Tony Wright dot com

At least once a week I get some sort of pitch or offer for employment, contracting opportunities, partnerships, and even co-founding opportunities. To save people time, I thought it might be useful to write a bit on what sort of opportunities interest me. I’ll break it up into jobs, contracting, and co-founding opportunities. If you’d want to see more detail on what I’ve done and what I can do, check out my about page. Here’s a quick overview:

• Product Strategy/Management (making things people want)
• UI/UX Design (making things useful)
• Usability testing / heuristic evaluation (making SURE things are useful)
• Visual Design (making things pretty)
• SEO (making sure search engines like your site)
• SMM/Viral Marketing (manipulating social media for fun and profit)
• Coding (light CSS, JavaScript, Rails - you don’t want me coding full-time, but I interface well with coders)

Co-founding Opportunities
For the purposes of this page, anytime someone wants me to dive into a new(ish) startup on the founding team. These are generally the offers that I find most interesting (given my preference for risk and equity over stability and salary). Co-founding opportunities that interest me have the following characteristics:

• Have a great technical co-founder
• Have a committed full-time founding team. As Paul Graham says: “You can’t use euphemisms like “didn’t go anywhere” for something that’s your only occupation. People won’t let you.”
• The team has a preference for open-source software (Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc)
• Offer a “clean slate”– it’s a new product/project with minimal legacy design and code
• Is a product/project that will benefit consumers or small businesses (I’m not a big fan of “enterprise software”)
• Allows me to wear a few different hats (as Robert Heinlein says, specialization is for insects).

Contracting Opportunities
Given that I have no portfolio or business “front-end”, I get a surprising number of contracting opportunities. These requests range from product management work in the areas of SEO/SMM and UI/UX design, but occasionally they are more “hands-on” jobs (which sometimes can be fun!). Contracting opportunities that interest me have the following characteristics:

• The job has ongoing, regular, and recurring needs.
• If it’s UI/UX design work, it’s not a “it works exactly how we want– we just need it to look prettier” type of job. If that’s the case, you and I have different ideas of what design is.
• If I’m going to be touching code (as a designer), the team is building the app with open-source software (Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc)
• Offer a “clean slate”– it’s a new product/project with minimal legacy design and code
• Is a product/project that will benefit consumers or small businesses (I’m not a big fan of “enterprise software”)
• Allows me to wear a few different hats (as Robert Heinlein says, specialization is for insects).

Jobs
For the purposes of this page, I’m saying that anything with an actual recurring paycheck is a job. Jobs that interest me have the following characteristics:

• Are within a small company or department (ideally a startup)
• Have a generous options package (if necessary, at the expense of a generous salary)
• Offer a “clean slate”– it’s a new product/project with minimal legacy design and code
• Is a product/project that will benefit consumers or small businesses (I’m not a big fan of “enterprise software”)
• Is a senior management position (or is a hands-on position on a small enough team where positional authority doesn’t matter)
• Allows me to wear a few different hats (as Robert Heinlein says, specialization is for insects).

I don’t know if this well help scare off the bad-fit offers (I try to politely reply to anything that comes my way) or if it’ll help attract the good-fit opportunities, but I figured it was worth a shot.