Opportunities to work with us
In the Makuma team, we don’t have job titles, because we contribute to the project however we can, in the ways that we enjoy. So while we all have specialist skills, we also often get involved in other aspects of the project that we’re passionate about.
However, here are some of the types of work we are currently doing but would love some more help with. If you are passionate about healthy relationships and are skilled in one or more of these areas, we would love to hear from you!
We hire on a permanent basis, working 20-40 hours per week, paid hourly. Our working language is English. Most of our team are based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania and we love to meet up face-to-face when we can. We can also work together remotely though, especially if you’re in a similar time zone. And if you’re excited to work with us but would rather drop in as a freelancer, mentor or volunteer, we’re open to that too.
We offer a very fluid, flexible working culture that’s more like freelancing than a regular job. But with freedom comes responsibility. We expect you to find how to contribute to the project and the team, remove any barriers to you doing your best work, and to speak up whenever you need help. Most of all, you need to be excited about the process of solving complex problems, even when we don’t achieve immediate success.
CMS development
We’re creating a digital content platform for social skills self development activities. It probably makes sense for us to use existing open source solutions, even if we need to customise them to our needs.
If you have experience of either customising a powerful CMS platform, or with building content management systems or ecommerce platforms using a web application framework, let’s talk.
Marketing strategy
Word-of-mouth marketing is core to our product, because we are enabling our customers to have better social interactions – which allow their conversation partners to experience our product too.
To get things rolling though, we’re exploring how to use content marketing and collaborations to drive organic search traffic. We’re open to new ideas, so long as they benefit everyone involved. No manipulative marketing techniques here!
If you have a persistent attitude, a strategic mind and an openness to collaborate, you’ll love this role.
Copywriting
Our style is authentic, compassionate and clear. When customers read what we’ve written, they are inspired to take action – not because of any “marketing tricks”, but because they feel we’re speaking to them and they clearly understand the value of what we propose.
From a single word on a button to a long-form blog post, writing is key to what we do, so if you’re a wizard of words (in English and Romanian) and love a writing challenge, we’d love to hear from you.
Customer research
We like to get the whole team involved with customer research, so that we all get to see what we’re building from the customer’s perspective.
We’re constantly doing lots of customer research though, so there’s always plenty to help with: designing experiments, planning interviews, selecting and scheduling participants, organising logistics, running the experiments, analysing the results and discussing them with the team, so we can use the insights to guide what we’re building.
If you love to observe and talk to customers, but have the organisational and analytical skills to run a good experiment, we’d love to work with you.
Game design
Games take the psychology of motivation and create fictional worlds that make us want to play. We’re fascinated by how we can create games that help people to have better relationships.
We’d love to harness the potential of elements like narrative, levels, goals and collaboration to create a powerful and transformative educational experience, where players learn skills that they can apply to their real-life relationships.
If you have experience of developing games in any form, let’s brainstorm together on the possibilities.
Behaviour change
We don’t want to just share good ideas about how to tackle social anxiety, overcome loneliness and have happy relationships.
We want to go one step further and help people to form healthy habits that have a positive impact on their relationships. That’s much harder, but we believe it’s necessary if we’re going to have the maximum impact.
If you’re passionate about this challenge and familiar with the best ways to achieve deep and lasting change in behaviour, we’d love you to guide the development of this part of our app.
UX/UI design
Once we’ve identified an opportunity to help the customer and mapped how it fits into the bigger picture, we need to design a clear process to make it happen – right down to buttons on the screen and what happens when the customer clicks them. From there we quickly build a prototype, so we can get customer feedback as early as possible.
It’s not enough for us to just create a “usable” experience, though. We are trying to inspire people to make changes in their lives, understand themselves more deeply and improve their relationships – so we need to draw on powerful techniques such as narrative, emotions and game design.
If that sounds like a challenge that inspires you, let’s collaborate.
Community engagement
An African proverb says “it takes a village to raise a child” and we definitely see our project as a collaborative effort.
We want to work with a diverse group of workshop facilitators, therapists and others to create the best educational challenges. As well as feedback from customers, we’re also open to hearing their ideas and suggestions, and working with them to create new functionality and experiences.
If you love to chat with people online, to spark conversations and gather ideas, you’ll enjoy working with our community.
Recruitment & team nurturing
We’re always looking to build relationships with people who have the skills we need, are passionate about healthy relationships and ecology, and enjoy working on difficult challenges in a fast-moving, supportive team. There are only a few who are a good fit, but we’re committed to finding them.
Once on board, we’re committed to maintaining healthy, supportive relationships and helping everyone to continually develop their professional and interpersonal skills. We’d love to get so good at this that we can help other businesses to do the same – especially ‘green’ businesses.
If you love to meet new people and care about forming and supporting compassionate, creative and productive teams, get in touch.
Executive assistant
As a startup, we’re always living on the edge of chaos, and there’s always new problems to solve every day. To stay on top of things, we need to take a methodical and organised approach.
Sometimes these challenges don’t need specific technical knowledge, they just need a positive attitude, patience, precision and perseverance. One day it might be emailing and scheduling research participants, the next day might be organising receipts or doing research online.
If you enjoy working on a different challenge every day and bringing a little order to the chaos, you’re a good match for this role.