Martin Remmelgas, Codemagic — The Power of Community in Scaling DevOps and CI/CD for Flutter

David:

Hi, I'm David and this is Build to Succeed from Very Good Ventures. Today, we're joined by Martin Remmelgas, CEO of Codemagic, a company deeply embedded in the Flutter ecosystem. Martin's international background and entrepreneurial journey have shaped a unique approach to building developer tools at scale, especially for startups, but now increasingly for enterprises. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Hi, Martin. Thanks so much for coming on Build to Succeed today.

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Martin Remmelgas:

Thank you, David. It's a pleasure to be here.

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David:

Well, you and I have known each other for quite a long time now, going back to the very early days of Flutter. You were super early in the Flutter ecosystem. I thought maybe a way to get started, I think you have a pretty interesting backstory, like your personal journey, all the different places you've lived. I know you're in Estonia now and grew up in Estonia. Maybe to get us started, can you just give us a little bit about that story personally of how you got to where you are today?

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Martin Remmelgas:

Yeah, hi everyone. I grew up in Estonia and I wanted to become a chemist. So, I went to study in Edinburgh in Scotland. During my studies, I earned my money by doing door-to-door sales in America, so I got a chance to work in Montana and like Butte and Billings, also in Indiana, in Bloomington, for example, around that area and in Texas as well, south of San Antonio in the desert.

And then, in my final years of studies, or one year before the final year, I was in Singapore doing my industrial placement for a year. And turns out, I didn't want to become a chemist anymore. I wanted to change the careers. I saw some guys building startups and I also saw what an expert chemist looks like or where is this train going that I am on at the moment, and I decided maybe it's time to change trains or make a stop and to do something different.

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David:

What was it about technology that really caught your interest?

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Martin Remmelgas:

I had a dream of building a research lab in chemistry, but that takes 10 or 20 years to do. And technology, you don't have stack traces in chemistry. You can't get error messages if something goes wrong, right? But technology, it allows you to build something quite quickly compared to anything else. So that attracted me. If you have an idea, you can actually do something about it and implement it, whereas if you consider chemistry like construction work or something else like that, you require some capital, but everybody can start the technology company.

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David:

Well, and you also were telling me that about this door-to-door salesman thing that you had, and I'm curious whether that gave you any desire for speed and moving quickly because I know that you got the door slammed on you quite a few times in your door-to-door sales. How did that influence your career decisions and you, as a professional?

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Martin Remmelgas:

Sales and door-to-door sales, it teaches you a lot. The most that it teaches you is that you'll be surprised what you will get if you always expect the best. In the beginning, if you're starting out trying to sell something, you don't know what you're doing and it doesn't work out and then suddenly, it does and you'll be surprised. You can work in low income areas and succeed and you can work in high income areas and fail, and you're thinking to yourself, maybe these guys don't have money or I don't know.

There are small things that you can do that make all the difference in the world. And having this performance metrics like working hard, paying attention to the details and just not giving up and always trying to do better, it does translate to results, and it gives you a confidence in whatever you do in life that if you work hard and you're always wanting to get better, then it's like this belief that there is a light at the end of the tunnel that you will get there. So, that's what it helped me with.

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David:

Nice. It sounds like you learned some lessons early on in your career about speed, being able to move quickly and that you can't wait for that 10, 20-year cycle persistence and just working through both failure and success and a lot of that, I think, comes, you see it in your products actually. I think in terms of helping developers move more quickly, learn from what they're doing and et cetera, et cetera.

So, why don't you tell us a little bit about the story of how you got to Codemagic, which is the product you're leading today, I know in Nevercode more broadly. Tell us that story arc. How did you get that started and then what was the journey to get to Codemagic as we know it today?

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Martin Remmelgas:

Back in university, when I was in Singapore, so when I was doing my industrial placement then, I decided let's try this startup thing. So, in the summer when I came back to Estonia, I had some ideas what I wanted to build. I tried to recruit the team and we tried a startup idea, which failed. But one of the mentors at the time was CTO at Nevercode, which was the company behind Codemagic.

And after my studies I was working in Ernst & Young and then, he invited me to join Nevercode or Codemagic at the time. And that was at the inception of this, so before Flutter Live or Flutter 1.0 release, I joined right before that and Codemagic itself, it used to be a development agency quite similar to Very Good Ventures, for example, but this agency, it did an internal hackathon in 2012. And back then, if you recall, Hudson or Jenkins was the norm.

