14 Mar 2024
Join Spoonme.kitchen to help us build our iOS app
TL;DR: After about 6 months of building our web app and getting user feedback we are ready to start development to launch our mobile app. We are looking for an iOS engineer to join us for up to 25 hours/week (could be more in the initial weeks) at $100/hour. Candidates can live anywhere in the world.
About Spoon
Spoonme enables people to track their nutrition, share the food with the people they love, and effortlessly discover great new meals to make. We have built a very strong, flexible nutrition tracker and now we are releasing social features to share the food you love. We want to make an app that celebrates food, community, and our cultures. There are many food tracking apps on the marketplace, but our niche will be very different than competitors. Our focus is food discovery and making food social, with great nutrition tracking capabilities. Many companies are venture funded despite the business model not necessitating it. Spoonme is an attempt to see if we can make a consumer app people love, provide our unique perspective on what the best experience would look like, and take on larger companies while making a profitable company.
About the role
We have worked with some designers to think through the application flow, feature sets, and design. Those mobile designs will be finalized in the next couple of weeks. We are looking for an iOS engineer to work with us on building a SwiftUI application. You will be given a detailed set of documents to build the app from, with much of the brainstorming having already been done (although your perspective is welcome!). We want to ship features quickly, and roll them out iteratively, over the coming months.
About you
We are looking for a kind, empathetic human who is self-driven and curious. We are a small team and we need team members to work with us who can move quickly and ship significant features. Larger teams need a diverse set of people who can ship features quickly, and team members who can polish something and foresee potential issues years in the future. For our current stage of the company and our current size, our team needs someone who can ship quickly to get the product in users’ hands so we can receive feedback. We are looking for prolific team members who love to ship.
Compensation and company structure
We have a unique working setup at Spoonme. We only work 25 hours per week. We want to have a balance between work and life. We have one scheduled meeting per week where we align on what we have shipped in the previous week, discuss any new context that informs our path forward, and discuss our next steps. We believe that consistent effort, over the long term, can create an incredibly useful product and a fantastic company. This role will pay $100/hour. We have a similar approach to Gumroad, where nobody is an employee, and everyone works for an hourly wage to keep the company small and provide flexibility for employees. Some of our team members are building their own thing during their other time. That’s great with us!
How to apply
Send me an email at matt at peakstreak dot co. Please include some links to apps you have built that you are proud of. Let me know your familiarity level with Swift and mobile development. A link to your portfolio or personal website is helpful. Some people hire based on company names or degrees. I do not. I hire based on your ability to demonstrate strong knowledge, ability, and tendency to ship software. Last time I opened up a role I had about 60 qualified people apply. Please keep this in mind.
The interview process (to be transparent):
- Send application in (4 are selected from this stage)
- Interview (2 move on)
- Paid technical work (one is selected after this)
- Get started
This is an imperfect way to evaluate candidates, but after having hired over 100 people in my career, it works as well as any of the other methods! I look forward to reading your email and am excited to get started building together!
06 Oct 2023
TLDR: Spoonme is hiring a design to help us make the most focused and polished food tracking app on the market
NOTE: This position has been filled. I received over 600 applications for this. The site that I posted it on was scraped by many other job boards. I removed the posting from the original board I posted it on, but am unable to update the many places that scraped it. Thanks for all the interest! There were far more qualified people who applied than we had space for.
Here are the high level details:
- Up to 25 hours per week
- $100/hour
- We work in six week cycles with two weeks of cool down and polish between cycles. Check out Shape Up to read more on how we work (we follow this way of working, but are not the book’s authors).
- This is a contractor role. The startup is still pre-revenue and bootstrapped. You’ll be contracted with to build out our branding, design our main screens, and design our mobile app. This could become your primary focus in the future, but things are still in the early discovery stage at this point.
About spoonme.kitchen:
We are a tiny team (Matt: founder of the company, Mike: building out our food database, an Elixir engineer: building out the application). We believe small teams reduce overhead and enable a product to become great in a faster timeline. If we can keep our teams and company small we can iterate based on our customers’ feedback faster and build something people love.
