Founding Designer
About Perch
The mission of Perch is to make reading free. The best way to understand what we're building is to try the app for yourself and read these two essays:
In terms of initial funding, we've raised over $6 million from some of the best venture capitalists in the world, including Reddit Co-founder Alexis Ohanian's 776 Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Ashton Kutcher's Sound Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, Kygo's Palm Tree Crew, and more.
The founding team currently consists of Mike (CEO), Matt (CTO), and Will (Founding Engineer).
The Role
Your sole responsibility as our Founding Designer will be to design the most beautiful and useful reading app in the world. This includes individual contributor responsibilities such as owning all things product design and user research. But you will also be responsible for building a design culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship. If the design of Perch isn't world-class, the probability of us serving a billion users is zero.
We are biased, but we genuinely believe this is one of the most exciting engineering opportunities in tech. It's an opportunity to do the best work of your life and build a product that impacts billions of people, while making the whole world smarter. Financially, you can view it as compressing 40+ working years into 2-4 really intense ones. Here are the assumptions that have to hold for Perch to be a $100 billion company, using Spotify's $125 billion market cap and 640 MAUs as a comp:
- 640 million MAUs: Hundreds of millions of people already read blogs and newsletters, and we think we can grow the market to 1 billion+ by removing discovery/cost friction from the user experience.
- $30 ARPU: Spotify's revenue per user is $30. Instagram's is $50.
But beyond monetary rewards and potentially impacting the lives of billions of people, we believe this is a rare opportunity to grow as a designer and as a person. You will work with a fantastic group of teammates on some incredibly hard problems, and in the process, you will become a better designer than you ever could've imagined while cultivating friendships with your colleagues that last a lifetime. If this resonates, we'd love to talk with you.
One More Thing
We built two blogs called the Startup Archive and The Founders' Tribune that have hundreds of thousands of followers across Instagram (SA, FT), X/Twitter (SA, FT), LinkedIn (SA), and two newsletters.
It began as a way to dogfood our product and put ourselves in the shoes of people who write online, but it has grown into this powerful owned-media asset that reaches millions of people every month. The plan is to build a media company within Perch that can be leveraged in three important ways:
- Improves Perch experience and is aligned with our goal of making great writing accessible. The more great writing there is on Perch, the more useful the product becomes. The Startup Archive and Founders' Tribune are some of hte most read publications on Perch, and if we can profitably launch more great publications, that means more great stuff to read for our users.
- Reduce customer acquisition cost for Perch and future products. One simple example of this creating Perch playlists (e.g. “Top 100 Startup Essays of All Time”) and sharing it across the Startup Archive socials. We haven't done this yet because we are focused on retention and frequency of use before turning our attention to growth, but it's a powerful growth hack that will be available when we need it.
- Profitability. Despite quite a few inquiries, we haven't monetized the media properties with advertisements. More money is always nice, but we're not cash-constrained right now and time spent selling ads would detract from our focus on Perch. However, the ability to sell ads and get the company to profitability when when we need to is a nice lever to have that makes us less reliant on VC funding. Over the long-term, we plan to monetize these publications through the Perch revenue share to better align our incentives with writers and improve company profitability.
