The Shape of Work

#201: Daniel Sternlicht of Common Ninja on his startup story, and building a developer community

March 11, 2022 Springworks Season 1 Episode 201
The Shape of Work
#201: Daniel Sternlicht of Common Ninja on his startup story, and building a developer community
Show Notes

Daniel Sternlicht is an entrepreneur and Software Engineer - CEO and Founder of Common Ninja. Common Ninja is an online marketplace for web developers offering a large selection of free, customizable, and responsive apps, plugins & widgets.

Daniel's background is a career in web development—including working with companies like Microsoft, Outbrain.

In addition to his daily work in these companies, Daniel would work on side projects, and as a developer, dealt with boring and repetitive tasks. For example, designing a comparison table and adding functionality to it such as search, sorting, and pagination, etc.

To solve this problem, he created an online tool for generating these kinds of tables and offered it as an open-source project for the developer community. And since then, there’s been no looking back.

In this episode, we discuss with Daniel:

  • The story behind his startup, Common Ninja and the name
  • Two major hurdles while building a developer platform
  • His vision towards building an awesome developer community
  • How COVID became a catalyst in the growth of Common Ninja?


Follow Daniel on LinkedIn.

Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast host:
Moshe Vhanunu

About Springworks:

Springworks is a fully-distributed HR technology organization that is building tools and products to simplify recruitment, on-boarding, employee engagement, and retention. The product stack from Springworks includes:

SpringVerify — B2B verification platform

EngageWith — employee recognition and rewards platform that enriches company culture

Trivia — a suite of real-time, fun, and interactive games platforms for remote/hybrid team-building

SpringRole — verified professional-profile platform backed by blockchain, and

SpringRecruit — a forever-free applicant tracking system.

Springworks prides itself on being an organization focused on employee well-being and workplace culture leading to a 4.8 rating on Glassdoor for the 200+ employee strength company.