What are we building?
A small company focused on food tracking and sharing food with those you love: If you have used the current tools on the market for tracking what you eat they have a few things in common:
- Very focused on weight loss
- Not social, at all
- Almost all of them have taken venture capital funds. They need to bring large returns to make it worthwhile for their investors.
- Very messy databases. You’ll find about 50 results for each item you try to track. Navigating those is very difficult.
We are trying to build a tool that solves a narrow niche:
- We are not focused on weight loss. We are focused on deliberate, purposeful eating
- We are going to stay small. We want to build a product for a subset of the overall market. We want to create the most streamlined food tracking experience on the market.
- Focused on social interactions. Food is at the heart of most social events, and some of our favorite memories. We want people to share the food they love with the people they love and build their community.
- A focus on creators. We don’t have more details to share than this right now, but we are going to try to be create the best platform for creators on the market.
- Our goal is to make a product that is so good at the problem it is trying to solve that people happily pay for it.
A little about you
- Experience creating and building a brand
- Demonstrable experience building for a variety of platforms (mobile and web)
- Rich experience in TailwindCSS
- Ability to ship meaningful work in a short time frame, so we can collect user feedback and iterate
- Thinking in systems: This first hire will help us design our logo, branding, and overall design. We need to build a strong foundation while keeping a bias to shipping and getting feedback
- Availability: We need you available for at least 20 hours per week. We have been shipping at a fast pace. We want to continue that cadence and release our new designs after about six weeks of working together.
Locations
You can be anywhere in the world. We have people on different continents on the team. We do have one or two meetings a week (about an hour total) to align on direction and demo what we have built. Other than that we work asynchronously.
Not interested in working with agencies
I believe deeply in small teams. Each person that is added to a team or an organization creates overhead that can slow things down. Agencies add too much overhead and formality at this point. I have worked at an agency before as well as in Professional Services. I have nothing against these types of organizations. We need to work with a small team and be nimble in these early stages. We want to work directly with one person and only that person.
How to apply:
- Send me an email at (matt at peakstreak dot co) and write up a paragraph or two about why you’d be a good fit. If you are interested in being an early employee at a company and working with a small team, please highlight that.
- Attach any work you are proud of that could demonstrate your ability and reduce our risk when hiring you. Bonus points for apps in the App Store that you have designed.
Thanks for your interest!
13 Aug 2023
Requiring presence is often bad management
But first, a disclaimer
I once heard a wise man say “there are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs.” I believe that deeply. Almost nothing is universally true. I want to start off this post with some nuance. There are certainly businesses, industries, and moments in a company’s evolution, where presence and working together is highly beneficial. All movements go too far, and if the people who promote remote work can’t acknowledge that there are exceptions, they’ve entered into cult territory and are not thinking rationally. GitHub was a remote company but we knew that sometimes people needed to gather in a room, around a whiteboard, for brainstorming or doing work in a tightened timeline. In person work can be critical for creative stages in the early part of a project’s life. Similarly, it can be rational, in a companies early days, for founders to want people together to move quickly. What I am going to say next is moving past that nuance and focusing on knowledge workers in most companies. Brace yourself for the some strong opinions!
Managers who require presence are often just bad at leading people. It’s laziness, or exploitation
Managers are often just not very good at their job: Most managers are bad at their jobs. I think that’s almost axiomatically true. Management is hard, and there are not many resources out there to create great managers. Especially if you don’t adhere to the “extract as much value out of people as possible” mentality that many old business books advocate. Managers are often winging it. They are dependent in their early years of management on a mixture of who they are: their experiences and upbringing, likely their DNA, and their work experience up to that point. They often try to carbon copy the best managers they have had while avoiding the pitfalls of their worst managers. Few companies have great resources for you when you become a manager. It’s trial by fire. Your manager is likely not a good manager. I’ve been managing large teams for about 7 years and I would say I am becoming average at this point. I would say I was bad at many of the things I am going to write out later in this document early in my management career. Let’s just acknowledge our areas for improvement and the current dynamic.
