sense isn't too challenging. What I think becomes harder and like why we invest in having really good product thinkers is sequencing that appropriately.

The the prioritization is is obviously, I mean, I'm not saying anything that's rocket science here. Like people that can prioritize a big set of things effectively are effective. We lean a lot on customer interviews.

We lean a lot on like larger understandings of the ecosystem we're in overall. I think one thing that's been meaningful for us too is like our product doesn't have any subscription fee, right? So we're always them building for what's like the best solution in the long term.

'Cause like our incentives are built such that we want to make something for a state unit. Economics are really affordable and that's totally in line with our users, right? Like if they want to send money back home because we don't charge any sort of like, you know, higher subscription fee, we're totally incentivized to build what is the best and cheapest rails.

I have like a silly framework for all of this that I've been talking to people about. It's like if you think about FinTech and try to simplify it, really consumer FinTech, and try to simplify it pretty aggressively.

It's like the parts of physics that are like pre relativity, like, you know, there's objects in motion and then there's objects at rest. You just have like money in motion and money at rest. And the analogy is all apply to both.

Like if you have money at rest, you don't want there to be entropy, you just want it to be stable, accessible, like low risk of being hit by inflation or any other mechanism that'll decrease its value.

And if you're sending money in motion, you just want to have it be like frictionless, easy to do low activation energy. It's the same analogy. So like that's pretty much like all you're doing FinTech at any given time.

You're moving money, enabling new money movement or you're enabling a better experience with money at rest. The sequencing of that is pretty hard. I think it requires being really at the pulse of what your users you don't understand and then also having a really good understanding of what the ecosystem is supporting at any given time because people are constantly iterating.

There's always like some new API that can move money in some fans a whole way on some crazy stable coin thing that no one's ever thought of. There's like five of those a week. Like if you go on Twitter you'll be overwhelmed with all of the capabilities.

So being able to parse out like who's actually going to be a good partner, that's pretty critical. Understanding what the capabilities are out there, that's pretty critical. And the hardest part is of course staying close enough to your users that you know what it is that they need most.

Our team's really good at that. I won't pretend that I'm like an effective part of that puzzle. Our product team, our design team is amazing. Our customer experience team amazing too.

And it really affected the taking, you know, surveys, user interviews and user feedback through customer support chat and translating that into our roadmap, our sequence of priorities.

Eden: I guess like in the early days you mentioned you guys made the decision to use React Native, you know, everything's in TypeScript so you didn't have to worry about migrating it later and those kind of fundamental decisions to build the product.

How is that informed by your understanding of like the demographics of your users being, is it predominantly iOS versus Android? Are they, you know, using the flagship newest, latest and greatest devices or are they using like older lager phones with smaller screens?

How did you kind of like make some of those engineering and architectural and performance decisions? You know, 'cause I've definitely seen sort of mixed feedback on whether React Native is good when you're doing lots of third party stuff or camera stuff or native features that you need access to.

Like how did your team kind of weigh the pros and cons of all of those things? And then factoring in like just what's realistic, like what your users have in their pocket.

Devin: That's a, it's a really good question. I have every April 1st at Comun I start talking about like the Samsung Smart fridge app that we should be building. So like I tend to like throw in a joke, oh, like it's time to support Samsung Smart fridge.

Like let's go to iPad. Guys, it's time for Amazon Kindle. But then like React Native pretty high leverage for us from the get go. You'd be surprised by how many of our users are actually not Android.

Obviously, like Android is pretty predominant. But there are quite a few iOS too that as you alluded to the spectrum of device capabilities that they might have. It's pretty broad.

So like I have a big, I call them my, like, flock of sheep of Android devices in office that are all kinds of different dollar figures to buy. I bought plenty from Walmart where I like I lie about saying that I'm going to get a phone plan 'cause like you can't buy these like $50 phones without committing to a phone plan.

I'm just like, yeah, I'm going to get one tomorrow and then leaving, never come back. So we try to do it ourselves of like being able to test and house QA and all of these things. You guys have been helpful in that.

Like I can start to think less about that. I think one thing we're going to explore with you all is doing a kind of like a broader array of Android device testing.

But I think like the simple heuristic for us is like you don't want someone to not get access to your banking products because their phone doesn't support it. And then at the same time it's like we're talking about a population for which our banking bundle is getting them out of the cash economy and into the digital economy. They probably don't care deeply about like amazing animations or really cool like haptic feedback. Like, we'll build those things. But like the first and most important responsibility is helping them make that transition.

Those are important guiding lenses. I think overall it's really great that we started the time we did. If you look at the ecosystem we build in on a longer time horizon, I think what we've built wouldn't have been possible in the like pre Expo era or before Expo became what it is today and like we'll go to their office hours.

There's still like an insane altruistic thing. Well it's not altruistic purely, but like what they've done for our spaces. Unbelievable. Like you can go to office hours and they're discord and like ask these people questions.

They built like every capability possible and I don't think they have any intention of slowing down. I don't think we would've maybe pursued the cross platform react native piece as aggressively before that was the case.

We do have people that, you know, sometimes applying on like, hey, I've heard elsewhere. Like they build native first because of like X or Y capability. It's very rare that that capability can't be surfaced some way in our setup.

Whether it's by a bridge or through Expos capabilities for like native API development. But you know, maybe there are things that if I was building like some sort of like smart home app or something with like a recording, maybe podcast experience at home for iOS, I probably would make, potentially consider a different directional decisions.

