Job: Web developer for a new project by the guys who made Facebook Graffiti
We're looking for someone who:
- gets stuff done
- is a great web software engineer
- would enjoy building their own web framework
- has good UI sense
- can work in a startup (flexible hours, independence, pushing out features quickly, etc)
- wants to work on something fundamentally important
- cares about users
- hates most Facebook apps, but thinks that building on top of the social graph has the potential to be powerful and useful
- lives near SF or is willing to move
Who we are:
We're three guys who have been working together for six years. Tim and Ted (brothers aged 25 and 22) do web development, and Mark (25) does everything from getting awesome advertising sponsorships to getting a meeting with just about anyone. We do all our brainstorming/decisionmaking/etc together.
We started in 2003 with BooksOnCampus.com and have worked on few other projects since then, but the Graffiti application on Facebook was our first big hit. We're now working on a new project that we're very excited about. We're keeping it a secret for now -- we wish we could be more open, but can't risk it in an ecosystem like the Facebook Platform where companies copy each other and can grow to millions of users in a matter of days.
Graffiti and the new project are both built on the Facebook Platform, but we're not an "app company." We don't view Facebook as a way to spam our way to success (Graffiti is one of very few large applications that has never spammed or abused viral channels). Rather, we've always been interested in creating and improving connections between people, and we think Facebook is a powerful platform on which to do that.
We love what we're doing. We're driven to make our projects work, but other than that we're laid back. We're moral, fair, and honest, and we care a lot about our users.
We're not a YC company, but we happen to live/work in the "YScraper" and we're friends with a bunch of the YC guys.
What we're working on:
We have two projects: Graffiti, and our new application.
Graffiti is relatively mature. It has 2.5 million monthly active users and a strong community. It's profitable enough via brand advertising (Dell, BMW, HP, Microsoft, Comcast, Kohler, Intel, ...) that we haven't needed to raise money. We've turned down several offers of VC money because we wanted to maintain long-term control over the direction of the company.
The new project, the one we're hiring for, is different from other Facebook applications. We can't say much, but here's a little info:
- It's meaningful and could ultimately have a significant impact on the world.
- It's a huge project, but we're building and releasing it piece by piece.
- The part we've built is live, with thousands of users. It's looking quite promising.
- It's community-based. We have some experience with this from running Graffiti, but getting it right is subtle and challenging.
- It's built with PHP, MySQL, jQuery, and Facebook Connect. We decided that existing frameworks (django, rails) ran the risk of becoming too restrictive for this project, so we went our own way. People love to knock PHP, but it's a pragmatic language for web applications, and if used right, its flaws are inconveniences rather than obstacles.
- The model is broad enough that parts are very abstract (e.g. we have a database table of database tables)
Sound interesting? Health benefits and stock options are included. Email us: (hn.jobs.tmt@gmail.com). We'd particularly like to see what you've built before (either on your own time, or for someone else).