Head of Socials

ABOUT HOTPLATE

Hotplate exists to enable anyone to start and scale a local food business without a brick and mortar.

The traditional brick and mortar restaurant model is broken: it requires six figures in upfront capital https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/on-the-line/how-much-does-it-cost-to-open-a-restaurant and comes with high operating costs. Within their first year, 2/3 of all restaurants and bakeries close.

The next wave of food entrepreneurship is emerging. These chefs and bakers run businesses from home, commissary kitchens, or mobile pop-ups. They generate hype and buzz on Instagram and run almost entirely on pre-orders. The result is 50-80% profit margins, over 10x the traditional 5% margin https://www.restaurant365.com/blog/what-is-the-average-profit-margin-for-a-restaurant-2/#:~:text=Full%2Dservice%20restaurants%20(3%2D5%25)&text=With%20greater%20labor%20costs%2C%20FSR,%2C%20turnover%20rates%2C%20and%20location of a brick and mortar.

But today’s e-commerce tools weren’t built for this way of selling food. Without Hotplate, chefs and bakers hack together DMs, Google Forms, Square, and Shopify. They spend more time managing logistics than growing their business.

We support the top pop ups in the country, many of which are recognized by the New York Times, Infatuation, Eater, etc. and recently crossed 5,000 businesses and $80M paid out on the platform, but we're just getting started.

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 read more to make sure Hotplate is a good fit, check out our philosophies on hiring https://www.notion.so/Hiring-Philosophy-f008f4f940e34a17b29c90b4d27b7e5a?pvs=21, fundraising https://www.notion.so/199ebe859bea446499968ee12ce7b1f7?pvs=21, and our values https://www.notion.so/Values-Mission-f3371eb51e9047238c66cd312e3660f0?pvs=21.

THE ROLE

As Hotplate’s Head of Socials, you’ll own a mission-critical part of our growth engine, and one of the most important tools we use to stay connected with chefs and bakers. Our chefs and bakers live on Instagram, and you will, too.

We are looking for someone who wants the freedom to push our strategy (collaborating with the co-founders to identify what to test first), and then own the end to end execution (filming + editing), as well as analysis of what works vs. not.

This job is part maintenance, shipping content to serve our existing community and audience, but mostly experimentation. We want our content to bring new chefs onto Hotplate, help people discover the drop model, and get more consumers excited to buy from our chefs. Much of these playbooks aren’t built out, yet.

We’ve organically grown to 7K+ active businesses selling in every state of the US and built a social audience of 25K+ followers. But we’re just getting started. We believe this is the right cultural moment to make Hotplate and the food drop model mainstream. We want to grow our audience into the hundreds of thousands and turn our best-performing content into something millions of people engage with.

In this role, you will spend a lot (!) of time with chefs and bakers in-person and async, filming with them, drawing out their stories, and helping them feel comfortable on camera. Our chefs and bakers are ultimately why we do what we do. Full stop, you should be someone who’s excited to work closely with chefs and bakers and make them feel supported, cared for, loved up, and feeling like they’ve had an amazing experience with our team.

This role is based in San Francisco, and we are 5 days a week in-person. You should be down to travel, and expect anywhere from 1-2 trips / month, sometimes last minute.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL

- You’re already a creator. You can write the post, shoot and edit the video, and ship it yourself

- You’re obsessed with under