Point of clarity: are all of your services rendered remotely? No need to move to a big city (until a job requires it, at least)?
Yup, everything is online.
Launch HN: Pathrise (YC W18) – Career accelerator for students, free until hired
41–50 of 77 posts
Re: Launch HN: Pathrise (YC W18) – Career accelerator for students, free until hired
#42> because we have aligned incentives [with our students] - we only make money if they do. If you sign up all students and do nothing further, you still get your 7%. That is not aligned. To align incentives you would have to align the students payments with how much you improved their outcomes - much harder to do of course. I think your model has the same risks as real estate commissions where the selling agent is hig…
Agreed, a "progressive" pricing based on salary would be a good way to address this, e.g. >50k -> 1%, >80k -> 3%, >100k -> 5%, >120k -> 7%.
Percentages in and of themselves are progressive pricing! If we believe we can get the student a 100k+ job, we'll definitely be incentivized to help them get there instead of telling them to settle for a 50k job.
The progressive^2 pricing model is interesting though. It's a little legally complex unfortunately so we have to look into it, but I also like the aspect of the idea where the less you make as a student, the more a lower percentage could help you live more comfortably.
Re: Launch HN: Pathrise (YC W18) – Career accelerator for students, free until hired
#43I really like this concept for college tuition or for funding people who haven't already gotten a degree. However if just focusing on soon-to-be/recent graduates, I don't get why a student would be motivated enough to use your service with a non-trivial fee over going to a university provided one that they have already essentially paid for. Even going to a state college, the schools are still quite driven to have ver…
By aligned incentives, we mean aligned incentives that are integrated into the business model.
Any business has a good reason to treat their customers well because that results in future business, but you wouldn't necessarily call something like a restaurant an aligned incentives business.
We've seen from our perspective that the lack of aligned incentives in the business model itself leads to ineffective solutions. A good portion of our students come to us after already having gone to their career services centers and realizing they want more help.
To be clear, I still think career services centers and the counselors that help run them are doing good work. However, one counselor using intuition and anecdotal evidence to advise hundreds of students just doesn't work very well.
Re: Launch HN: Pathrise (YC W18) – Career accelerator for students, free until hired
#44I would advise them to not cold-email students about 'Engineering fellowships' which upon further inspection are just resumed workshops and interview prep. If you want students to take your company and service seriously, don't send out disingenuous emails about 'impressive backgrounds'. It makes your company look like one of those pay-to-join academic honor societies whose emails everybody[1] ignores. [1] Obvious not…
That's a good point that the word fellowship is potentially misleading. Although...I do want to clarify we actually offer advice on project development, the interview prep goes to a reasonable technical depth, and you are connected with other engineers at top companies. So in many ways, it is still a fellowship. We struggle a little with how to describe ourselves because we're not quite just career coaching but calli…
I replied to the original email you sent me with some thoughts. I want to note here that I like the idea of Pathrise but was just a bit put off by the initial email.
Re: Launch HN: Pathrise (YC W18) – Career accelerator for students, free until hired
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, a "progressive" pricing based on salary would be a good way to address this, e.g. >50k -> 1%, >80k -> 3%, >100k -> 5%, >120k -> 7%.
Percentages in and of themselves are progressive pricing! If we believe we can get the student a 100k+ job, we'll definitely be incentivized to help them get there instead of telling them to settle for a 50k job. The progressive^2 pricing model is interesting though. It's a little legally complex unfortunately so we have to look into it, but I also like the aspect of the idea where the less you make as a student, the…
Right, but your revenues are also dependent on the cost or time it takes you to do. Let’s say it costs you $1000 of time to get someone a $100K job and $1500 of time to get them a $120K job. You are going to encourage them to take the $100K job to maximize your company’s revenues.
Re: Launch HN: Pathrise (YC W18) – Career accelerator for students, free until hired
#46> because we have aligned incentives [with our students] - we only make money if they do. If you sign up all students and do nothing further, you still get your 7%. That is not aligned. To align incentives you would have to align the students payments with how much you improved their outcomes - much harder to do of course. I think your model has the same risks as real estate commissions where the selling agent is hig…
I think that you have some good points here that we've actually debated internally quite a bit. First, I would say the program is designed so that we commit a specific amount of time and resources per student, so we're motivated to work on their behalf to recover that investment that we make for free. As for the risk of trying to sell quickly rather than looking for quality, I think the most effective way we can tack…
Committing a specific amount of time gives you an incentive to better screen your applicants. It still doesn't give you an incentive to find them the highest offer. Let's say that someone could get 110k with a significant effort by your company and 100k without you.
