The Story of Building the SeaPeople App

We're gonna be honest — podcasting turned out to be even more eye-opening and simply interesting than we expected. This time, for the second episode of Software Mention, we invited someone who's been building software for 30 years and is great at it. Jean-Michel Lemieux led engineering at Atlassian, was CTO at Shopify, and then decided to start a startup. A social app for boaters, built with two developers, targeting a million users.

Mateusz Basiak sat down with Jean-Michel to talk about SeaPeople, small teams moving fast, and what it actually means to build something from zero. Check the highlights of our conversation.

What is SeaPeople?

“Sea People's basically the combination of Strava, WhatsApp, and maybe Instagram or Facebook. It's basically a social platform for boaters. And the whole purpose is to bring boaters and the community together because being on the boat, whether you're out in the middle of the ocean, you're coastal, or you're on a lake. One aspect is it's dangerous, and you do need help, and you need a great network of people. But maybe, the simplest way, it's like the Strava for boaters.”

Why do you think, no one built this before?

“A lot of the apps we have are pretty generic, and they treat location as something that's really, really precious. How many people share their location in iMessage, for example, with their family? Or Life360 is another app. It's all protected. Whereas for boaters, we kind of inverse that relationship. When you're on a boat in the water, we always broadcast our location. So what would an app look like, if broadcasting your location to others was actually permissive? It was something like we're already doing all the time, which is what we do on boats. Now you show up to an anchorage and I'm like, I want to see who's around me. It's almost like no one else could have built this because they didn't understand how boaters live their lives.”

Can you run an app with a million users with just two developers?

“I came from leading a team of 4,000 developers and then I was leading a team of two. My purpose with SeaPeople was: could we run an app with a million users with two developers? What would it take to do that? Why not? And this was a pre-AI bubble. We started this two and a half years ago. I kept it super simple. I want to be able to run it on my laptop, I want these technologies that we're using to kind of scale with us.”

How to stay fast when everyone else seems to be slowing themselves down?

“I don’t overplan. I don't go, in two years we're going to build this. I go: what's the most important thing we're going to do now? Let's make it really, really good. And then, once we're done that, we're going to look at it. I hate overplanning because things go too quickly. Organizations as a whole overplan way too much and they overplan because they feel it gives them safety and security and confidence — and I think it gives them slowness and bad decisions.”

Was React Native the obvious choice for SeaPeople?

“I was maybe a bit biased, but it was, I guess, one of the first companies who kind of embraced React Native at Shopify. I used the alpha of React Native in 2015, I believe, 2014, 2015, when Facebook launched it. And when React Native came out, like something in my brain goes, I've seen this thing before. Also, I'm impatient. So like, there's no way I'm learning another, another, another one. Like, I'm not learning Swift. I already do React Native and I went with this thing that I knew and it turned out to be a good bet.”

What to actually look for in a development partner?

“I wanted a hugely technical team. I wanted no bullshit, just great technical people who could help with the innards of Expo and React Native because I knew that that's where we're going to. You know, I could figure out the rest, but I think tracking down and having access to the committers who are actually on Expo, that was the most valuable thing. I knew that we're gonna hit some quirks of React Native and Expo. I didn't want to bash my head, I wanted to just go to the source. So that's why I picked you guys.”

What's the difference between giving your team a task and giving them a mission?

“I want to give people missions, not tasks. Hey, we need milestones in the app because we want to shorten onboarding — go build it. I expect developers to go look at competitors, go look at how other people have done it, become great product engineers. Now, ironically, maybe I was right ten years ago — that's what engineers have turned into with AI now. We're all product managers.”

The takeaway

There's a lot more interesting takes in the full episode, including Jean-Michel Lemieux's take on why Android keeps you honest, what nearly broke everything during a major refactor, and why he thinks B2C is the hardest thing you can build. Watch the full conversation on Spotify or YouTube.