Yeah, it was painful to manage some CI pipelines, like a trial manifesto has been created and people were trying Scrum and all that stuff and managing one of the operations and processes becomes a full-time job to somebody. So, they started this idea of can we productize our knowledge and our operations to build the product out of all of this DevOps work that we're doing inside the company and sell it to our customers perhaps. So that was the idea behind Greenhouse at the time, which evolved to Nevercode, and then to Codemagic. That's where it all started and I joined right before Codemagic was launched.

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David:

Wow. So, it came from an internal hackathon and then you pivoted over to just this as a business. And you guys were super early with the Flutter focus and being big members of the Flutter community. I mean, you've been there since day one and that every major Flutter event that's ever happened, there's always been a Codemagic presence.

Even going back to, I don't know if you remember the Chrysler Building party, I remember you guys had a section of that and everything and even before events were really events for Flutter. How did that relationship with the Flutter ecosystem come about and what did it do for your team and the growth?

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Martin Remmelgas:

It came about before I joined. In the summer of 2018, I believe it was droidcon Berlin that they had this, or I think it was even this Mobile World Congress when they announced the beta, but droidcon Berlin, some of the team members went there and they saw some demos of Flutter. It's like, "Hey, people get excited about this Flutter thing. What if we do something about it?"

And so, Nevercode product, back then, it created some hack on how you can build Flutter apps. And our CMO at the time tweeted about this to Tim Sneath, who was the head of Flutter back then. And to our surprise, Tim responded and then we got to work on what is now known as Codemagic. So, we completely built a new product only for Flutter and that's how this relationship came about with Google and Codemagic.

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David:

Was it about the Flutter ecosystem at that time that made that an exciting opportunity for you?

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Martin Remmelgas:

I think the team got excited about it because the technology seemed interesting and cool. So, they were wanting to experiment and try out what is this new thing that is Flutter or Dart and people seemed really excited about this new thing.

So then, when you try it out, they realise it's quite different from any other multiplatform framework on the market and the community behind it was very, very welcoming. So, when we created this MVP or this first idea supporting the Flutter community, everybody jumped on board and was interested in joining our private Slack channel, was interested in giving feedback, being these early adopters and supporting us and feeling like, "Yeah, let's do something great for Flutter guys."

And obviously, once Google showed interest in supporting us showing that we are doing something for the community and I wanted to see that we can be a strategic partner for companies adopting Flutter so that they have a build partner that can provide CICD support for this new framework. This was like, so now you have some big player recognising you're a small player and then, you have the community getting excited about what you're doing. And so, we decided to go all in and try it if we can make it work.

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David:

That's amazing. I think you're very similar to VGV in that way, that early on in the community and there's a handful of other companies and also a lot of individuals, I think, that really grew professionally as a result of being early and deeply involved in the Flutter community.

When you look back on that strategic choice and maybe it wasn't purposeful, even with VGV in the early days, it wasn't really a purposeful decision of like, "Oh my god, Flutter is going to explode and this is going to make great business sense." It was just more like our team just liked the tool and wanted to use it, kind of what you're getting at, but when you think back and reflect how important was that early engagement and contribution to the community to Codemagic success?

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Martin Remmelgas:

It's the only reason we succeeded. Without it, we would be nothing. Nevercode was a good product, that was before Codemagic and it was a good product, people liked it, but we didn't know how to sell it and the product itself was not scalable. So, after a certain threshold the way some architecture decisions were made, the product, and this was a known issue that we couldn't take it too far.

One customer may have started to affect other customers, so this was critical for our success and if we didn't have the community to speak on our behalf or advocate for us and we didn't have Google trusting us or also putting bets on their partners, we wouldn't be here today.

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David:

Let's talk about that community aspect. So obviously, the technology choice getting recognised by Google and I think being early to an ecosystem, it creates opportunity for you to be recognised by a company like Google, whereas if you got into Android or something else, you would be swimming in a sea of tonnes of other companies that are already there.

So, the technology choice was helpful, but I know you're also a very strong advocate for community involvement, not just embracing a technology but actually showing up and engaging the community and going to the events, and talking to the community more regularly. What was the provocation or source of the desire to lean into the community in the early days of Codemagic?

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Martin Remmelgas:

So, when I joined, I joined to become this business person or be a business development person and had to come up with a plan like now that Flutter is out there, how do we now market ourselves? And we didn't have a big marketing budget either.

