PastBook - Amsterdam, NL - Full Time Hands-On CTO / Tech Lead / Product Developer
We offer salary + equity.
PastBook is on a mission to help people reliving their memories.
We are VC backed - rebuilding the team from scratch and looking for engineer #1.
We can sponsor VISA, but just after a trial period of few months. No remote.
I'd like to ask to all these complaining italians that are telling people to stay away from their home country: how many of you are still in Italy and what are you doing to change things?
I don't think that throwing shit (true or not) and scaring international talents from coming to Italy opening their own startup is a good way to help.
Disclaimer: I'm Italian, living and running my company in NL since 3 years.
PastBook is the easiest way to relive your memories, online and offline.
We’re looking for a smart person to join the team full-time that can take the lead on the technology/product side of the business and build a top-notch tech team around him/her.
We’re based in Amsterdam, with a beautiful cozy office on the Herengracht canal - in the middle of the city.
We were part of RockStart Accelerator in Amsterdam and we’ve built an extensive network of connections that you can use. We are making money and we are VC backed, this year we'll have to scale and grow globally.
Our main market is the USA, where we’ll setup another office soon (HQ will stay in Amsterdam).
The role requires great 360° technical and communicational skills, leadership, autonomy and dedication.
Being able to understand and play – by case – with the balance between startup/business needs (i.e. have something good enough out ASAP) and technical debt (i.e. re-work, re-factor) is key.
You’ll have to deal with:
- Apache + MySQL + Redis. Dedicated servers + AWS (EC2, S3 and more)
Pay attention that some sales people will be good at selling themselves to you but not your product to the customers.
ABC: there's no way to know if he/she's a good sale person if not seeing it in action.
To know which kind of sale person is best for you - you have to try to do it yourself first: know your customers, know their problems and which are the values they see in your product (I assume you have done this before building the product).
Then start searching key people in the industry you're targeting and ask for help - get into that network and you'll find your person.
Avoid sales consultant. Avoid external sales company. It's too early for you. You need someone internal that will do more than just selling your product. You need someone that will listen to any comments, feedbacks, needs, feelings of your potential customers and will identify opportunities, product changes, propositions and values.
To get him/her on board pay attention to do not give out shares on day one. Setup an option pool with vesting and link i.e. salary with company performance (not personal one). I can give you some further tips on that if needed. I did that myself with a new biz dev guy.
We want to be "More than just printed books", allowing people to collect photos from relatives and friends in a private place, being able to turn them in a keepsake printed book within 1 click.
We've just updated the UI and added a new look&feel for the book template (code name 'magic-blur').
You can hand-pick photos for many social-network (we'll facilitate the import of multiple photos with a wizard within the next few iterations).
Any feedback is welcome.
I'm the founder, you can reach out directly to me at stefano at pastbook dot com
I learned that's true thanks to this app http://human.co and their simple concept: move 30mins or more every day to stay healthy (the #daily30), inspired by "23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health?" by D. Mike Evans
I am not saying this is my main problem (it is not). It is a question of logistics and I wonder how other people in a similar situation/lifestyle have solved it. If you want to imply that taking time off even as a founder is a sign of lacking passion or commitment: my personal experience is that people who don't recreate tend to blow things up really bad in the long run.
As a start-up founder my dream is to change the world. Here at @pastbook we deal with technology on a daily basis and yet there are millions of people who have never owned a photo in their life, not to mention such basic needs as having light after the sun goes down. Working with Watts of Love to create and spread this photo story seemed like the perfect match for us, and I hope it can make a difference. It is doing project like this that I feel moving a step forward in making my dream happen. Lights On!
Enjoy the story about love, joy, and hope on Ilin Island, Philippines. http://wattsoflove.pastbook.com
We at PastBook.com were working on a project to make easier to create books in a collaborative way - allowing people from different places and devices to put photos (but not just photos) together, to create stories and keep those memories save forever, even printing them in a book.
We saw this behavior raising up especially around gifting like "put together some crazy photo for the birthday of a common friend" or "having all the photos of a wedding from the different points of view of the guests" or "collecting the photos from a company party or an event".
Main problem in doing this was that still a lot of users are not sharing all their photos on Facebook or they simply prefer to share them somewhere else.
That's why we started working to extend this feature to allow people to simply put photos together independently from where those photos are posted/shared/saved. Then up-sell premium services like, for instance, printing.
It's built from developers with developer in mind: we'll allow every other photo-app to use our API to push/get content from these shared albums and provide books (PDF/PRINTED) on demand, as potential revenue stream for a lot of startups in the photography business looking for monetization channels.
We offer salary + equity.
PastBook is on a mission to help people reliving their memories. We are VC backed - rebuilding the team from scratch and looking for engineer #1. We can sponsor VISA, but just after a trial period of few months. No remote.
More info here: http://www.pastbook.com/txt/job-offers/#cto
Interested? Write to work@pastbook.com