The Problem & The Mission of Hotplate Running a food business is hard, too
hard. About 2/3 of brick and mortar restaurants and bakeries fail within their
first year, putting these types of businesses in the same risk category as
startups. It is insane that that is the case. However, during COVID, as people
were stuck at home, a new model for selling food emerged: people making and
selling food in their home through social media via pre-order pickup. These
new businesses opened pre-orders for a brief period at the beginning of the
week and had their customers come to pickup their food at the end of the week.
This seemingly small change has massive implications. By running on a pre-
order pickup model, these chefs and bakers solved many of the problems
traditional brick and mortars faced: No ingredient waste or need to forecast
demand. Significantly less labor needed, a single creator can take the orders,
make them, and hand them off to the customer over the course of the week. No
need for an expensive lease: customers can pickup from the creator's house or
a local business they partner with. Zero startup cost, anyone can start small
and organically grow without needing to invest over $100,000 to start a
traditional brick and mortar. As we saw this trend develop, we spoke to the
people behind these businesses and found out that many of them were making
upwards of 50% margins on their food sales, 10x the average of 5% for a
standard brick and mortar. However, there was one big problem: no product
existed to sell food this way. These businesses were taking orders via DMs,
Google Sheets, or hacking the functionality of a Square or Ecommerce website
to post their sales. They were spending most of their time trying to organize
orders, remind customers about pickups, chasing down venmo payments, and
tabulating spreadsheets. They were hitting a glass ceiling. By building the
foundational tool for this new model, we have the opportunity to fundamentally
change the food industry for the better: increasing the diversity and
accessibility of food by making it possible for anyone to start a food
business. If you want to know more about Hotplate to know if its the right
place for you, I encourage you to read our philosophy on hiring, fundraising,
and our values The Opportunity We are hiring an engineer with experience
working across our stack who craves an environment where they can have full
ownership over the features they build. In this role, you will have the
opportunity to build out end-to-end features as well as participate in the
ideation and design of a product that thousands of people rely on to be the
backbone of their business. What you will need to be successful Extremely
comfortable working full stack Experience in React Comfortable working in a
codebase that is end-to-end Typescript A love for designing products and
features from scratch A high bar for delivering clean, intuitive, UX
experiences Understanding of TailwindCSS, NextJS Have worked in early to mid
stage startups before, with experience taking projects from 0 to 1
independently Our philosophy of engineering Hotplate's engineering team is
small, and as we scale we want to keep it that way. Every engineer operates in
a full stack capacity. Features are owned by individuals, so even though we
all have our strengths, each of us pushes code to all layers of the app. We
find this increases our velocity, results in better decision-making before and
during feature development, and is a forcing function for us to grow as full
stack contributors. If this is an environment in which you think you would
thrive, we would love for you to apply! Hotplate is an equal opportunity
employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on
race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy,
childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical
or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or
expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected
characteristic.
