Looking for React, Next.js, TypeScript to join Hardcover (Goodreads competitor)

Hey hey all!

Last year we started a small but ambitious project: create an alternative to Goodreads to take down Amazon out of spite. It started as a bit of a joke, but now we have a small team working on (all for equity) a Discord community and around 44k ratings being tracked already.

We landed on a name: Hardcover, and have been making progress as a team. We're in public beta now, and recently released some exciting things:

• Match Percentage - Showing a score of 1-100% for how much we think you'll love each book.
• Social feed - Showing book activities by people you follow.
• Multiple Data Providers - We're pulling in book data from multiple sources, organizing it, and building a system to grow with more data.
• Goodreads Importer - Import your books from Goodreads into Hardcover!

We're also working on projects that could be huge on the marketing side (including a Wordle for books and infographics) and creating an "Airtable for your books".

The team right now includes me (full-time, Full-stack developer / product manager), a visual designer/front-end developer (part-time), a back-end developer (part-time), and a data scientist/full-stack dev (part-time). We brainstorm things together, validate problems and prototypes with users, then prioritize and begin implementation.

We recently posted about our first year that sheds light on a lot of it: $9,207 Spent, 400 Users: 8 Lessons From Hardcovers First Year.

React Developer

We're looking for a senior React developer to join the founding team of Hardcover. Someone who can come in with opinions and wants to build stable, scalable, fast software that people love using.

A few pieces of software we're using today:

• React - Obviously.
• Next.js - Hosted on Vercel.
• Hasura - Our GraphQL API that's a gateway to Postgres and Ruby on Rails.
• Ruby on Rails - Our backend for any business logic. The Next.js app doesn't manipulate data in the DB at all – only the Rails side does.

Here're a few libraries and opinions we're using today on the React side: Tailwind.css, Apollo GraphQL Client, next-auth, react-beautiful-dnd, react-window, and slate. Slate is an AMAZING starting point for building rich text editors. We're using it for reviews, and think there's a lot we can do to make the best editor out there. We've set up Storybook for testing components too, but aren't using it to its fullest.

We aren't writing tests for the React side, but we want to find a good middle ground to get some testing in place. We're linting everything, but could also add more rules there.

Later on, we know we want to create mobile versions on iOS and Android – most likely using React Native.

We're looking for someone who can come in and be the lead on all things React for an application that could be used by MILLIONS of people every day (at least that's the hope!).

Equity

From an equity standpoint, we're using the Slicing Pie Model. This means that everyone (myself included) earns equity based on the work and value they bring in to the project. No one is "awarded" equity for joining. This means you'd earn equity based on either 1) chipping in for company expenses or 2) Being paid an hourly salary in equity.

Everyone's percent ownership of the company is (their earned equity)/(everyone's earned equity). With everyone on the team tracking hours and being paid in equity, over time it changes – which is by design. Often times the amount of work to make a successful project is skewed to the people that join the earliest – not necessarily the people that put in the most work or make the largest impact.

This role has both with the opportunity to earn a lot of equity.

Everyone on the team can see everyone else's equity, and I update it monthly for the team to see. Our hope with this approach is to incentivize hard work and sticking around rather than just getting in early.

Up for it?

We're looking for someone to join our team who's up for working on this not just for a week or month - but for years.

There have been dozens of Goodreads competitors that have come and gone over the years. We're trying to build one that stands the test of time. Part of that is building a strong team that can work together with an eye toward the long-term viability of the project.

If this topic (books) and tech stack (react) meshes with your own goals, please reach out! We'd love to bring someone on board this month. Email me (adam at hardcover.app) or comment on this post!