When managers are not good at their job, they often resort to lazy indicators of success for their teams. Presence, and the appearance of “looking busy,” is often one of the first tools in the toolbox they reach for. This desire to track people’s time and presence seems to be a recurring theme on “Study finds employees don’t work hard at home, all employees must return to work” articles and headlines. It’s management expressing fear that their employees are not getting anything done. They are not good at bringing the best out of their team, or their individual employees, so they get lazy and say they want to see their team members in their seats. It’s a legacy aspect of a bygone world.
What does good management look like?
To be honest, I am not positive. Great management looks different for different people. People are varied in their abilities, experiences, and needs, so what a good manager looks like to each individual is different. But over the years I have discovered some principles of what good management looks like. Here are some of mine:
Clear expectations and a vision:
At the heart of great management is a company that understands the “why” of what they are doing, and has clearly communicated to employees that vision and outlined who needs to do what to accomplish that vision. This is foundational. If you are unfamiliar with these concepts, or want to read some great books to help you understand these principles, I would recommend two solid books: Simon Sinek’s Start with Why and Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage. Business books generally suck, but I would say these two are worthwhile reads. Especially if you are new to management. Your team members need to know what the vision is, and what everyone needs to do to accomplish the vision.
Focusing on outcomes:
After you have the vision and know who needs to do what, you need to focus on outcomes. You are being a fool if you are paying your knowledge workers for their presence. A person who is at your company for every waking moment of their day, but who does not deliver any results, is not someone worth employing. Focusing on presence, for the vast majority of roles, is a terrible way to manage. Your company needs to accomplish business outcomes. You need to be laser focused on the needs of your customers, and everyone needs to be helping to accomplish those customer focused objectives. You should not care when they work, or even how much they work 1, you should be entirely focused on the outcomes you are seeking. In fact, if a person ships the outcomes you desire in 10 hours per week, and not 40, that person deserves a raise, not a reprimand. They have delivered more value in less time. That could free them up to do other work. This person should be a highly valued person on the team.
You should also be separating, explicitly, the hours they work from their evaluation as an employee. As an example, I’ve had team members reach out to me to say “I am going to the dentist.” I have said back to them:
Thanks for the heads up. I want to emphasize to you that I am not concerned with where you are during the day. Give me a way to get in touch with you if something urgent comes up, but other than that, you control your own schedule. The primary criteria for evaluating your performance is how well you drive the goals that we have outlined together. That is why you are here at our company, and how your performance will be evaluated. Please don’t feel the need to give me tiny updates about where you are. I want you to feel like you control your schedule, not me. Let’s only focus on shipping those valuable outcomes we have established.
Your job as a manager is to help your employee overcome any and all obstacles that stand in the way of them achieving the outcomes you have aligned on. They can work wherever, and whenever 2, works best for them to do their best work. You help them achieve outcomes. You completely ignore presence, and explicitly tell them that lots of presence without results would not be any consolation, nor would it meet expectations.
Create organic, natural touchpoints for accountability that celebrate achievement:
All of the approaches listed above, if they are not connected to delivering real results, are simply a really flexible work environment that doesnt’ accomplish anything. Delivering better experiences for customers and for fellow employees is at the heart of everything an employee does. All the work needs to lead to clearly defined outcomes. Outcomes are what matter.
