CTO / Technical Co-founder

*Note, equity bracket limited on Wellfound, so very open to discussion. Very much depends on the specifics of situation. I could imagine anything from 10-50% working, depending on who you are and how we set things up.

About me
Hey - I'm Danny, your potential co-founder :)

I started working full-time on Spark Jam in January 2023. I've made a bunch of progress, but in the grand scheme of things, am still very much at day zero.

My first company is Sixteenth - a leading talent management agency for Creators. I've worked with Creators for 10 years and am incredibly passionate about the space. I understand it on a very deep and ituitive level, which is proving to be pretty useful.

To give you an idea of who I am as a professional, I'm good at:

• company building: leadership, culture building, organisational design, vision, direction
• marketing & selling: recruiting, fundraising, closing customers, building brand
• management: as well as overall company leadership, I'm good with people and managing performance

I don't want to talk about myself much more here... we can get to that later and really, this is about you...

About you
I'm on the hunt for a brilliant human to be my co-founder, so we can take this thing all the damn way.

Having done my first company as a solo founder, I know I want to do this one alongside someone. I also know that for Spark Jam to succeed, we need a level of magic in our product. I'm talking about having someone at the helm who has that obsession, high-standard, talent, gift, taste etc., when it comes to design, user experience, functionality and all the other bits that make certain products special. So, that's one way of thinking about who I'm looking for.

You are...

• capable full-stack dev, who can pick up on dev cycles right away, take ownership of our process and execute on feature requests, bug fixes and anything else that comes up in the immediate term
• ideally, you're a bit of a jack-of-trades, being able to do solid design work, as well as dev work. If not, that's okay because we can hire around this. I just want a CTO who can atleast appreciate beautiful design (and can ideally produce it too - esp in the early days)
• a brilliant leader of engineers. You can attract, hire, inspire, retain, coach, manage devs, designers and other product people, to do their best work
• obsessed with product. You have great judgement and taste when it comes to building product. You're smart and intentional about how to take an idea from 0 to execution (ie maybe you come up with hacky solutions for how we can test something tomorrow) and come up with solutions that can scale naturally into more sophisticated product solutions. What I'm trying to say here is that you're both scrappy and quick, but in a way that is intentional and smart, so that if we end up shipping off the back of a hacky test, the thing we ship is beautiful and elegant. (always up for debating how elegant vs scrappy something should be, but I want someone who ultimately has a high bar)
• thoughtful, open, coachable. I like to spar with someone who is intentional and thoughtful. It's also super important to me that you are excellent at welcoming and taking on feedback. I like a dynamic where we can both switch into coaching mode for the other. You should own what you're brilliant at. I should own what I'm brilliant at. And in order for that to work, we need to be good at communicating and levelling with one another, to either bring the other up to speed or to help them see blind spots.

About Spark Jam

Spark Jam is building a community tool to enable Creators to turn their audience into an extra revenue source and a creative resource.

So far, our MVP allows fans to…

• submit content ideas
• up/down vote on other ideas
• join team video calls to jam with the creator and other top fans

During testing, we've uncovered some awesome insights, which are helpfing inform the next chapter of our product development.

We’re at the pre-seed stage, having received early Angel investments from top Creators (and our earliest test users) Ali Abdaal and Eleanor Neale.

Having recently put our MVP out, we’re now focused on conducting user interviews, tracking requests, executing product improvements and slowly acquiring new users. Classic startup cycle underway!

Location:
To avoid any confusion...

• We are a US company
• I'm British and in London right now, but travelling between here and LA for the next few months
• I'm waiting for my visa, which I hope will come through around April 2024
• I'll be moving to Los Angeles and that is where I want the company to be based
• My dream would be to have a co-founder in LA too, so we can sit next to each other as we build. I want to walk on the beach together, do hikes, get breakfast, eat street tacos etc etc as we're strategizing and excuting. Maybe you don't/won't live in LA too and that's cool, but at the very least, I'd hope that we can have regular time together where you visit me/I visit you. I believe there is a tonne of value in this - both for the business and for me as a human

Our current stack:
Next.js 13 with TypeScript
Prisma ORM
TailwindCSS
Vercel
PostgreSQL