And so, I tried different things, but when I was, I think, it took me two, three months or something to start going into this community stuff, but I quickly started to message people in the community and ask them, "Why are you using Flutter? Where do you get your information on tools? Where do you go to meetups or where does the community get together?"

And then, I realised that there are a lot of these groups of people who are excited about Flutter that meet in different cities, and this was new for me. I hadn't worked in tech for so long and I was like, "Okay, so there are these really big fanatics that come together and start celebrating some technology. Okay, cool. What if I go to some of these meetups and see what they're like?" And then, you go there and you meet the people and they're telling you about the work that they're doing and what they're experimenting with and they're really learning to help you.

And then, I started to go more and more to these events because, first of all, I learned a lot, and secondly, you start building a network and with a little budget that we have back then, word of mouth is what I put on my bets on is trying to show up, show that I care, support what they are doing, and learn what they needed so that I can be this a devil back then or listening to what the community wanted and then doing something.

And what ended up happening is that you start getting a lot of opportunities. So, when you start keep showing up, people start inviting you suddenly or people start saying or asking you for advice, it's like, "Hey, we're thinking of doing another meetup," or "Hey, we're thinking of building a project," or "Hey, we're thinking of doing a hackathon. Do you guys want to participate?" And now, suddenly, we are somebody.

So now, suddenly, people are paying attention to us. And I've always had this belief that if you do good for the community, the community will do good back to you and you just stick to this value, this is a promise that we're going to make. And so far, it's been paying off very well. If we keep investing in the community and because ultimately, all of our customers are Flutter developers and the only customers are Flutter developers, then our success is very closely tied to Flutter's success. So, we'll do our part which is to go to these events, try to support them and listen to their feedback and it's been very, very good.

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David:

So, when you go to these events, you sponsor meetups, which has a cost obviously, get the booth and everything. You have to travel and pay for people to be there and attend these events, and you, being this visible part of the Flutter ecosystem. How did you, as a business, plan or justify or measure the ROI of that activity, because I think if there's companies maybe sitting on the sidelines of that activity, they're like, "Well, what am I going to get out of it and how do I explain this to my leadership or the budget people?" How did you guys contextualise this and what have you learned in terms of ROI of these activities?

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Martin Remmelgas:

In the beginning, there was no justification as such, so there wasn't anything. It was just what can we do, what seemed like a good idea and then started to do it. I think the ROI aspect are justifying investments, what the type of investments we're making today. Back then, first of all, I just showed up to those meetups and I tried to connect people. Let's say somebody wanted to speak at another meetup, so I just brought them two together. So that helped me a lot. But talking about the value that the community has for the business, so how do we justify that? How much should you invest in community activities.

When you're investing in ads, so then, you can have a relatively good understanding of your returns. So, that's a marketing spend. Then, you measure the number of sales that you're making. If you increase your marketing spend, do you get more sales? So, that's a fairly straightforward approach.

With community, it's a little bit different. So, those dividends start to pay later. So, one thing that's very difficult to measure is brand. So, how do you invest in brand or how much should you invest in brand? So, this is part of a community investment. How do you measure a brand return? It's very difficult to measure these things. It's something that you trust is a good investment and you put money there in the hopes you'll get returns.

How I've justified it today is if you're starting out, there is a good chance there is a default choice on the market. Let's say, if you want to build a Flutter app, maybe there used to be a default choice where you're from, what you should choose and choosing anything else is a very bold move.

Most people will argue against you. Why would you choose something else? Consider VGV or consider Codemagic. Why are you not choosing GitHub actions or why are you not choosing Jenkins? Everybody in the company has been doing it like that. Why on earth would we change something or why would we try something new?

And here is our brand plays a role, if you can say that Codemagic has been with Flutter since the beginning, and if you can make that association in person's brains that Codemagic and Flutter go hand in hand together, it's a match made in heaven, maybe you stand the chance to actually be in consideration of a customer in this case. So having this good brand is important.

Another thing that I'm getting feedback on is, or what I find valuable is product and customer feedback. You can build the best product in the world, but if you don't have a community, it's very hard to get people on the call on the phone or let's say you're about to release a new feature, you're sending hundreds of emails and no one... Let's say you put, I don't know, $10 Amazon or $100 Amazon voucher in your email saying like, "Hey, if you spend 15 minutes with me to explain the product or your feedback, I'll give you $100, you enter the raffle of a $100 Amazon voucher," and that already introduces bias. So now, you are getting people replying who care about this thing or maybe there is a wrong motivation here.

