Founding iOS Engineer

Forty-one downloads. Thirty-eight of them were family.

Somebody spends a year building something beautiful, hits publish, and then sits there refreshing a dashboard that never moves.

You already know this. You might have lived it.

We have the exact opposite problem.

200,000 customers. Real ones. They buy from us, they open our emails, they write back with their actual problems. We spend $200,000+ a month on ads and we make money doing it. Profitable for years. Never taken a dollar of outside money. No board, no runway, no investor who decides on a Tuesday that your project is dead.

We've got the audience. We've got the people who run the traffic, the ones who make the content, the ones who talk to customers every day. Everybody here is a specialist with a weapon.

What we don't have is the person who builds the thing.

That's the job. You help us build it. On launch day we open the doors and the room fills up.

What we're actually doing

The food industry has been lying to people for fifty years and getting rich doing it.

"Natural" on a box with nothing natural in it. Sugar hiding under sixty different names so it never shows up first on the label. The truth printed in six point type on the back, in a language nobody ever taught you to read.

A 52-year-old woman stands in a grocery aisle with her reading glasses on, holding a box, genuinely trying. And she cannot win. It was built that way on purpose. She goes home, eats it, gains the weight back, and decides something must be wrong with her.

Nothing's wrong with her. Somebody rubbed the numbers off the scoreboard.

We're putting them back.

Here’s what I want for you

A few short years from now somebody asks what you've worked on. You say the name and they stop and go "wait. You built that?!"

But there's a smaller moment before that one, and it's better. You're standing in line at a grocery store and the woman in front of you pulls her phone out and opens the thing you made. She has no idea you're standing there. Nobody in the store knows. Just you.

That's what this is. Not a feature. Not a sprint. The thing people pull out of their pocket without thinking about it.

The work

I'll say this much about what's hard.

Real time personalization at a scale where the obvious approach falls over. Millions of people, and a different correct answer for every one of them, fast enough that it feels almost instant.

An AI that has to still be good on night 400. Not preachy, not generic, not wrong. Harder than it sounds and nobody in this space has done it.

Unit economics where inference cost is big enough to change what the product is, not just what it costs.

A data problem where the free sources are a mess and the good ones are expensive, and neither one gets you where we need to be.

None of it is solved. Some of it might not be solvable the way I'm imagining it, which is why I want somebody who'll tell me so.

Solve these and you didn't ship a feature. You built something a very large number of people touch every day, that didn't exist before you, with your name on it.

This is probably for you if…

You want to build something that hundreds of millions of people use. Not a “good” app. A great one that everybody knos. The money on this is good and it should matter to you, but if it's the main reason you're here it probably won’t work out.

You're somebody who's shipped. Not a portfolio of prototypes. A real app, in the store, that you kept alive for years and that has your fingerprints all over it. And recent matters more than long. Somebody who shipped last year beats somebody with ten years and nothing live.

Somebody who makes things that look and feel different. Competent isn't rare. What I'm after is rarer than that. I want the person who blew a weekend on an animation nobody asked for because it bugged them that it felt cheap. That instinct is the whole difference between an app people use and an app people love.

Somebody who argues. I have a plan. I want you to tell me what's wrong with it in the first conversation, before you're even hired.

Somebody who owns it. No product manager here. You and me, deciding fast, then finding out if we were right.

Swift and native iOS, enough backend that you're never stuck waiting on anyone, and real comfort with AI APIs and vision models. Subscriptions, StoreKit, App Review, the whole irritating machine. If you've shipped a paid app you know exactly what I mean.

The honest downsides…

There's no spec. There's a firm direction, a prototype and a pile of unanswered questions. A real chunk of your week is deciding things nobody has decided yet. Some excellent engineers hate working that way. That's a reasonable thing to hate.

You'd be the only engineer for a while. No technical team to think out loud with, nobody to review your pull requests, nobody who shares your vocabulary. That can get lonely and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

I'm not a programmer. I'll have opinions about things I only half understand, and you'll have to be the kind of person who can tell me why I'm wrong without it becoming a thing.

Right now we're a supplement and coaching company, not a tech company. We want that to change. But right now the people here are marketers and coaches. You'd be the only one in the room who speaks your language, at least at first. (upside: you’ll get to help build the team you want around you)

The users show up on day one. That's the whole advantage, and it's also the pressure. There's no quiet period where you get to polish in the dark.

And it takes over your brain. If you've already got something doing that, keep it. That's the right call and I'd make the same one.

What you get

$200,000 to $260,000 base, depending on what you bring.

A share of the profit growth. Not a lottery ticket that pays out if somebody buys us in nine years. A cut of the money the business actually makes, starting the year you make it bigger. We're profitable today, so this is real money and not a story.

An equity stake with a written path to owning a real piece, tied to milestones we agree on up front.
Your name on it. Technical founder of this product, publicly. Not "a developer."

Real say over how it gets built. Not some fantasy where I never have an opinion. I'll have plenty, and I'll bring you what I hear from people who know more than I do. I'm not a programmer and I know it. You’re the lead on this one.

You build the team. When we add engineers, you pick them. Nobody gets hired onto your side of the house without you saying yes.

Remote, wherever you live. Four hours of overlap with my day. We’ll fly everyone in a few times a year and eat well.

I want version one in the App Store this year. Not the full vision. A real, small first version we can put in front of people and start learning from.

How to apply

No cover letter.

Send me two things.

One, the app(s) you're proudest of. Link it, and tell me one thing you'd rip out of it today if you could.

Two, tell me about a time you built something nobody asked you to build. What it was, and why you couldn't leave it alone.

That's it. If it's good, we talk for 30 minutes and I tell you everything.

If that goes well, I pay you your full rate for two or three days to tear apart our janky prototype and tell me what version one should be. No free work, ever.

I'm talking to a small number of people. If you're already deep in something you love, go finish it. I mean that.

If you're not, and you've got the chops, this is the one. Come build it with us.

(And if this isn't for you but you know the person it is for, send them this. I'd owe you one.)