You guys doing very little gets you 7k.
You guys putting forth significant effort gets you 7.7k.
That's not much difference and it makes a lot more sense for you to put that extra effort into finding another customer to get another 7k.
Re: Launch HN: Pathrise (YC W18) – Career accelerator for students, free until hired
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Percentages in and of themselves are progressive pricing! If we believe we can get the student a 100k+ job, we'll definitely be incentivized to help them get there instead of telling them to settle for a 50k job. The progressive^2 pricing model is interesting though. It's a little legally complex unfortunately so we have to look into it, but I also like the aspect of the idea where the less you make as a student, the…
Right, but your revenues are also dependent on the cost or time it takes you to do. Let’s say it costs you $1000 of time to get someone a $100K job and $1500 of time to get them a $120K job. You are going to encourage them to take the $100K job to maximize your company’s revenues.
This is potentially a real effect, but in this case, the exact unit economics will determine exactly how much it matters.
Thanks to a focus on software and automation where we can afford it without hurting the experience, it's been good enough so far where we haven't noticed this affecting our decision making yet.
Re: Launch HN: Pathrise (YC W18) – Career accelerator for students, free until hired
#48Cool idea, my university has a stellar co-op program for Engineering and Computer Science students, and other universities in Canada do as well (Waterloo, UBC, etc.) and I am curious as to what differs you from universities that have these co-op programs because co-op is mandatory at UVic and Waterloo and has helped fund my way alongside many other engineering students ways through their degree. Also 7% of first year…
Same with RIT(Rochester Institute of Technology), the cooperative education program is a huge boost for placement. Most of us end up getting hired before we even graduate at the same company. You go into the workforce with real experience, school credit, AND you get paid(requirement).
Re: Launch HN: Pathrise (YC W18) – Career accelerator for students, free until hired
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that you have some good points here that we've actually debated internally quite a bit. First, I would say the program is designed so that we commit a specific amount of time and resources per student, so we're motivated to work on their behalf to recover that investment that we make for free. As for the risk of trying to sell quickly rather than looking for quality, I think the most effective way we can tack…
Committing a specific amount of time gives you an incentive to better screen your applicants. It still doesn't give you an incentive to find them the highest offer. Let's say that someone could get 110k with a significant effort by your company and 100k without you. You guys doing very little gets you 7k. You guys putting forth significant effort gets you 7.7k. That's not much difference and it makes a lot more sense…
Hmmmm, this is a really interesting line of logic.
With this logic, I think you can look at the income share agreement more as us taking on the risk rather than aligned incentives.
The problem with some potentially good career coaching services out there is that charging students thousands of dollars upfront without actually having placed them yet just feels unfair.
On the other hand, with income sharing, students know we have a similar risk of getting nothing out of the experience as they do, which motivates us to make their experience as impactful as possible.
Even if we continue at an extremely high rate of placements, let's say 95%+, for the other 5% of students where the worst case happens, the income share agreement model is much better than upfront payment because the cost of these invested advising hours and resources is on us rather than on the student.
Outside of that, I think from a purely revenue perspective you're basically right that the incentive to invest a lot of time for a little salary is not incentivized.
Part of the reason why we are still incentivized to put effort into our students (especially if we can track measurable results) is that those results will ultimately lead to much better user acquisition anyways, especially since we expect natural referrals for Pathrise to be one of our main sources of growth moving forward.
I do have to admit though, that though this is a very real incentive core to our business, it isn't an incentive that's actually integrated into the revenue model itself.
Re: Launch HN: Pathrise (YC W18) – Career accelerator for students, free until hired
#50I am curious as to how narrow your scope of industries/requirements will be in the future.
I have a friend with a BA in Photography and a MA in Collaborative Design. She is very talented and intelligent, but has trouble explaining exactly what it is that she excels at. (I've known her for years and I still only get the gist of it. Think creative work mixed with formalized systems thinking.)
Is this a possible customer down the line?