What really helped us to build a good product was this community because now, we can go and ask feedback from these guys as well that I have made friends with before. It's like a network. And I've used this when, for example, we introduced pricing. So, in the beginning, Codemagic was free. And then, when I was talking about it at some events in the States, people were very sceptical and they asked, "So what's your business model? You're a free product, so what's your business model?" And I was like, "What do you mean? It's a free product. Isn't it something to be happy about?" It's like, "No, I don't trust it."

And you wouldn't figure this stuff out unless you actually go out, talk to people and they're feel confident enough, comfortable enough, enough to share it with you. And then, you was like, okay guys, we should probably make some business case for it. Otherwise, people just not going to get it. They're thinking of stealing their data or whatever. Maybe we should explain how we make money. And coming up with our pricing model, it was very helpful.

So now, I could actually put these community people that I've met as personas and think like, okay, what are they going to say if I present this to them, and I can actually talk to them and present these ideas to them and get feedback. And that helped us to create their first pricing, for example.

Similarly, when we create the major new feature release or product release that allowed to build not only Flutter apps but other apps as well, like native applications, then how do you position that or how do you create your messaging around it that still keeps your existing community but now allows them to bring their other applications on Codemagic as well. So, in that sense as well, this community has been super helpful.

Similarly, for hiring, for content writing and many other things, the community has been very good. And how do you measure that? I think the easiest way that I've thought about it is let's say your company has certain goals that you're about to hit, so how much budget are you going to put aside to hit those goals? And community is just part of that budget. If you take it away, then there's a good chance you'll run into some problems.

Strategically, you'll find that, "Oh, we couldn't get people on the phone. It's difficult to get user interviews," or I don't know, "We couldn't find content writers. They're difficult to find," or stuff like that. "Oh, we made a bad product decision." So, having this community there is just like a booster to building good products.

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David:

Amazing. I mean, so many good things in there. It's brand, lead generation, product feedback, all the things that come with community. I think we're in an interesting phase. Those of us that have been around since the very early days of the Flutter ecosystem where it was very small and the community, you could almost know all the major voices, but now you've got all these big gigantic companies also working in Flutter.

I'd love for them to hear what you just said around the importance of showing up at these events because it's a way to really engage face-to-face with maybe your potential future hires, customers, relationships you can forge. And I think, that we have a tendency as a business people to be like, "Oh my God, what dollar can I spend and get $2 back and how quickly can it happen?" And these things are longer term investments too, like you're saying, relationships and being able to call those people up when you need the help, and that's super valuable, but hard to put a dollar figure on or something.

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Martin Remmelgas:

Yeah. Attending conferences is different. You can sponsor conference events. It's relatively easy to measure the ROI of that. How many leads did you sign up from that event and how many deals did they convert from there? But there is added value to it as well, which is this community part. How do you actually build relationships in this world?

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David:

Yeah, well, and while you're right, you can track those metrics and how many leads and contacts did you get and deals did you get out of it? But at the same time, I feel like that also can diminish the value if you're only looking at that, how many new clients did I sign up because I sponsored this event?

But realistically, I mean, I like the phrases where it depends, some people say 6 months, some people say 12 months, but your current pipeline is based on what you were doing six months or 12 months ago. And I think if you think about the, especially the 12 months, that's a long time in the future before you might start to see the results because you just don't know. Maybe somebody meets you at an event or a meetup and there's nothing happening then, but maybe a year later, they're like, "Oh, now I'm in a situation where I need a solution and maybe I'll call Martin at Codemagic.

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Martin Remmelgas:

Exactly. People buy from people they know. It's very difficult to sell something that requires trust to somebody who doesn't know you or doesn't trust you, right?

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David:

Yeah.

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Martin Remmelgas:

It's how do you always stay on top of mind of people? Even if you have the best fridge in the world, you're not going to convince somebody that already has a refrigerator to change it, but maybe you have a friend who's looking for something or maybe you're going to buy a new flat or something like that, then it's like, "Oh, I'll call Martin. He has the good fridge. I met this guy. I like him."

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David:

Yeah. Let's shift gears a little bit into the changing Flutter ecosystem because we were saying in the early days, it was a lot of enthusiasts, a lot of individual developers. You had Google in there, but I know you're in an interesting spot because you have companies that sign up to use your product and I'm curious how you've seen the Flutter ecosystem change over the years just based on the shape of the type of customer you're getting. Has it changed recently?

