Winter 2025
Growth Engineer Intern
Posted on 9/8/2025
Bonsai
11-50 employees
Back-office software for freelancers
No salary listed
Paris, France
In Person
 Growth & Marketing (2) |
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- A strong interest in growth marketing and/or technical growth engineering
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Comfort with data analysis and the ability to draw insights from metrics
- Exposure to technical skills (e.g., scripting, automation, or web development) OR a background in marketing with some technical curiosity
- Growth Initiatives: Support the execution of customer acquisition campaigns across paid and organic channels
- Content at Scale: Help develop and automate processes to create and distribute video and written content, especially for social media platforms
- Scripting & Automation: Write scripts (in code and content) to streamline and scale video production workflows
- SEO & Distribution: Create and optimize content to improve organic search rankings, repurpose content for multiple platforms, work on our backlinking strategy
- Data Analysis & Reporting: Track key metrics, analyze performance data, and provide actionable insights to improve growth efforts
- Experimentation: Run A/B tests and growth experiments to identify what drives engagement and conversion
- Research: Conduct market and competitor analysis to surface growth opportunities
- Experience with basic coding, scripting, or web development projects
- Experience with video creation, or scaling content processes
- Familiarity with marketing tools like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or email platforms
- Eye for design and content aesthetics
- Hands-on experience at a fast-growing, global startup
- Opportunity to learn directly from experienced marketers, product managers, and engineers
- Potential for a full-time role after the internship
- A chance to make a real impact on a product that helps small businesses succeed
Bonsai provides an integrated back-office software platform for freelancers and small businesses. It combines proposals, contracts, time and task tracking, project management, CRM, invoicing, payments, expenses, and financial reporting in one subscription-based system, with a client portal and integrations to QuickBooks, Calendly, and Zapier. It differentiates itself by targeting freelancers with a tightly integrated suite that includes legal documents, tax estimation tools, and a dedicated Bonsai Cash business account. Its goal is to reduce administrative work for independent professionals so they can focus more on their core work.
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
Growth Equity (Venture Capital)
Total Funding
$19.3M
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Founded
2015
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Zoom acquisition closed end-2025 expands reach to Zoom's small business users.
- Subscription tiers scale from solo at $25/month to teams at $59/user.
- Global user base grows via integrations with QuickBooks, Calendly, and Zapier.
What critics are saying
- Oase steals teams with €49/month flat pricing and built-in design reviews.
- Zoom integration alienates freelancers, driving 70% churn to FreshBooks within 6 months.
- Post-acquisition engineer exodus from San Francisco halts tax tool updates in 12 months.
What makes Bonsai unique
- Bonsai integrates proposals, contracts, invoicing, and tax prep for solo freelancers.
- Y Combinator W16 graduate serves 500,000 users with US-focused freelancer tools.
- Bonsai Cash provides dedicated banking for freelancer expenses and taxes.
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Benefits
Remote Work Options
Paid Vacation
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↑ 19%1 year growth
↑ 21%2 year growth
↑ 35%Bonsai vs Oase: built for solos vs built for the studio. Louie & Lam Bonsai is good software. The proposal flow is clean. The contracts are solid. The tax tooling is better than most accountants will give you. If you're a freelancer sending proposals and invoicing one or two clients at a time, it's hard to beat. But Bonsai isn't an agency tool. It was built for a team of one, and the seams show the second a second designer joins. What Bonsai nails. The solo loop: * Lead comes in. * Send a proposal. * Get it signed. * Track your time. * Invoice. * Repeat. Bonsai maps to this perfectly. Templates, automations, an interface that stays out of the way. A CRM that doesn't feel like a CRM. Expense tracking wired into tax prep. For a team of one, that loop is the business. If you're solo, stop reading. Use Bonsai. What happens when you hire your second designer. Your bill goes from $25 to $50/month. Still fine. You set them up, assign a project, go back to work. Two weeks in: * You're reviewing their work over email. Bonsai has no design review. * You're on Slack to coordinate. Bonsai's messaging is client-facing only. * Three projects are running in parallel. You don't know who's loaded, who's free, or what's on fire. * Your old freelance clients loved the portal. Your new agency clients are confused by it. None of this is Bonsai's fault. It wasn't built for this. Solo-to-agency isn't a feature gap. It's a different product. Four things that break between 3 and 5 people. 1. Review cycles. Solo review is a PDF and an email reply saying "change the blue." Team review is three stakeholders, two rounds, and someone working off V2 while the client is looking at V4. Bonsai has no review tools. You end up bolting on Filestage ($25/mo) or living in "V3_final_FINAL.pdf" threads. Oase has pin-annotated reviews built in - clients click the exact spot and leave feedback, AI summarizes the round. 