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 one of Hotplate's early customer support & success hires, you'll get the chance to work closely with our chefs on a daily basis for their support needs, while also having broader impact across scaling support processes and contributing feedback to Hotplate's roadmap. Typical responsibilities will be:

• Responding to support tickets (text, email, calls) that come through in a prompt and effective manner, and building rapport with our chefs in the meantime

• Sharing advice with chefs on how to be successful and best leverage Hotplate! We often use support to make sure we are setting chefs up for growth

• Helping scale current processes to make chef support + success even more efficient. This could mean updating help center materials, or tweaking our onboarding flow to answer chefs' questions before they even come up

• Aggregating feedback / bugs to share out with the whole team to guide product roadmap and growth initiatives

What you’ll need to be successful

• ~2+ years in some kind of customer success or customer support role (note: we care less that these were traditional ‘support’ or ‘success’ roles and more that you were in a customer-facing position)

• High level of empathy and good bedside manner

• Insatiable hunger for improvement: you’re a naturally curious person, enjoy scaling processes, and regularly solicit feedback

• Ability to work in-person 5 days a week in San Francisco

• [Bonus] Background working in startups and/or more consumer-facing businesses. (Extra bonus points if in food! 👀)

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.