We facilitate hundreds of ebook loans every day. Our users indicate the books they would like to lend or borrow and the system matches the lend and borrow requests and prompts the lender through the loan process on Amazon's site.
We make money from sales commissions through the Amazon Associates program and through display and email advertising, including sponsorships by independent authors and publishers. The startup is already bringing in respectable revenue.
In our market, the big news of the day today is that another Kindle lending site, Lendle.me, lost access to the Amazon API. Many are speculating that Amazon revoked the API in order to put an end to Kindle lending. However, the reality is that although BookLending.com is the largest Kindle lending platform by a substantial margin, we have had uninterrupted API access and do not expect that to change. I can discuss this at greater length with qualified candidates.
At this point, we're exploring incubator/seed funding and I'm ready to find the right full-time North America-based (West Coast ideal) technical co-founder. MUST be available full-time once seed funding is in place. Must be able to relocate for minimum three months to any major city in North America.
The ideal cofounder can develop quickly and competently in a LAMP environment. Familiarity with Amazon, Facebook and Twitter APIs would be a real asset. Agile development experience would also be good. If you have leadership experience, tell me about it. We have identified a number of priorities for further development, and I want to find someone who will take a keen interest in product development to contribute to generating ideas, planning, prioritizing as well as taking the lead on execution. Proven dedication to excellence is essential. A love of books is a tremendous plus.
Why I'm a good cofounder for you: I've already proven that I can lead a team and bring a successful product to market that generates tons of media coverage and word of mouth. I have extensive online marketing experience with paid traffic, search engine optimization and social media, and although I do not code, I have several years of project management experience in PHP/MySQL custom development. I am familiar with HTML and I can build MySQL queries to gather data from our database. I keep learning. I don't expect software to do things automagically, and if you want someone with whom to discuss the pros and cons of one approach over another, I can offer an ear. I am gutsy and I am not afraid to reach out to people who can help grow the business; I love talking to people. I have an unwavering commitment to this startup. I'm unflappable, and I laugh a lot. When adversity hits, I suck it up and figure out how to turn it to our advantage. I love books and I understand our market.
Equity in the company - terms to be discussed.
If you are interested, you are bound to have many more questions. Please contact me (include LinkedIn/Blog/Twitter links) at [email protected] and if you appear to be a potential fit I will contact you to discuss further. If you feel like this could be a startup you would love to be involved with and you have the skills it needs, I want to hear from you.
Catherine MacDonald - [email protected]
[thanks to this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2332349 for providing a great example of a "looking for a technical co-founder" listing]