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Martin Remmelgas:

It has. It has changed significantly, especially in this year, in particular. We've been good at this small businesses and this community stuff where you have people and hobbyists and enthusiasts who are interested in trying your product out. And I've always believed that if you build a good foundation, let people experiment and learn and use your product, and maybe in the future when they go into positions where they can choose the tools they use, that they'll come back to you.

Well, today we are definitely seeing that and the types of companies that are coming to use Codemagic. We've got some really big companies now using it. Somebody that we've never thought was possible before, but now they are actually coming themselves and reaching out to us like, "Hey, we're interested in using Codemagic and you help us out?"

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David:

And these are massive, large enterprise-type brands?

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Martin Remmelgas:

Yeah, very big companies.

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David:

That's cool.

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Martin Remmelgas:

This was not the case before, which is the surprising part. It only and in particular, this year is when we are starting to see that. Maybe they were there before as well and only we just got lucky this year, but if you're asking what have we noticed different, then definitely, a lot of enterprise customers and in Flutter specifically, have signed up with Codemagic recently.

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David:

Do you think that's both a result of the work that you guys have been doing but also a result of where Flutter is in its maturity? Is it both of those things or one or the other, you think?

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Martin Remmelgas:

Our success is very much tied to Flutter's success as well? It's hard to pinpoint it. I don't think we've done anything that different. We continue to invest in community activities, we continue to make our products better, but have we done anything massively different in the past couple of years compared to today? I wouldn't say so. I think people we're riding the wave in a way, so you can say that we got a little bit lucky or maybe the efforts that we have been putting in all these years, they're paying off.

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David:

Well, I mean, I think anecdotally we can see that Flutter's enterprise adoption more broadly has ticked up a lot over the last couple of years. And I think one of the interesting nuances is you see it in your customer data, who's signing up, who's talking to you, who wants to use it? We see it in our client-base and I think more broadly you see it in the community, but it's not quite as visible.

One of my hypotheses, there's so many big companies using this technology comfortably and safely that the community is not even aware of. I mean, we find out monthly or even weekly about some new gigantic, highly recognisable company brand that's been using it for years even, and nobody knows. You find some job posts where someone's hiring a senior Flutter engineer or something and you're like, "What?" No one even knew. So, it's definitely been interesting and I think it's cool for that. You're actually seeing it in your data as well. It's not just anecdotal, you're actually seeing it happen.

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Martin Remmelgas:

Actually, something, what we have done recently, maybe this is a big reason for all of this, enterprise is paying attention, I think now already for two years, we have been this SOC 2 audit company, so we have this ongoing audit, like the SOC 2 type 2 audit.

Previously, we didn't advertise it this much, but this time, we put it on this enterprise page that we have this SOC 2 because some customers, we promised them that we're going to get it and that their contract depended on it. So now, that we have it, we have been getting more interest. So actually, I take it back, maybe we did do something, so maybe this SOC 2 thing has helped us a lot.

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David:

You're probably right in that regard, in that certain highly-regulated industries, financial services, these types of things, they need that security, that compliance in order to feel comfortable moving forward. And I think that's probably a symptom both of Flutter's maturity and of your maturity as a business where you get to a certain point where all of a sudden, you can actually invest in doing that, because we just went through it as well. We just got it also.

And it's a pain. It's not an easy thing to do, and there's all these rules and things you have to set up and audit some things that you have to do, and it seems a little like, "Ugh, why do we have to do this?" But, these bigger companies, these large enterprises, they not only need it, they require it. And so, I think it's also a thing where Flutter itself gets more mature, it gets more safe, and it's a safe choice.

Whereas two, three, four or five years ago, Flutter was a very risky choice for an enterprise business, but now I don't think it's seen that way. It's seen as very reliable and something that any company can make, but the fact that you are getting to that point where, two years ago, you went through that step, it unlocks a whole new set of opportunities, not just for Codemagic, but probably for the overall community of saying, "Hey, this is a stable, reliable ecosystem that you can participate in as a business."

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Martin Remmelgas:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And the reports themselves, I think what problem does it solve, right? What problem does this, having this report solved and not having it, it doesn't solve. We are still as secure as we were before.

