We’re bringing gardening to the masses. Join us.

Do home gardens make your insides tingle? Does local food warm your heart? Does urban agriculture make you want to plant every roof in your city?

SproutRobot needs you.

We’re looking for passionate people who want to join a revolutionary company that is transforming the way we produce food.

As a co-founder, you’ll take responsibility for one of the core aspects of SproutRobot’s operations. Everyone pitches in on everything, but you’ll take on a chunk of the business and make it your mission to Make Shit Happen™.

Co-founders will get a vesting chunk of equity, based how long you spend working your buns off for the company.

Interns will receive compensation in the form of experience, recommendations, a small hourly rate, and/or equity. We’ll negotiate based on your experience and how much kick-ass stuff you can get done.

Here’s who we need:

A Business Co-founder who will rock the cashflow. You are honest, you are creative, you love people, and you brain thinks in commerce. You will make blog writers fall in love with us.  You will write grants. You will go to farmer’s markets and preach the gospel of SproutRobot. You will court partners who want to sell their products to our customers or license our service. And most importantly, you believe the way to sell things is to connect a great, responsible product with people who really, genuinely, need and want it.

A Gardening Co-founder who will research gardening techniques all the live long day.  You’ll figure out what seed varieties are best in what climates. You’ll answer gardening questions from our users on email, Twitter, and Facebook with love, charm, and respect. You’ll figure out where gardeners are running into trouble, and fix our instructions so that future customers hit home runs. And you’ll love every minute of it, because new sprouts make your heart sing and the garden is your Mecca.

Our Technical Co-founder will craft beautiful code, refactor, test, iterate, and polish SproutRobot’s code until it purrs like a kitten. You’ll work closely with interaction designers and gardening experts because tou understand that code is nothing if it’s not tied to a real human need, and that our human need is that our users need vegetables to grow, and they need to grow right. iOS, Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript are your hammer. The worlds gardens are your nail.

Interns

You’ve got pep. You’ve got spirit. You’ve got a heart of gold, and you want to change the world. You’re our next intern. Here’s just a sampling of what you could do:

• Help the gardening co-founder with research. We need to know when you can plant peppers in Poughkeepsie. Here’s Google. Get on it.
  
  
• Learn how to program! Help us write code!
  
  
• Hang out in our farmer’s market booth and talk SproutRobot up.
  
  
• Stuff seed packets. Glue mailers. Take them to the post office. Run, Forest, run.
  
  
• Look for grants that we can apply for. Draft proposals.
  
  
• Be our Twitter goddess. Scour the tubes for cool gardening information and pass it on to our subscribers. Babble with our adoring throngs.
  
  
• Pretty much anything else that needs to get done. There’s a lot.

Or some combination of those. Just wanna code all summer? We can make that happen. We’ll figure out a way for you to work on things that will help you build your career.

So, are you in? 

This is an opportunity to get into the next great gardening organization on the ground floor.  Local food is exploding. The green revolution is nigh. People need ways to save money on groceries.  SproutRobot is using technology, design, social media, and the entrepreneurial spirit to make gardening much, MUCH easier to jump into, with two galoshed feet.

Join us. We’ve been waiting for you. Email hello@sproutrobot.com with a cover letter that makes us feel like SproutRobot would be impossibly incomplete without your radiant light. Resume not necessary. Make us want you.

About SproutRobot 

Launched in May 2010, SproutRobot is a web-based service that makes it devastatingly easy to start a vegetable garden. Punch in your zip code and what you want to grow. Whenever it’s the right time to plant something, we send you seeds with comic-style instructions so clear your dog could follow them. Featured in TechCrunch, LifeHacker, and on TV news in dozens of markets across the U.S., SproutRobot has signed up 5000 registered users and about 100 paying customers who receive our lovingly packaged seeds and instructions every month. It was built by Erik Pukinskis, with help from at various times from Atiya Simon, Kynthia Brunette, Caroline Olsen Van-Stone and Rain Miner. Currently Erik is running it as a sole founder. We haven’t accepted any funding yet, so it’s 100% founder owned. 

About Erik Pukinskis

Erik is a computer nerd and a design fanatic who thinks the world is a mess and wants to help. He founded SproutRobot in 2009 after realizing that he needed a robot to remind him when to plant things in his garden. He’s been programming since he was a wee lad, got a bachelor’s in Computer Science from the University of Connecticut, a masters in Interaction Design from Indiana University, and did two years of a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at U.C. San Diego before he realized academia was eating his soul and left to found SproutRobot. He runs SproutRobot full time, although sometimes he has to freelance to keep the lights on.

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