👋 We're Lemontree, a new kind of non-profit that sells family dinner.
Every day, we show up at work and help low-income parents set the table with fresh produce and pride.
Our product looks like most meal-kits with everything a mom or dad needs to cook a delicious meal for just $2 per serving.
And parents love what we sell. In our first year in business, we delivered more than 13,000 meals. Every week, we get photos from happy customers:
Our core product is physical. Every week we deliver fresh produce, meat and staples.
But, we understand the leverage that software provides. Our team's background is startups not non-profits. We've worked at places like DoorDash, Instacart and Meetup and we know that the right software can make all the difference.
To help us get there, a team of incredible volunteers helped us build a simple Ruby on Rails application that:
- Lets customers pay online and stores customer credit card information with Stripe
- Sends receipt text messages with Twilio
- Generates PDF labels that we use to know what to put in a customer bag
- Exposes an API that we use with Retool to enter information and build admin tools (all customer orders happen via SMS and are manually entered.) Retool is an amazing low-code tool! Highly recommend.
The app is fairly straightforward (~1000 LOC), hosted on heroku and well tested (95% coverage).
I'm happy to add you to the repo if you're curious.
Our team is mildly technical (Alex, the founder was an intern at Rails Dev Shop Thoughtbot in 2011...), but we don't have the capacity to maintain our codebase and build the crucial features we know we need.
We're looking for a partner to helps us maintain our app, and add incremental features that drive real change. This isn't just a consulting gig, this is an opportunity to help create amazing family dinners.
Ideally you're an individual contractor who has experience working with both startups and rails.
Some things you might help with:
- Fix a bug with our API order flow that is causing new orders for users without a card on file to return a
400(and do all the other expected behavior). - Refactor our order processing code to be more "rails-y" and add tests.
- Help us build something like hello bar to announce new features.
- Help us add a after checkout screen that encourages folks to refer friends.
Each of these is a relatively narrowly scoped but hugely important project.
But, for us this is about more than just the projects, it's about having someone who can act as a technical sounding board. Someone can help us cut scope, drive code quality and understand soft-spots.
We imagine that this is about 2 days a month of work (give or take) – it's a simple app. We're happy to setup a retainer and adjust as things grow or expand.
We don't care where you're located, but we need you to be available to communicate for regular checkins on Eastern Time.
email alex@alexgodin.com!