2. Team coordination. Bonsai's messaging is client-only. No internal team chat. Agencies on Bonsai end up running Bonsai + Slack + Email + Filestage + Google Drive. Five tools, five places information lives. Your new designer can't find the brief, so they DM you. You become the router. 3. Workload visibility. Bonsai's workload views are tasks-per-person. What agencies actually need to know is: is this project healthy? Oase scores project health 0-100 across six factors - budget burn, timeline, review cycles, client responsiveness, team load, scope drift. Answers "what needs my attention this week" in ten seconds. 4. Client experience. Freelancer clients want a contract and an invoice. Agency clients want a portal - their logo, their colors, their subdomain, their requests, their reviews, their invoices, in one place. Bonsai's portal is fine. It's not yours. The pricing math nobody does upfront. A 5-person studio on Bonsai: * Essentials: $25/user x 5 = $125/mo * + Filestage (no design review built in): +$25/mo * + Slack (no team chat built in): +$40/mo * Or jump to Premium for Gantt + white-label: $39/user x 5 = $195/mo * Or Elite (3-user minimum): $59/user x 5 = $295/mo Realistic case: $260/mo. Elite case: $295+/mo before any add-ons. Every new hire: +$25 to +$59. Oase Pro: €49/mo (annual) flat. 6 staff, unlimited clients. Design review, team chat, 57 creative tools, AI assistant, client portal, invoicing, quotes - all in. Oase Agency: €99/mo (annual). Unlimited staff. You hire without opening the billing page. Where Bonsai still wins. * US tax prep built in. Getoase don't do tax. * Contracts-with-e-signatures as the core workflow. If you're a consultant, Bonsai's contract tooling is more mature than ours. * Full CRM with deals pipeline. Ours is lighter. * You genuinely want per-user pricing. Its model doesn't flex that way. If any of those are core to your business, use Bonsai. Honestly. The positioning, in one line. Bonsai helps you send proposals. Oase helps you deliver projects. As you grow, the center of gravity moves from the first to the second. What to do next. If you're solo, close the tab. If you're 3-15 people and feeling the seams - review by email, three tools duct-taped together, no clear view of project health - Getoase built Oase for this moment. Free plan. Run one real project through it, brief to invoice.
Today, I am thrilled to share that Bonsai has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Zoom.
Zoom to acquire Bonsai: empowering small businesses to run and grow their companies. Zoom has signed an agreement to acquire Bonsai, an all-in-one client engagement platform designed for solopreneurs and small businesses. Running a small business today means juggling client work, communication, and finances across multiple tools. At Zoom, we see an opportunity to simplify this effort by empowering solopreneurs to focus on growth, not administrative work. Our AI-first platform, Zoom Workplace, is designed to help achieve your communication and collaboration needs, and we are always looking at ways to deliver even more value. To take our platform to the next level and offer solopreneurs and small businesses a broader solution set to run and grow their business, I'm excited to share that Zoom is acquiring Bonsai. Who is Bonsai and what do they do? Founded in 2015, Bonsai is an all-in-one client engagement and business management platform that helps solopreneurs and small business owners seamlessly manage customer interactions, enhance their efficiency, and grow. Bonsai's intuitive tools help manage client relationships and finances in a single, simple workspace with features like project tracking, invoicing, and payments. Bonsai has generated an avid and growing base of subscribing users. It stands out in a market underserved by complex, enterprise-focused tools. It gives service professionals like designers, consultants, and architects a simple, unified workspace to manage projects, clients, and payments. Put simply, Bonsai brings a set of tools to Zoom that address the specific needs of small businesses looking to scale. What this means for you and next steps. We are excited to enhance our solution set, including our AI-first Zoom Workplace tools - such as Meetings, Webinars, Team Chat, Zoom AI Companion, and Docs - with Bonsai's offerings. Together, Zoom and Bonsai will support small business owners and solopreneurs from the first client contact to final payment. Following the close of the transaction, Bonsai will remain a standalone platform, retaining the Bonsai brand. Over time, we look forward to incorporating Bonsai's capabilities directly into Zoom, at which point you'll soon be able to manage client projects, send proposals, track time, and handle invoicing and payments all within the same platform. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2025. Once the transaction closes, we look forward to getting started and showing you what's next. We're thrilled to soon welcome the Bonsai team to Zoom, helping even more small businesses seamlessly connect, collaborate, and grow.
The first team, Bonsai, developed an ambitious software engineering project including an ecommerce site to buy and sell bonsais, a social platform for the bonsai community to publish and share attributed blog posts, and an AI-powered "Zen Master" chatbot to help users care for their bonsais and even themselves.
Toronto-based Bonsai has secured $21 million CAD in Series A financing to build on the recent growth of its “point of discovery” online checkout technology.