That's not really what this report is for, but buying our product, when previously, if an enterprise customer wanted to use us, they would have to fill in a bunch of forms anyway, but now, if we didn't have this audited report to show, they would've spent months filling in security questionnaire reviews and all those things before they could adopt us. But this is a feature for their risk team, so that they can more easily use us, so that they have some standardised report that they can use.

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David:

Well, there's a couple of things you're talking about here that are important. I think when we think about digital technologies and building product companies like you guys have built here, building tools for a community of people to grow, there's definitely product and technology choices, but there's also brand and marketing choices around getting involved in community or even process and these SOC 2 type choices, that's not really a product decision.

It's not like you've done something in your actual product to make it a new feature or some new thing that it can do, but in choosing to invest your business's resources in doing that, can unlock a new set of opportunities. That being said, are there things in Codemagic that you guys are working on? Where does the tool go next or what new features have you added recently?

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Martin Remmelgas:

Yeah, Codemagic, the coolest feature that we added recently is to do with this collaboration between or how you can test your apps easily. If today you had to share a build with somebody, like let's say you're working on a button or let's say you're working on a page and now you want it to show the latest to the designer, then there's a good chance the designer had to instal the new version on their phones and test it, which isn't necessarily bad, but I think we can make it better.

And now, Codemagic allows you to have application previews. So, we call this product Stellar, where if Codemagic produces you a build, you can now open it in the browser that's running on a real iOS simulator or an Android emulator, which is really cool actually, because if you have access to a simulator or an emulator, that'll also give you access to the developer tools in that. Imagine changing location on your device or changing language or text styles or sizes.

Let's say you want to see what the app looks like in Arabic, for example, then these are all things that are relatively complicated to do on a physical device. And secondly, sharing a build immediately as a link is I think a better user experience than having to download it and test it on test flight and then leave feedback over there.

So, this is a cool feature that we have and what we've been working on. We have ideas how to progress it even further. Don't want give out too much yet, but today, we're introducing this app previews thing what Codemagic users have access to.

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David:

No, that's super exciting. Congrats on the new feature, and that does sound very compelling. Definitely, it's interesting because where you guys got started was being able to accelerate these builds and do the distributions, but you're right, getting someone to instal it on the phone, and I know people have experimented with using Flutter Web to do those things, but actually being able to run it in a real simulator, real emulators is very cool, and congrats on the new feature.

So, just to wrap this up, I mean, we've talked about so many things here, the importance of community brand building. You guys got in super early. I'm curious, as you've progressed through this, what are some of the lessons you've learned and maybe advice to someone who might be an early member of a startup, a tech company, what are some of the lessons you've learned that you think you would give advice to if you could go back in time?

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Martin Remmelgas:

I think trusting yourself is important and trying to catch yourself on whether you are too hopeful, whether you are ignoring facts or reality and trying to be overly optimistic. Then, catching yourself there sometimes, it's like trying to rationalise decisions is probably not the great idea. So, trying to be more objective at times is good. But if you're starting out and you're considering then trying to get on board, like technology, like Flutter at the moment, it's super good.

We've seen as well that Shorebird, for example, launched and everybody is excited about this stuff. If you can launch something for a specific segment, market segment, and this will automatically build love for you, and having this community love for your product is something that I think it's very difficult for competitors to do, especially if they're large companies. So, going after a small segment in the beginning, it'll pay dividends to you. So yeah, that, I think, was a good choice, and if others are considering it, then now is a good time to get [inaudible 00:33:51].

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David:

Yeah, actually, I'm curious about that because we talk about, "Oh, we got started seven," eight years ago now in the Flutter community, and we're talking about enterprise maturity and adoption, but that I think Flutter is still only really just getting started in the grand scheme of things, of what's possible. Do you think that there's still plenty of opportunity for startups? What pain points or niche opportunities do you see that the community maybe could go solve or what advice would you give to people to get started in the Flutter ecosystem?

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Martin Remmelgas:

Actually, if you think about it, considering the number of developers on Google's side who are working on Dart and Flutter and considering the user base that they have for Dart and Flutter, you wouldn't expect that such a small time, the team can serve such a massive market to do a good job at it at the same time. I think at the Google IO, it was said about a third of the new apps that are released to the stores or Flutter applications.

So, the question is how do you pick an idea or what problems am I seeing in the community? But the good news is that everybody can check what problems exist in the community if they check the Flutter issue tracker. So, if you go and actually using these AI tools now, maybe an interesting way to do it, so if you go, maybe somebody who's listening can try it, if you ask AI what problems exist in the Flutter ecosystem by looking at the issues or maybe looking at the sentiment that's on X or maybe looking at what's being posted in Stack Overflow if people still use it or in Reddit.

