Founded in March 2010, Primitus, an angel-backed startup, is a web development lab located in Hong Kong Science & Technology Park. We focus on building and iterating on new Internet/Mobile products and bringing the best to the market. Our vision is to build Primitus into a lasting world-class technology company and the first truly global brand in China. At the same time, we would like to create a corporate culture capable of sustaining the business year after year.
Our definition of success has three basic ingredients — positive impact, happiness, and financial reward. We are excited about the opportunities ahead and ready for the challenge. We believe that from excitement and bold moves, great things often happen.
Primitus is a member company of the Incu-Tech Incubation Program, HK Science & Technology Park
As we keep looking towards the future, these core values guide our actions.
Primitus follows the Customer Development and Lean Startup methodology created by visionary entrepreneurs Steve Blank and Eric Ries. They are disciplined approaches to building companies that really matter. Based on the premise that startups tend to fail through lack of customers rather than lack of technology or product features, these methods are systematic ways of identifying who the customer is, what it is they need and whether that need is sufficient to build a business on. As a result, startups can dramatically reduce the risk associated with bringing a new product to market by building the company from the ground up for rapid iteration and learning.
Resume Tracker strives to be the easiest way to collect and manage resumes online for SMB. It eliminates the inefficiency of an HR email inbox, improves candidate quality, and reduces time-to-hire.
We provide users with their own careers site to handle job applications and to manage applicant information.
Jiepang China’s leading location-based social app which helps friends share where they are offline and in real-time. To date, over 300 brands have partnered with Jiepang including Starbucks, McDonalds, Nike, Louis Vuitton and more to serve its over 1.3M users in the greater China region.
Primitus is responsible for Jiepang’s busienss development and marketing activities in Hong Kong.
Compared to many companies in HK, working at Primitus is a whole different experience. We think inefficient corporate bureaucracy, annoying co-workers, and disrespectful bosses suck. We are trying to build a new kind of company that employees are proud to be part of. We hope to create an environment that employees will treat our work less of a job, but more of an opportunity to make a positive impact on the lives of others.
Yet changing the status quo from scratch requires a wide variety of skills. That's why at Primitus, every team member is a hands-on contributor, and everyone wears several hats. Our goal is to build a small team of people who share the same values but bring a different and complementary set of skills.
We don't really care if you have a degree. We just care if you share our values, have a strong passion in building great Internet products, and has a personality that fits with ours.
Our vision is to build Primitus into a long lasting company. In order to do so, we need to create a great company culture to attract exceptional talents who can create great products which produce happy customers and financial success. Many companies start the opposite way by figuring out a way to make money and then making their people and culture an afterthought. We look to Zappos, Netflix, Google, Apple, Salesforce.com, innocent drinks, Patagonia, Virgin, Disney, Starbucks, Toyota and Pixar as our cultural models. At our company, we have mutual respect for one another no matter what titles you have. We enforce a strict no-assholes policy which means "We don't hire assholes here".
Also, we strongly believe that a successful company needs to have a corporate mission that is bigger than making a profit. Primitus has adopted a community involvement program based on the famous 1/1/1 integrated philanthropy model used by Google, PalmOne and Salesforce.com. We will contribute 1% of product, 1% of equity, and 1% of employee hours back to the communities it serves.
To get a feeling of our culture and work atmosphere, you can check out our Tumblr Blog. Below are some highlights of our journey so far:
Our vision is straightforward - to build Primitus into a lasting world-class technology company and the first truly global brand in China. This is no easy task though. Working at Primitus offers you a chance to help make it reality. Want to be part of something big? Let's talk.
The most important benefit we can offer is the work itself. At Primitus, you will have the chance to solve interesting problems while having a positive impact on the world. Life is too short to spend your precious time on trivial and unfulfilling works. To help you meet the challenge, we are creating a workplace culture that gives us rapid learning, accelerated responsibility, and a zero-politics work environment, which is unusual compared to many companies in Hong Kong.
At the end of the day, an organization can only be as good as its people. We try to recruit a select crew of people who are smart, creative, up for any challenge, and incredibly excited about what they do on a shared mission. The kind of people you'd want to hang around. We respect other people's opinions but aren't afraid to speak our mind. We make sure you will be in very good company.
Startups have two advantages: stealth and speed. So speed is our primary operating principle. We run our company with that principle in mind everyday; each Primitus product has only 2-4 people developing it. We communicate openly and honestly to minimize politics so everyone has a voice. We care deeply about the speed and quality of everything we do, and we don't think much of formalities or convention. Our goal is to maintain a culture of openness and trust from the inside out.
At Primitus, we use new and effective technology to our advantage. We develop primarily in Ruby on Rails, Objective C, some PHP, MySQL, MongoDB, HTML 5, CSS 3, SASS, Javascript (jQuery), Node.js and Git. We follow Agile Software Development methodologies, such as Scrum and Extreme Programming, helping us to produce higher quality software more productively. If you're not afraid to dive into new and unfamiliar technologies, Primitus may be the place for you.
Everything we do here is design. A lot of people think of design as visual, something that looks pretty. But we think design is more than that. It is also about efficiency and making things simple. So we consider Engineering as part of the design process. Every Primitus product has to be beautifully designed. Everybody at Primitus shares this passion. We want to design the beautiful and build the impossible.
In order to innovate, you have to experiment. And when you experiment, you can fail. Yet we like to tinkering and experimenting product ideas because we believe successful startups don't begin with brilliant ideas - they discover them. We think little bets are more likely to lead to big ideas than big bets. By placing small bets, we can iterate as cheaply and quickly as possible to learn about valuable problems and opportunities. We experiment product ideas in continuous cycles. In each cycle, many things are prototyped, a few are launched, most are failed, and if we are lucky, one will be spun out into a viable company that have a big impact. Then the cycle begins again. If all this crazy talk makes sense to you, we'd love to connect.
We are always looking for people who can create great Internet products, especially multi-talented engineers and designers who have a strong passion in startups. If you'd like to join us but don't see a vacancy that suits you, don't hesitate to contact us with your story, resume or portfolio.