Employees often need feedback touchpoints and a chance to demonstrate the great work that they have been doing as well. Often our greatest employees just get shit done and don’t toot their own horn. Provide an opportunity for them to receive the recognition they deserve! You need to provide organic, encouraging checkpoints of accountability into your employees’ regular work. This provides a few really useful opportunities for the individual, team, and company:
A chance to get excited and celebrate great work The team can rally around the great work of their peers. It provides the individual an opportunity to get recognized for the great work they are doing. It pumps up their fellow coworkers and creates a culture of achievement, recognition, and celebration. It can really help install a sense of the why into an employee, knowing their labors matter.An opportunity for mentorship and course correction Consistent moments of team wide accountability and celebration also helps course correct when someone is going down a path that could use improvement and provides for fellow team members an opportunity for mentorship and feedback. I was at a company once where two team members worked for two months on a programming project. They finally got in front of the team for feedback and it was determined they went in the completely wrong direction. Pretty much all of the work needed to be scrapped. This was deflating for the team members and the business. An opportunity to get feedback and course correction earlier would have improved the situation dramatically. You will ship better solutions if you have many eyes on it during development. It isn’t “shipping through consensus.” That’s another issue. But it is an opportunity to let others polish the team’s work in a lighweight way.Accountability If you are not focusing on presence, and instead focusing on outcomes, you need accountability for your team to deliver on the things they are responsible for. A feedback touchpoint, with a chance to celebrate achievement, can be a fantastic way to consistently align on current progress, hurdles, and opportunities. For some of the neuro-divergent it can also be a really helpful tool to keep them on track and engaged. If you have this accountability checkpoint intermittently, you do not need to worry about where your employee is, or how often they are looking at their computer screen. You can instead focus on the outputs of their employment.
Disclaimer: Some people really struggle with public speaking even in small group settings. It’s a very reasonable accomodation to have a form of accountability and celeberation that doesn’t require them to present in front of a group. Think through what works for your varied team members by asking them what form of accountability and check ins work best for them. It could be as simple as a Pull Request for a programmer.
One thing I have seen be both fun and effective is a Demo Day. At a regular interval you have team members demo what they have been building and open up some space after each demo for questions from the team. This provides a way to celebrate progress and give an opportunity for mentorship and course correction.
Don’t be a lazy manager
If you are managing a team of knowledge workers you need to level up your game and stop focusing on presence or the appearance of being busy. You need to outline a clear vision, make it clear who needs to do what to accomplish that vision, create organic and consistent opportunities to celebrate that work, and have accountability to demonstrate progress. If you do these things well, for the vast majority of employees and companies, then it will not matter where or when team members work.
What about employees who are not driving outcomes?
If you have instituted these improvements in how your team functions and you have team members who are not demonstrating progress then you need to change your focus. Your first area of focus should be introspection and a conversation with the employee. Bad managers assume the employee is the problem, instinctually. You may be the issue, or the systems at your company may be hurdles for them to do their best work. I would ask the employee what about the environment of your company or where they work is impeding their ability to ship the outlined outcomes. Then I would work very dillgently to remove those obstacles, or give the employee tools to overcome the obstacles.
If the employee still cannot drive the outcomes they are responsible for it may be a time to part ways. There are millions of companies around. Not every company is a great fit for everyone. Some people don’t thrive in an environmnet of high autonomy. If your employee is one of these people, help them transition to a new company and be generous with them in that process. Trust is critical to any organization. Once trust is lost it is incredibly difficult for the working relationship, especially with lots of autonomy, to work again. High performers want to be around other high performers. It’s too damaging to company morale to have someone on the team not contributing. If you find someone in this situation after you have made all the improvements you can based on their feedback it’s often best to part ways. Be a good human in the form of generous severance. Make the move sooner rather than later.
My employees are shipping their objectives, I am just concerned they are not working the full 40 or more hours!
If your employees are shipping all of their objectives, and you are simply worried they are not working enough, you may not be lazy. You may be trying to exploit them. Are you simply trying to squeeze as much productivity out of them as possible?
People working 40 hours per week is made up and subjective. If your employee gets done in 30 hours what takes another person 40 hours, is that okay? Do you need to squeeze an additional 10 hours of productivity out of them? I’d venture to say that focusing on time as the primary metric for productivity is a poor approach. Ignore the click baity thumbnail and title and focus on this fantastic keynote address from Alex Hormozi. Hours per week, for knowledge workers, shouldn’t be the standard. It should be output. Refer to footnote 2 for some more detail on when knowing the amount of hours an employee is working could be high signal, but generally, avoid caring about hours worked.
