Our company, Tovala (YC W16), has built a smart oven and companion meal delivery service. We're growing our team as we prepare to ship our first product and looking for our first dedicated Android engineer. If you like food, startups, Android and live (or are willing to move) to Chicago, give us a shout.
Lead Designer | Chicago, IL | Tovala | Full Time | Equity: .25 - 1% | On-Site Only
I'm David Rabie, one of the founders of Tovala. We've built an incredibly smart oven that is paired with a meal delivery service.
We're a small team of 7 that's gone through YC. Looking for someone to handle UX/UI of many parts of the Tovala experience (e.g. app, packaging, marketing, etc.). Great opportunity to help design a brand from the ground up.
Honestly, you don't. You just need to focus on building something that people want and making sure that the experience you deliver is better than any other.
Further, if you start to think about your hardware as a means of delivering something else (for us, that's food), then getting copycatted on the hardware won't be as hard to deal with from a business standpoint.
Depends on your development cycle, but this is one area that startups should have an advantage over bigger competitors. We got copied on a few things (logo, tagline, product) by a bunch of people in 3, 6, 9 months time. Of course we're already working on our second model, so no worries!
Great question. With Tovala, our model is a little different. We anticipate most of our customers will order our meal delivery service - and be delighted by the experience and taste. That'll give us a touch point to our customers throughout the life of their smart oven.
Depends on what you are trying to prove. If there are questions as to whether people will pay for your product, then yes, proving that that is the case with a functional prototype will go a long ways. If, however, you are trying to get feedback, build up brand evangelists and learn, then selling your prototype is not hugely important.
By selling few our of prototype units we got both meaningful feedback and evangelists (not consumer, as the thing itself is mostly useful for government institutions).
On the other hand we also got interesting support headaches, as the final production version includes all the feedback and thus is completely different in overall architecture, hardware and software and thus probably only thing that is compatible are pinouts of I/O connectors (and voltage levels on them are only mostly compatible).
Most important is to deliver our product (both hardware and food). However, we'll also be able to run some testing on our website to see what content/messaging/copy converts best into additional pre-sales.
We (Tovala) will also be hiring for some software, operations and food roles :)
The best option is to get warm introductions and develop relationships early. Getting people to hear about your product, give you feedback and feel invested before you launch is critical.
However, that's not always possible. If you're scrambling and haven't had time to do that, you can always reach out blind or use services/agencies to help. There's a YC company called PRX that helps with this and does it at a very affordable price. Another cool site that was on Product Hunt recently ranked a bunch of media outlets - http://presshour.co/?ref=producthunt. Lastly, take a look at your competition and who covered them - those are probably your best targets.
Building early relationships is better, but you also want to be reaching out with something interesting, real, or actionable. I think it depends on the situation - happy to chat about it some more, just email me at [email protected]
Our company, Tovala (YC W16), has built a smart oven and companion meal delivery service. We're growing our team as we prepare to ship our first product and looking for our first dedicated Android engineer. If you like food, startups, Android and live (or are willing to move) to Chicago, give us a shout.
https://tovala.com/careers/