Hotplate is transforming the food industry by empowering chefs to start and run their own businesses online. The traditional food business model is broken, expensive, and low-margin. During the pandemic, many chefs found a more profitable way to sell food through Instagram via preorder and pickup. However, there was no platform to support this unique sales model—until Hotplate.

We provide chefs with tailor-built websites to drop and sell food via preorder, streamlining storefront and backend operations. With Hotplate, chefs can manage thousands of orders and customers, helping some achieve monthly sales of over $100k entirely on their own.

If you're passionate about improving the diversity and accessibility of food and eager to disrupt an industry that has remained mostly unchanged for years, we would love to have you at Hotplate.

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:

1. No ingredient waste or need to forecast demand.

2. 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.

3. No need for an expensive lease: customers can pickup from the creator's house or a local business they partner with.

4. 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

As the frontend lead, you will be set the foundation of Hotplate's frontend architecture, UX, and UI for hundreds of thousands of customers and chefs and the next decade of our growth. Much of our frontend was built in the infancy of the company, and needs some foundational upgrades in its structure, style, and layout. In some areas, you will be codeveloping entire visual rewrites with me (Ben, CEO), establishing a design system, and refactoring the core functional architecture of our frontend. On top of that you will be ideating, designing, and developing dozens of new features for our product that help thousands of businesses. You will have no limitations to what you can do, and nothing will be holding you back to have unlimited impact in your role.

What you will need to be successful

• Strong experience in React

• Advanced understanding of React Context and global state management best practices

• A love for designing products and features from scratch

• Experience implementing full design systems and reusable component primitives

• A high bar for delivering clean, intuitive, UX experiences

• Get energy and excitement from refactoring old frontend architecture and redesigning them with your own vision

• Comfortable to work in the backend when needed to develop endpoints and basic logic to support your own development of new UI/UX

• Solid 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.

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.

Hotplate is end-to-end Typescript, with a frontend built on React and Next.js, and a Node backend.