On the negative side, this was one of the strangest work experiences I've ever had.
As a professional with years of experience working with startups, the things that went on a Carb Manager had me scratching my head on a daily basis.
The CEO was a young app developer with no business experience who created a bunch of apps about 12 years and got lucky with one of them. His inexperience in business shows.
1) Communication
The most troubling thing was the CEO's communications skills, and the tone that he set for communication within the company. He insists that he approves anything that happens in the company, but doesn't respond to questions. Staff message him on Slack with a question that was a blocker, and he either doesn't respond, or responds with a broccoli emoji. What are you supposed to do with that as an employee?
On calls, he was often unable to make eye contact, and would umm and ahh over even minor questions.
2) Inability to make decisions as a company
The CEO seemed to deeply struggle with making decisions. He would take days or weeks to make decisions on minor matters. For certain decisions, he would sometimes open up discussion to the entire company, which would result in utter gridlock.
3) Constantly shifting priorities
The company implemented the OKR system while I was there. Great! But after agreeing to quarterly objectives, managers would sometimes go in two weeks later and discover that the CEO had changed them without even letting anyone know.
Other times the CEO would announce on an all-hands call two months into the quarter that the company was completely shifting priorities and would be starting over with fresh OKRs the following week.
4) Management by committee
As a marketer, a PM, a developer, or a customer success professional, you likely have a specific skill set that you've developed over the course of your career. It won't be respected at Carb Manager. Every project and every process is put forth for input by the entire team, and every voice is as important as any other. There were complaints from the customer success team that marketing copy contained run on sentences and sentence fragments. In copywriting, you write the way you talk. Marketing copy isn’t English class. The marketing team had to fight like crazy to continue writing normal marketing emails after the CEO wanted them to remove all sentence fragments from the copy after that.
Customer success and dev also often are invited to contribute to Product and branding decisions. Rather than relying on industry-standard best practices, Product and Marketing are then expected to take everyone's most minute little opinions into account, even when it goes contrary to everything anyone in Marketing/Product ever learned throughout their careers.
5) Unqualified staff and cronyism
The CEO hires his friends and people he likes. He's hired several close friends in high-level positions. Almost no one in the company has any training in their role.
On that note, there's a very "clique-y" mentality. If you're a member of the cool kids club, the CEO will post about your birthday and anniversary every year. If not, he won't even bother to throw you a "like" emoji when you post about a vacation or a big life event. He acts as if those outside his friends circle don't exist.
6) Micromanagement
The CEO used to go through and make grammar changes to blog posts to ensure that they followed MLA format. He once sent marketing an article about proper usage of hyphens in academic writing, and asked that they review each article for proper MLA hyphen usage. Only when marketing staff explained the additional time and administrative overhead that this would create did he back down. This was far from an isolated occurrence. He seems to see the company as his own little fiefdom, and wants to be involved in the most minute aspects of everyone's job.
7) Gridlock and stagnation
From the look of things on the outside, the company hasn’t shipped a single new feature after 18 months. This was typical.
The company has a lot of potential, as the first and original Keto diet app, but they've squandered their first mover's advantage, and just from the outside looking in, better-funded competitors seem to be taking over market share.