But at the same time it's like really nice to be able to hire people from their React ecosystem and like help transition them into React Native.

I think that's like a capability you want to have in house or you want to have as an option with whatever platform you choose. I don't know how easy it would be to go around and like have two teams like independent iOS and Android engineers.

When you look at like bigger companies, there's always this like weird thing of like they have like a poor performing quarter and then they like if they're cross platform app, they'll like fire like the Android engineers and iOS and they had like N and now they get like N divided by two like of like a React Native team.

That's typically like an anti kind of counter signal for success. But you see big companies do that and maybe in theory we, you know, by building cross-platform can maintain a smaller team. I think there's probably reason to suspect that's potentially true.

But yeah, I mean at the end of the day it's just like, what is your team comfortable with? What's the best approach for what you're building? And then just like being honest about the requirements that are more important to you.

Eden: And so you need access to the Comun mobile app for sending money, but does the recipient of the funds also need the Comun, like, I guess the recipient in Latin America? Like what's their mobile experience like in receiving funds.

Devin: It's pretty cool. We use WhatsApp pretty heavily actually. Like that's a platform that's really popular with that population. They don't need a Comun app.

Though, there are kind of like interesting pieces of that, right? Like if you're, if this is someone who might come to the US eventually, it could be interesting to introduce the product at that point. Right now are banking bundle's available in the US?

Who knows what the feature holds, right? It could be be something that could exist in other places as well at a certain point in time. But yeah, so far that recipient doesn't need the app themselves. Their experience is primarily driven in WhatsApp.

Eden: And I guess in terms of your role now that you're transitioning more into a management role, how much code do you still get to write and what do you kind of see as your ideal vision for the team and also for the whole company going into 2025?

Devin: That's a great question. I think we're going to have a really big year. I think we've also tried to invest in things that'll make that growth easier, both in terms of team and total volume of what the app starts serving.

For me, my day-to-day hasn't changed too much. You know, I've been doing primarily mobile for the time I've been here. Started doing more full stack stuff in the last like nine to 12 months, more or less.

Which changed very recently is we're adding the responsibility of just like ensuring that folks are, you know, unblocked, building into their future career interests, having a good understanding of what people are working on and why it matters. I still get as many commits in as I can, especially on a lean team.

Like it's important to maintain proximity. I'm also like pretty early in my career too, so I think it's easy for people's egos to get super inflated, start making bad decisions or just get like too distant from the development.

Trying to avoid any of those mistakes, we'll see what other ones I make, but hopefully I keep those in check. For myself, like what I've started telling people at Comun is like, I'm a shareholder first and an employee second.

So like really whatever I can do that's most valuable to the team. That's been my kind of mental model for the time I've been here. And I'll probably try to stick to that.

I think what's actually exciting about early stage is that it's like, it's a very rare circumstance that people can be incentivized to care more about the team overall than their individual outcomes.

If you're, you know, long-term compensation capabilities are primarily equity driven and you're early stage, be a lot better to have the company succeed and you do some role that you're not super stoked about.

If it means that the company's going to succeed overall, you're probably not going to complain. As opposed to the counter of like, you know, company hits some sort of asset to it, but you get to do whatever great role that you think excites you.

That's a pretty special circumstance for us to be in. And like the investment teams at back us will like come in sometimes and talk to us and they'll say things like, Hey, you should like really savor this moment and like, enjoy this stage 'cause it's going to change dramatically in the coming months.

When people say that, you're like, okay, yeah, I got it. But then when you look back it's like super correct and super meaningful. We've really increased our team size a lot in the last few months in the last year.

And a lot of things that like formerly were problems become a complete afterthought and a bunch of new problems emerge, but things change pretty quick. I try to enjoy the day to day.

We have really big ambitions for the upcoming year and I bet on us a hundred times out of a hundred, so I think we're going to hit them. We'll see what evolves for me. We'll see what evolves for the team.

I think the things that have gotten us here on the fundamental level stay important, like hiring people who have, you know, good foundations, but then also critically like, care deeply about what they're working on as much as possible can keep their egos in check and like progressively work on that and then, you know, are willing to change their mind when like seeing new information I think is a piece that's been important too.

Eden: It's been awesome just seeing how much the product has evolved over the last few months that we've been working with you and yeah, really looking forward to seeing how things continue to grow.

The new features you're going to add, you know, I think it's all the enhancements to the user experience, like we're along for the ride with you guys and it's, yeah, we're very excited.

Is there anything else that you would want our audience to know about you or Comun or anything that you'd like to share before we wrap?

Devin: We're always hiring. If you or someone you know is deeply interested in this problem set, send us an email. We love talking to people who care about this too. And our team is composed of the people with all sorts of background stories.

I think fundamentally if you care about this problem and you're willing to dedicate time and effort to it, your background doesn't matter as much, we'll find a place for you.

Eden: And what is your website if people want to check you out?

Devin: We are Comun.app. C-O-M-U-N.app

Eden: Thank you so much Devin, for taking the time to share your experiences, your backstory. It's always awesome getting a chance to talk to a founding engineer who's actually been along for the ride for a startup since, you know, very close to the beginning.

I think you have a very special perspective and like a lot deeper of a connection to the products, the user experience. And it definitely shows in how you speak about the company and how you're leading your team and yeah, very much appreciate your perspective and unique insights.

Devin: Likewise, it's been a pleasure.