thanks for this! Great points. Here's how we think of them:
chicken & egg: we build hyper local liquidity the way Uber tackles neighborhoods or cities, hence the initial focus on investment banking. The few similar products we've seen try this inevitably try to do dozens of industries or hundreds of roles and this makes it impossible to achieve true liquidity or to allocate marketing dollars properly.
Quality control: To me, this is the beauty of The Lobby. We're not trying to get the best written content, or to get the CEO of a company with highly specialized knowledge. It's junior level people talking about how they got their job. If you're bad at this or your quality sucks, our ratings will indicate that and you won't be picked further. If you're a great insider, your ratings will indicate that too and you get more demand + more money.
But the main point here is: this knowledge is not rocket science. Any analyst at a specific team in Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch will have very similar answers on how to land the job. That's what we see at The Lobby too.
No one can guarantee that the information the insider is giving is 100% accurate, but we think with the right reward & incentive systems in place, the best insiders rise up and the crappy ones get booted out.
Edit: To the last points you added. The myth that because you're a job seeker you don't have money is the one we're fighting with our analogy. People spend money on all sorts of things they don't need and absurd amounts of money on schools, bootcamps like GA, and more. Those are all for career advancement.
If you believe our premise that learning from insiders about what life is really like, what it takes to break in, getting personalized tips, etc. is the way to get the best careers, then suddenly a large portion of that spend can go to something like The Lobby, which I profoundly believe is a better use of your cash.
One example that I kept hearing from the YC partners themselves: "If I had your service when I was a freshman, I would have spoken to 2 lawyers, asked them what they do all day, only to realize that I don't want to be a lawyer." Think of the massive opportunity cost of learning what to do or WHAT NOT to do way before even pursuing a career or becoming a full-time job seeker.
Last point: our best users are career switchers, they already make money and want to make a career move. For me, moving from finance to tech was borderline impossible and I had money to spend. I just didn't know what to do or what path to take. The Lobby would have solved or mitigated that too.