Almost eight months after Toronto-based VarageSale announced that it was laying off nearly 30 staff, including its VP of engineering, the company announced that it is adding Craig Dunk to its team as its new VP of Engineering.
“We are extremely excited to welcome Craig to the VarageSale family. He brings a breadth of experience managing and scaling tech companies that will be an important part of VarageSale’s continued success,” said Andrew Sider, CEO of VarageSale.
Dunk has over 15 years of experience in developing mobile apps and services, including his experience as a co-founder at Metranome, which was acquired by D2L. Dunk joined D2L, which raised $85 million in their latest round of financing from OMERS, as VP of Product Architecture. Dunk was also employee #50 at RIM, where he scaled BBM.
In his new role, Dunk will oversee all engineering functions including Software Development, QA, and DevOps. Speaking with BetaKit, Sider said that part of the restructuring of the company earlier this year was a desire for product-driven growth, rather than paid advertising. “We wanted to make it more clear to the market how our product is focused on hyperlocal, trusted communities and that experience has attracted a unique user type,” said Sider. “Eighty-five percent of our users are women, and the bulk of those are moms with children under five. They live in the suburbs, they own a home, so part of making the structural changes was developing and focusing on those two things, and we’re at the point where our efforts are starting to hit and were seeing momentum.”
Sider said that Dunk is key to leading this product-driven growth, and helping to keep up the company’s momentum as someone who has experience with scaling. “There’s a big push for product-led signup growth, and we’re really working on team development programs. We’re hiring another 10 engineers, making sure we integrate those teams well and we get new product teams up and running.”
