Mihaela Popa
2 Dec 2021
•
4 min read
Walnut is the first Sales Experience Platform that makes the B2B sales process personalized, consistent, and efficient for prospects.
Founded in July 2020 by Yoav Vilner and Danni Friedland, the 100% codeless platform’s mission is to assist SaaS companies in delivering flawless product demos that put their prospects in the center of the conversation.
Being able to design and edit the sales demo without the need for coding frees up a significant amount of resources and eliminates the need for cross-collaboration between sales departments and back-end teams such as R&D, product development, and graphic design, giving the sales team full creative control over the demonstration.
Discover Walnut: The First Sales Experience Platform from Walnut.io on Vimeo.
In its first year, Walnut has raised a total of $21 million from leading investors in Silicon Valley, England and Israel, and has won prestigious titles ranging from "Top 50 Startups to Work for Globally" to "Top 3 Must-Have Startups of the Year.”
Walnut serves more than 60 B2B clients, including Adobe, NetApp, Varonis and People AI. In addition to Tel Aviv, the company has offices in New York and London.
We chatted with Danni Friedland, Walnut’s Co-founder and CTO about their biggest achievement over the last year, their tech stack, how they are managing their remote team, interview processes and more.
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Growing the company from 10 to 40 while focusing on keeping the culture and not compromising on the quality of the people we bring in was probably the hardest challenge and I feel that we managed to do that in the best way possible.
We’re using Elixir + GQL on the backend and ReScript + React on the frontend. We’ve chosen Elixir on the backend as back then when we started it provided the best compromise between dev experience and long-term maintainability and stability - the 3 things we care most about here at Walnut. I think Phoenix and Elixir are one of the best examples of community building and long-term planning. If only I could get the same thing with type-safety it would be just perfect. We chose rescript mainly because we suffered so much working with vanilla JS and/or Typescript. VanillaJS just doesn't scale(in terms of system size) - forcing you to work hard on tests for any decent stability. While Typescript is, surprisingly, felt even worse, making you feel safe while still not being safe at all (felt like carrying a broken umbrella with me.. all was great until the rain would start).
As our customer base grew 800% in the past year, and the product demands increased, we’re now focusing on putting in place a lot of infrastructure to scale our system further. The great thing about Elixir is that it allows us to focus on shipping product features and not focus on optimizations for performance. So the team is hard at work introducing async job queues to the system, making demo creation more stable and efficient and in general scaling various places in our system while preparing for the next growth spur.
I was thinking a lot about what to write here that will be truthful but also not sounding too salesy. And decided to just ask the team what they think the culture here is, and here are direct, unfiltered, quotes:
The onboarding process really depends on the team, we aim for engineers to be able to push to production within their first day or two. And depending on previous experience engineers spend their time going through our onboarding checklist, reading documentation, and start contributing to small parts of the system. We also do a lot of pair-programming sessions to teach various parts of the system
Honestly, we’re trying to build an engineering driven organization while also having the luxury of having a product that’s in high demand and is growing like crazy.
Isn’t that the dream place to be at? Good news is - Walnut are hiring - so make sure to check out their open roles now!
Thanks for reading and happy coding, Mihaela x
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