The Dots

The Dots was struggling to operate and grow. Its codebase had been inherited from a previous business in Australia, and the offshore team maintaining it was fighting to keep things running. Without a complete rebuild, the business was going to fail.

I joined as fractional CTO to fix that. My scope was to rebuild the platform from the ground up, hire an engineering team, and get The Dots to a place where it could scale.

The remit ran wider than the rebuild. GDPR arrived during my tenure, and I led the company’s compliance and privacy work when the regulation was new territory for everyone. I introduced OKRs and led that process, interviewed and selected incoming hires, advised on org design, and sat in the room when the company met Atomico to raise capital.

The startup raised a venture capital round led by Hambro Perks. With stakeholder backing and a clear mandate, I began rearchitecting the database and back-end services from scratch. The new platform had to support a growing feature set and integrate cleanly with external systems.

I built the technical foundation that everything else would sit on, then hired engineers to help the business execute at speed.

A core goal from the outset was reaching a larger audience through mobile apps. The legacy system made this impossible. It restricted how data could flow between the database and users. I took an API-first approach on stress-tested frameworks, so one set of services could power the website, the iOS app, and future client-side applications.

I established a shared, open-standards specification to avoid thrash between the engineering teams. This helped the team ship faster and land features on every platform at once.

One of the hardest parts of any replatforming is porting existing data. Years of accumulated user data had to move from a monolithic, outdated system into the new architecture. Every legacy data structure was remapped to the new schema.

With an expanded suite of products (web, iOS), it became critical to unify the experience. Whether you were on the website or a mobile app, you needed to know you were on The Dots.

The design language was clean and modern. Professional without losing the creative edge its audience expected. And a design token system kept the palette, typography, spacing, and components consistent across every platform.

The web and mobile clients were built with React and React Native, sharing common components and a large part of the codebase between platforms. As a result, engineers could move quickly, and the experience stayed consistent wherever members used it.

I’m Pip Jamieson, founder of The Dots. Forbes called us the next LinkedIn.

The way The Dots works is people post projects, and then tag the full team around that project. So it can be an app that goes up, and says: this is the UI designer, UX designer, front-end engineer, back-end engineer. It could be a redesign of a whole building — this was the interior architect team. And in essence, we’re like a living wiki of projects and the people and teams behind them.

Back end and front end was just completely linked. We didn’t have APIs from the back end, for example, which was starting to get really tricky as we moved into sort of the app space. And also, the technology had just got a bit old. We were literally rebuilding the platform from scratch.

I started working with Josh straight after our first round of investment. The first phase was brilliant, because it was really starting to future-proof the business — you know, where did we want to take it in 5, 10, 15 years?

Search for us is the kind of thread that binds the entire platform — from the perspective of the over 10,000 businesses that now use us to hire talent, that’s primarily search-based now, to our community discovering each other. It’s a highly complex area, especially with the amount of data that we have. Working alongside Josh to think through that very complex issue was fantastic. That manifested in terms of the choice of the platform that we used, all the search technology we used, but more in terms of the data structure, which was the most important thing for the long-term future of the site.

It’s wonderful how, when you work with someone, you’ve got something in your mind, and they make it 10 times better than you thought it would be.

One of the things that was really helpful with Josh in those early days is — again, because I’m a non-tech founder — recognising: is a good engineer a good engineer? And that’s where Josh came in, in terms of an advisory capacity, ensuring that those people were world class. I now have a world-class engineering team.

Really, the core things that Josh enabled was future-proofing the business, basically reducing the churn of the clients that we had. On the flip side, as well, it was helping us bring more value to the community that we were servicing.

I’d absolutely recommend Josh. He is brilliant at being helicoptered into a problem and working alongside a founder. He challenges in the right way. That wonderful mix of business acumen and technical acumen is particularly valuable for non-tech founders.

Thanks to Josh working with me in those early days, I’ve been able to supersize what he was into the insanely amazing team that I have now. And so, yeah, I’m really grateful.