Head of Socials

Hotplate; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Hotplate, based in San Francisco, is seeking a Head of Socials to own a mission-critical growth engine through filming, editing, and posting content that resonates with chefs and bakers. You will shape strategy, manage execution, and measure outcomes to optimize performance.

You will partner with the co-founders to decide what to test, while owning end-to-end campaigns and analysis to drive growth from a 25K follower base toward 250K.

Qualifications

• You are a creator who can write, shoot and edit posts and videos.
• You analyze reach, engagement, shares, follower growth and conversions to spot patterns and scale or adjust.

Responsibilities

• Own the social content strategy and end-to-end execution (filming, editing, posting).
• Collaborate with the co-founders to identify tests and what to test first, then execute.
• Grow Hotplate's audience and engagement, turning content into a growth engine.
• Spend significant time in-person with chefs/bakers for shoots and storytelling.
• Role based in San Francisco; 5 days a week in-person with travel 1–2 times per month.

Skills

Creator

Content analytics

Job description

About Hotplate

Hotplate exists to enable anyone to start and scale a local food business without a brick and mortar.

The traditional brick and mortar restaurant model is broken: it requires six figures in upfront capital and comes with high operating costs. Within their first year, 2/3 of all restaurants and bakeries close.

The next wave of food entrepreneurship is emerging. These chefs and bakers run businesses from home, commissary kitchens, or mobile pop-ups. They generate hype and buzz on Instagram and run almost entirely on pre-orders. The result is 50-80% profit margins, over 10x the traditional 5% margin of a brick and mortar.

But today's e-commerce tools weren't built for this way of selling food. Without Hotplate, chefs and bakers hack together DMs, Google Forms, Square, and Shopify. They spend more time managing logistics than growing their business.

We've supported 7,000 businesses generating $100M+ in sales, many of whom are the top pop ups in the country recognized by the New York Times, James Beard, Infatuation, Eater, etc., and we're just getting started.

By building the foundational tool for this new model, we have the opportunity to fundamentally change the food industry for the better: increasing the diversity and accessibility of food by making it possible for anyone to start a food business.

If you want to read more to make sure Hotplate is a good fit, check out our philosophies on hiring, fundraising, and our values.

The role

As Hotplate's Head of Socials, you'll own a mission-critical part of our growth engine, and one of the most important tools we use to stay connected with chefs and bakers.

We are looking for someone who wants the freedom to push our strategy (collaborating with the co-founders to identify what to test first), and then own the end to end execution (filming + editing), as well as analysis of what works vs. not.

This job is part maintenance, shipping content to serve our existing community and audience, but mostly experimentation. We want our content to bring new chefs onto Hotplate, help people discover the drop model, and get more consumers excited to buy from our chefs. Much of these playbooks aren't built out, yet.

We've organically grown to 7K+ active businesses selling and built an audience of 25K+ followers. We believe this is the right cultural moment to make Hotplate and the food drop model mainstream. This person will help us grow to 250K followers and turn our best-performing content into something millions of people engage with.

In this role, you will spend a lot (!) of time with chefs and bakers in-person and async, filming with them, drawing out their stories, and helping them feel comfortable on camera. Our chefs and bakers are ultimately why we do what we do. Full stop, you should be someone who's excited to work closely with chefs and bakers and make them feel supported, cared for, loved up, and feeling like they've had an amazing experience with our team.

This role is based in San Francisco, and we are 5 days a week in-person. This role includes travel, likely 1-2 trips / month, sometimes last minute.

What you will need to be successful

• You're already a creator. You can write the post, shoot and edit the video, and ship it yourself

• You're obsessed with understanding why content performs. You use reach, engagement, shares, follower growth and conversions to spot patterns, form hypotheses, run experiments and decide what to scale or change. Every post is a chance to learn, and when we fail, we fail together