One of our core values at RevenueCat is being customer-obsessed — and it’s pretty easy for us because many of our team members happen to be RevenueCat customers too. We encourage our employees to build their own apps and to share what they’ve learned with the rest of the team.

Since we chat about our own apps pretty frequently and have several team members who are interested in building their first app, we’ve started a little something called the Employee App Club.

How it works

The Employee App Club meets twice a month on Zoom and has a dedicated Slack channel. We use our time together to show off new features in our apps, give each other feedback, brainstorm how to solve problems, daydream about WWDC announcements, and share our experiences and tips on programming techniques.

Everyone is welcome — regardless of their experience level, background, or preferred tech stack. Our members come from across the company, including the engineering, sales, and support teams.

Learning from each other

My favorite part of the club is being able to ask tricky questions that pop up while building an app and having a community I can lean on for help.

César, one of our SDK engineers, has been planning to build an app for a while. In his research, he’s discovered some compliance challenges in the app-building process.

“Compliance is getting harder and harder, especially if you target all countries. But you can get helpful feedback on how to do it if you talk with different app developers,” he said.

Luckily, the Employee App Club has members of all different backgrounds, several of whom have experience navigating compliance challenges.

“Through chatting with other app developers on our team, I learned that there are some tricks, such as using iCloud for storage instead of a service like Firebase, that can help to circumvent some of the legal burden,” César said.

Several of our members are building an app for the first time, and the App Club has helped them learn the ropes.

Khanh, one of our front-end engineers, has built web apps before but never a mobile app. And she really wanted to explore mobile app building to learn more about the world of subscriptions..

“After doing some research, I decided to go with Expo. I watched YouTube videos and read documentation, but I found it really hard to set up the project, despite spending a few weekends on it. That’s when I decided to join the Employee App Club to ask for help and find out if there were any alternatives to Expo,” she said.

Ultimately, Khanh decided to stick with Expo, since she works with React.

“Carlos and Josh, app developers and my RevenueCat teammates, assured me that getting the project started is one of the most challenging parts, which made me feel much better about my struggles. This project has been a great learning experience for me and has helped me become a better software engineer.”

Serving our customers better

Having a group of app developers on our team helps us understand the challenges developers experience every day. It helps us come up with ways to make in-app purchases easier to work with and is a great resource for anyone in the company who has questions about how apps work:

Tina, one of our developer support engineers, says the Employee App Club has helped the support team track down and fix bugs. She pointed out that App Store Connect needs production data to display charts, and the support team uses the Employee App Club to help pull this information.

“Having app developers inside the company helps the support team quickly gather the necessary information, without going back and forth with the developer in a ticket. Thanks to members of the Employee App Club, we were able to collect definitions straight from Apple’s charts,” she told me. “Referencing Apple’s docs lets us better understand why discrepancies exist between RevenueCat’s and Apple’s analytics systems.”