Focus on what matters
Your business will not accomplish it’s goals if you have someone sitting at a desk, in your local area, looking busy all day without outcomes. If you are an effective manager, you are not focused on presence. You are focused on achieving clearly outlined business goals. Stop being a lazy manager and focus on what matters. Move mountains to help your employees do the best work of their career. But do it by providing lots of autonomy and flexibility. Remote work is fantastic for both of these things.
As you focus on outcomes you will get the best work of your employee’s lives. You will dramatically decrease turnover in comparison to companies who micro manager and require presence. You will get your pick of the best talent on earth. You will accomplish your business’s objectives.
You don’t need employees to come into the office. You, and your extended leadership team, need to be better leaders.
Notes
1 You should care if your employees are working too much. You want your roles to be sustainable, and you want your employees to be happy and healthy. Happy and healthy employees are better to work with, and they often produce better results. Also, if your employee is producing what you think of as full-time outcomes in 3 hours per week you need to figure out why you understand the task so poorly. There is signal in how much an employee is working, but only in broad brush strokes. Focus on outcomes.
2 It does not matter when or where an employee works. Only that they achieve their objectives. I have found it effective to say “you need to be available within normal working hours for your coworkers and their meetings. It’s challenging to optimize for lots of people’s schedules across time zones, therefore we default to normal business hours for meetings. Be available for collaboration when needed (with reasonable expectations) and you can work outside of that whenever and wherever you would like. Also, have a high bar for what requires a meeting!
08 Jul 2023
Hiring a part time Elixir or Ruby developer: Going on a journey together to build something people love
UPDATE: NO LONGER ACCEPTING APPLICANTS: I have moved forward with four different candidates at this point into the final stage. I am no longer accepting applicants. Thanks for everyone who expressed interest. I am trying to let everyone know who submitted an application about the decision, if it’s to move forward to the next phase or if I went a different direction. Thanks for the time and effort you put into applying.
TL;DR
About me: I’ve worked in tech companies for about 11 years now. At MX.com, GitHub, and most recently LaunchDarkly. I’ve decided I want to make some #smallbets and start my own company. I believe we can make a product that brings people joy and helps them achieve their goals.
The opportunity: A contracting role for up to $100/hour, up to 20 hours per week, located anywhere in the world.
What will we be building?
I want to build a competitor to MyFitnessPal and similar applications. The app will be called Spoonme.kitchen. This is primarily to scratch my own itch, but I am optimistic we can build something compelling enough that it provides other people value and creates a small business. The vast majority of our time is going to be focused on building. We will try to keep meetings to an absolute minimum. We are going to cap the amount of time we spend on building to 20 hours per week. Work usually expands to fit the size allotted to it. By limiting the amount of time we can spend each week it’ll force us to focus, say “no” to some worthy goals, and ensure we are only doing the essential. I am in need of a strong Elixir or Ruby developer to work with me on this project. This project should be viewed as a creative journey.
Preferred qualifications
- Strong Elixir or Ruby experience
- Famliarity with CI/CD and an ability to use GitHub proficiently
- An ability to deploy and maintain the site
- Enough knowledge about Tailwind CSS where you can wire things up to make them look decent, until we hire a designer (would hire after we’ve proven the general value and data model/functionality)
If you meet some of the qualifications above, but not all of them, but believe you can add signficant value, please reach out.
Compensation
How we will work together
Constraints: I believe constraints are generally very good. The more we narrow what we are trying to accomplish the faster we can move there. We will work together for at most 20 hours per week, paid hourly. This constraint will force us to focus on the most essential tasks at hand. We will need to ruthlessly prioritize. This first iteration of the application will be six weeks long of contract work. We will see what we can build in six weeks’ time.
Few meetings: We will meet together weekly where you will demo the work you have done for the week. We will walk through the choices that were made, hurdles encountered, and the decisions for what the next iteration of the application should focus on the following week. These will provide you a chance to highlight the great work you have done and provide us an opportunity to brainstorm on direction. Of course, these sessions will be paid. I will be available if any questions arise for us to sync, or answer any questions in Pull Requests, or GitHub issues, as they arise.
