Product Engineer

Hey! I'm Austin (CEO of Spore) - I figured I'd give this listing a more personal touch :)

Spore's mission is to help creators overthrow the gatekeepers. We want to empower creators to break free from the control of the social media platforms, and become entrepreneurs.

With Spore, creators can easily design a website where their brand comes first, grow their own userbase, send text and email blasts, build a community, learn from analytics, and earn from paid memberships and selling digital content. It's an all-in-one solution that makes it easy to do everything in one place.

We want any creator who wants make money online to be able to do it successfully through Spore!

Here's a quick overview of the role

• You'll be a founding engineer with a ton of autonomy and control over the product
• We're currently a team of 4 - so very early, but with good traction and supporters
• We've very much a tech-first company. Up until a few weeks ago, every line of code was written by me (here's my GitHub)
  • I'm filling both the CEO and CTO roles for now, but the goal is to promote one of our founding engineers to CTO
• We're in-person in Golden, CO. It's an awesome town with a great vibe and tons to do nearby (hiking, skiing, and downtown Denver nearby if you prefer living in a city)
• We just raised $1m from a great group of investors that includes Lenny! (plus SignalFire, Canaan, & founders of Twitch, Zynga & Bleacher Report)

Now we can get into more of the nitty gritty:

We're looking to bring on engineers who can own an entire segment of our product. The segments are pretty large, with a lot of interesting problems to solve. If that sounds fun to you, you're a great fit! As our team grows, the goal is for you to be leading the team focused on that part of the product (if that's something you want!)

We of course have the infrastructure in place to make it possible for a small team to be able to successfully work on each part of the product.

Since we're still very early, so you'll likely start out working on a few of these, and as we hire more engineers, you'll settle in to focusing on one.

Segments

• Monetization
  • Our most important KPI (by far!) is the amount of money we help creators make. So the goal here is to build out different ways for creators to make money through their website. This means paid memberships for exclusive content, the ability to sell digital goods, paid DMs, etc... We'd like to experiment with crypto at some point too
• Chat / Communities
  • Communities are incredible to watch form and grow, and are going to be a big part of how we help creators. One of the features creators can have in their website is a Discord/Slack-style chat - this is one of the more complicated products we're offering, but also a very fun one to work on :)
• Newsletters
  • Newsletters are an awesome medium for creators to grow and audience and monetize. There are obviously a few companies built entirely around helping creators maintain a newsletter, but we think there are big advantages to having it baked into their website
• Analytics
  • This is the backbone of a lot of the value Spore provides. Basically a CRM & analytics for creators to better understand their audience, and to be able to segment their audience based on how they interact with a creator's content
• Merch & Shops
  • Creators like to create :) And that includes merchandise. We want to help them with this, and enable them to have a merch shop directly in their site. We'd also like to help them sell digital merch (whether that's an NFT, or something like a course or ebook)
• Podcasts
  • We have a subset of features that are useful for podcasters, and we want to continue to improve on them!
• Site customization
  • We let creators customize what their site looks like. Right now that means letting them choose the components they want to show, rearrange them, and customize colors, fonts, and images. Longer-term this will look more like more powerful site builders like Shopify & Squarespace.
• Infrastructure and scaling
  • We need someone who can make sure we stay in a good position to scale upward. Our current infrastructure stack has scaled to 10mm MAU and 150,000 concurrent with a previous startup, but there will likely still be road bumps along the way!
• Security & Troll management
  • With any online community, there's going to be trolls, and we need to have tools in place to keep them at bay to help creators' communities thrive. We also need to make sure we're adhering to security best-practices!

How we operate

1. We move fast with a bias toward action. Everything else in this list is designed to keep us moving fast
2. We learn - mistakes are ok! They come with the territory of moving fast, and are a great way to learn. And moving quickly helps us learn at the fastest pace
3. Ownership - you own and have autonomy over some aspect of the product or business. There will still be a lot of collaboration, and internal support for what you’re working on, but we’re going to trust you to make it great
4. Trust - in order to have ownership and move quickly, there needs to be a high level of trust in each individual that the right decisions will be made

Culture

Moving fast is important, but we can still do that in a fun, laid back work environment. Balance is critical - we’re in this for the long-haul and burnout sucks. We won't have many meetings - a weekly sync and 5 minute standups.

We want to have fun & enjoy spending time with the rest of the team, so we're going to do our best to make sure everyone we bring on board is an all around good person :)

We see ourselves doing company outings (new experiences, nature, culture, etc...), weekly game nights, and in general just enjoying each other's company

Our stack

No worries if you're not familiar with some of these - as long as you're a fast learner, you'll be good. We're going to do our best to document everything to make it easy for new engineers to understand everything!

Frontend

• React
  • Our "version" of React is a little non-traditional. We use hooks, but instead of useState, we use RxJS streams
  • We also use hyperscript instead of JSX

Backend

• Node.js
• Websockets
• ScyllaDB (Cassandra, but written in C++ instead of Java for better performance)
• Elasticsearch
• Redis
• Kubernetes (GKE)

Traits we care about

• Ability to learn quickly (and desire to learn)
  • You don't have to know everything already, but being hungry to learn and able to do so quickly is important with the speed we want to operate at
• Internally driven
  • We love what we do for a living, and want to work with others who feel the same and foster an environment where they can enjoy the time spent working as much as possible!
• Diverse backgrounds
  • Creators come from all walks of life, and to best serve them, we think having a team with a diverse set of beliefs and background will be incredibly helpful
• Bias toward action
  • It's hard to get things right the first time, even with a lot of planning. We think the best way to learn is by doing, and being flexible enough to adjust if we did things wrong the first time

Traits we don't care about

• Experience - all we care about seeing is some sort of proof that you're a quick learner, and driven. You don't need to have worked at a startup before, and definitely don't need a college degree. I worked at a startup when I was 16, and it was great for both parties

If this is something that sounds interesting to you, definitely reach out with any questions you have, and/or apply!