Hiring a designer for $100/hour. Help us make spoonme.kitchen a joy to use.

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!