An emphasis on shipping early and often: My goal is to get this application in people’s hands as quickly as possible so we can focus on improving the product. Feedback from users will be some of our most valuable direction. Ideally I will be using the application within the first week or two, warts and all. We will try to create an efficient and thoughtful machine of feedback and iteration to create a tool that people love and consider an essential tool to live the life they love.
Respect for time: There will be clear expectations of how we work together. No late night texts. We will be driven by making our creative vision a reality, but we will move this objective forward in a calm, deliberate manner. People overestimate what they can do in the short term, but dramatically underestimate what they can do in the long term. I want to build something incredibly great in the long term and believe that can be done in a calm, thoughtful manner.
A focus on outcomes: We will use an hourly pay rate as it’s a simple way to work together before we have built high levels of trust. However, your performance will primarily be evaluated based on results and outcomes.
Interview process:
- Phase one: Submit an email to (matt at peakstreak dot co) outlining
- Your experience with Elixir/Phoenix or Ruby/Rails (keep in mind I value honesty and transparency) with examples illustrating, as best you can, what you are capable of
- How you work best and the environment you do your best work in
- Phase two: I will go through applications and find four candidates who have stood out and have made me feel like there is considerably reduced risk on my part by hiring them because of their demonstrated ability and the hope that we could work well together
- Phase three: I will reach out to four of those applicants to quickly discuss moving forward (hopefully 10 - 15 minutes). I’ll grant each of those four applicants access to a repository to submit a pull request fixing one bug and adding some standard CRUD functionality into the existing application. This will be paid for work, paying $500 for the submission of the pull request (at a reasonable level of “done”) that satisfies the requirements of the functionality/bug fix. We will discuss the code changes synchronously in a 30 minute meeting and review the pull request.
- Phase four: I will select one of the four candidates to move forward based on their submission and our contracting agreement will begin.
A note about diversity: I’d like to hire someone for this role who provides a different perspective than me. I believe diversity of thought and experience makes for creating better tools. Candidates from other countries (who people in the United States are legally allowed to work with) are welcomed to apply. The compensation will be the same regardless of where you reside in the world.
A note to recruiters: Please do not reach out to me about this opportunity. I want to work closely with one person, with as little overhead as possible. I do not want to work with your agency, regardless of how great you are or how much of a deal you can provide. In the early stages of a company overhead is death. I want to keep overhead as low as possible to extend runway as long as possible.
25 Mar 2023
An unpopular stance, but lots of clarity
At GitHub years ago, like clockwork, team members would ask the question during our Company All Hands about the contract with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). The company would often give equivocating answers in the early days of the discussion. Microsoft later released a statement about how they handle military contracts (they don’t turn them down). But the questions kept coming.
Then one day the leader of GitHub answered the question something to the effect of “look, we are doing this contract, per our stated policy. It’s not changing. If you don’t like that, maybe GitHub isn’t the right place for you.” That is certainly not a direct quote, but it was the overall gist of the statement. It was a great moment because it made things much more clear. Regardless of which side of the discussion you leaned towards, you had clarity on what the future looked like and who GitHub was.
I love when companies tell us who they are. Coinbase and 37signals made public declarations about who they are and what working there would be like. Regardless of whether or not I agreed with their “no politics” stance, I loved that they were telling people, explicitly, what they were about, regardless of the blowback.
People want clarity, even at the expense of alignment
People want clarity. Your teams want clarity. Providing that clarity is better for everyone. It’s better for the people who realize the company may not be a good fit for them any longer. It’s good for the people who stay who no longer have to deal with ambiguity, or hear the same questions repeated because the answers are not clear and direct. It galvanizes the future direction of the company. Of course the decision may not be the correct one. That’s a different topic. But it sets a clear path in a clear direction.
While if those companies made the right decision is up for debate for many, my purpose is to primarily praise companies who have a clear, communicated vision. I admire that about the companies mentioned earlier. They told us who they were, and gave people the clarity to choose if that was something that brought them to the company, or pulled them away. Many companies try to walk the tightrope. I think that is the worst place to be. Having clarity is priceless.
