DESCRIPTION
The Opportunity:
Founders Factory is unlike anywhere else. We create entirely new products from scratch and turn promising concepts into prototypes, and ultimately an MVP, validating decisions commercially along the way to attract a founding team that can spin out into a fully-fledged business.
We are seeking to build a founding team for a product we are building within the Factory named Powder to the People, a new platform that gives beauty influencers the power to create innovative products and deliver them directly to their audiences, essentially turning beauty influencers into cosmetic brands.
The long term vision of this business is to fundamentally disrupt the way beauty products are launched into the market. The big brands can’t take this approach because they aren’t built to do so, and other startups can’t try this approach because they don’t have access to the insights and networks of big brands. As Founders Factory sits squarely in the middle, we are in a unique position to create a new era of consumer driven beauty products and trends.
This is a business that delivers tangible value to influencers and consumers, sits in a huge and growing market, and has significant backing from L’Oreal. You will take a leading role in launching this business and potentially become part of the founding team at spin-out. For the right person, this is an incredible opportunity where a lot of the early stage thinking around the concept has been identified, and where you would be able to shape not only the technology platform, but also the strategy and team of the business.
As the Product Co-founder of this venture, you’ll tease out problems, conceptualise solutions in the form of prototypes, and validate them with consumers. This process involves proposition development where business model validation is at the heart of the role, so we seek individuals who are constantly thinking about how to fix real world problems in the form of new products. You will be expected to share ideas and approaches with the larger product development team to help see innovative ideas through to launch. You should thrive in a startup environment and subscribe to lean methodologies and principles of product development.
You’ll be responsible for the following:
- Leading an incubation project to test hypotheses of customer segments and business models to create a defensible competitive advantage
- Build working prototypes for both desktop and mobile to put in the hands of real users to test business concepts
- Manage an incubation team of engineers and designers to prioritise, validate and implement a product to test in the hands of users
- Ability to help us build out our toolkit to make building prototypes even faster
- Consolidate feedback from the product development team and assist the team with final production
REQUIREMENTS
As our Product Co-Founder, you possess the following skills and competencies:
- Demonstrable experience bringing a product from concept to completion and launch
- Outstanding leadership and influencing abilities across colleagues and stakeholders
- A proven track record of taking ideas and bringing them to life
- Constantly experimenting with new technologies and tools to drive innovation and creativity Strong communication skills – you’ll be sharing the results of analyses, and discussing technical problems, with a variety of technical and non-technical audiences
- Thrive in uncertainty – ideally in an agency business and/or startup environment
- Ideally have some knowledge or past experience of supply chains and product manufacturing