Now, it's best time I think to try to get these ideas because the data is all out there and now actually, we have some tools to read it, when previously it has been difficult perhaps. So, in trying to pick to talk about the issues, I think, is a good place to start.

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David:

I think most people, not most people, but one of the things that a naysayer against a community like Flutter or somebody might come in and say, "Oh, well look at all these unsolved issues that are open on the Flutter repo," or "Does this get enough support from Google?" But I think you've just reframed it as, don't look at that as a weakness of Flutter, look at that as opportunity.

Go find something important and high scale, because you're right, there is this disconnect. So many engineers, so many teams, so much I think commerce being driven by the Flutter ecosystem right now. Really, you're right, being supported by, on a scale, relative scale, not the biggest team in the world in terms of the folks who actually work at Google doing this. Not that it's a small team, but that the disconnect between how big that team is and how big the market is, is quite large. Tonnes of opportunity in there to go find something to do.

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Martin Remmelgas:

Exactly. Think about it, you have a third of the old apps that are released in the world are Flutter applications, and there is a small team, not a small, but a good team, good talented team supporting it, but the demand for all the tools, what you need to now release these apps and maintain these apps and grow these apps, this is still there.

And I think companies like Widgetbook, Dart Code Metrics, Shorebird, there's a bunch of other ones, all of them have proven that you can build a business with this. And Eric, who was one of the guys who started Flutter or founded it, is putting all his eggs in this one basket that is betting on Flutter to be big. Why shouldn't you? So, I think there is definitely room for opportunity here, a lot of developer tools that can be built.

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David:

Yeah, that's super, super insightful, and I hope anybody who's in the developer community of Flutter that listens to this takes that to heart and says, "Oh, there's huge opportunity that if I can go find something that I'm passionate about, that I can solve a problem for a lot of people, that can be the foundation for a business that I build," or even if it's not a business, just something that I really deeply care about and passionate where I make a difference to the community.

One of the things when I was at Fluttercon EU that I observed in the same hall as Droidcon and Droidcon would have two or three or four, even five competitors that are doing a similar thing. And when you go to the Flutter side, usually there's only one or two, but when you think about the relative size, that's another example of that.

There's the Flutter team building at Google building for all of these engineers, but then there's all the companies, and I forget who I was talking to, but we were talking about like, "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if actually there were competitors all here where they're selling the same thing?" And you might not want that, but if you think about it for Codemagic, if you had across the way from you, the aisle in the Flutter space, somebody who's competing with you, I'm curious to your thoughts, but I think that's good for the ecosystem because that drives innovation.

That drives momentum. It drives competition to make the ecosystem better and continue to do more and more and more things. And so, I think it's exciting and there's a lot of opportunity for people to jump in and just create new things that can make a big impact.

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Martin Remmelgas:

Yeah, absolutely. And we have a lot of competitors. We always have to answer this question, how do we still win if we are small and we're competing against big companies, or even if we have direct competitors, like what sets us apart? Because if we don't set ourselves apart, we're going to die. It's going to fade out.

So, it forces you to innovate and forces you to do better, and this will always lead to better products for the community. So, the more competition there is, it's a guarantee you're going to get more affordable products, better features, more of everything. So yeah, come join the party.

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David:

Yeah, wonderful. Well, Martin, thank you so much for joining and sharing your insights today. It's amazing to hear the story arc, both for you personally and for Codemagic and embracing the Flutter community so early. And it's just wonderful to hear that even especially this year, really growing quite a lot and seeing a lot of exciting new opportunities. If people want to learn more about Codemagic or try out your new app previews feature, where can they find out more?

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Martin Remmelgas:

Codemagic.io And in particular, you'll note this app previews in one of the sidebars if you log in, so you can check it out there.

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David:

Awesome. Well, I look forward to seeing you at many more community events. I'm sure we'll see you there for a long time, and thanks again.

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Martin Remmelgas:

Yeah, thanks for listening everyone, and thanks, David, for inviting me. Cheers.

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David:

Thank you for joining us on Build to Succeed, a Very Good Ventures podcast. We hope you enjoy exploring the experiences and insights of leaders that have built successful digital products. Please take a moment to leave us a review, and if you want to get our latest episodes, don't forget to subscribe. Thanks again and see you next time.

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