BoomStartup Tech Founder Needed!

[coltonbh]

Wanted: Jumbas Tech Founder

What We Do

Jumbas is a startup entering the daily deals space. We aggregate all
the best daily deals in cities nationwide and also offer our own
“Featured Daily Deal” in these cities. We filter the deals for our
users based upon their preferences and deliver only what they are
interested in. We use a proven customer acquisition model that allows
us to gather large amounts of users at a fraction of the cost of our
competitors. Also, we form strategic partnerships with direct mailers
that give us access to local businesses and local customers in new
cities. Our customer acquisition model, direct mailer relationships,
and value added to the user’s coupon experience make us unique from
other daily deal companies. Daily deal sites are springing up like
weeds; Jumbas is unique both in its business model and services it
provides--we're looking for an innovative tech founder to grow with
us!

Progress

Currently, we have a minimum viable product that we are updating and
modifying. This product consists of purchased scripts and
improvements from various students we have hired to modify the site.
It can be viewed at www.jumbas.com (keep in mind the site is being
updated over the next week so it is only functioning intermittently
right now). We have around 250 users receiving daily emails and get
decent traffic to our site each day. We have been accepted into the
BoomStartup 2011 summer program—a highly competitive startup incubator
that selected only 10 companies from over 100 applicants. Thus, we
have an initial seed investment of $15,000 that we will use to grow
Jumbas this summer and we have superb mentorship from the BoomStartup
founders. We expect to have over 50,000 subscribers by the end of the
summer program (August 2011) and to raise another round of capital at
that point in time. At the end of the BoomStartup summer program, we
will pitch to over 100 Utah angel investors and VCs to raise our next
round of capital. Then, we expect to grow the company as quickly as
possible in preparation for a quick, 2-3 year exit.

Tech Founder Requirements

We are currently looking for a tech founder who will work with us this
summer in the BoomStartup program and continue with the company as the
CTO. The tech founder’s initial responsibilities will be to:
• Handle continued development of the jumbas.com website including
aggregation of daily deals nationwide, the implementation of our own
deal platform for our Featured Daily Deal, and continued improvements
to the features and user experience of jumbas.com
• Analytics including website analytics, user analytics, and customer
segment analytics
• System creation for input of mass email lists into the jumbas.com
web application
• Rewrite parts of the application that are currently using third-
party scripts

Skill Set Description

The developer would be working at the outset with an MVC-based PHP
application utilizing a custom framework and the Smarty templating
system. The application interacts with a MySQL database and is running
on a CentOS 5.5 distro, and so the developer should be familiar with
command line operations, basic server administration with Apache, and
SVN. The system has been modified to use the Amazon SES server for
sending out mass emails.

Further into the project, we would like to rewrite the existing
application (which is third-party) to use our own code, as well as to
avoid any intellectual property or licensing issues. Therefore, it
would be ideal if the developer has experience writing full
applications from scratch, but the dev is free to use the framework he/
she is most comfortable with (Cake, Zend, Yii, CodeIgniter, etc.). If
the developer is more comfortable and entirely fluent in another but
similar language such as Ruby, this will work as well. Components that
are necessary for the application and should be codeable by the dev
include good user management (email opt-in on signup, self-service
settings), XML parsing for grabbing RSS feeds, regex writing and
parsing for scraping basic pages, cron familiarity, and general good
design principles. Finally, the dev should be comfortable with and
understand the implications of integrating online payments, including
how to NOT violate PCI DSS standards and keep things flowing smoothly.

Offer for CTO

The CTO will be given a 20% equity stake in Jumbas. None of the
current founders of Jumbas are taking a salary this summer; however,
if absolutely necessary a small salary could be arranged for the CTO
if he/she needs it to stay afloat for the summer.

Please contact col...@jumbas.com or 208-521-8653 by Friday, June 8 at
the latest if you are interested in knowing more about the company and
the CTO position. We hope to solidify our tech founder by June 8 at
the latest.