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Review my startup

talentopoly.com

11–20 of 44 posts

Re: Review my startup

#11

Seems like it's forrst.com + resumes.

Forrst is great if you want to see what other designers and developers are working on. Talentopoly is great if you want to see what they're reading.

I think there's room for both as I am a Forrst member and still found myself wanting to build something like Talentopoly.

Re: Review my startup

#12
post #5

Almost forgot to mention the most important aspect, the site is invite-only. It's read-only to the public.

This becomes confusing - it seems at first like a social bookmarking site, but then there's resumes. It's a gated community, but read only to the public. I'm not sure any of this is BAD, and I may just be stupid, but the 'why the hell should I care' bit seems to be confusing? Is it a job board, or a news/content sharing site? Both?

The idea behind the hosting of resumes is because the goal is to have it be one of the websites you check everyday. And for designers looking for developers, IT professionals looking for designers, and vice versa -- you can qualify potential co-work partners.

Re: Review my startup

#13
post #5

Almost forgot to mention the most important aspect, the site is invite-only. It's read-only to the public.

This becomes confusing - it seems at first like a social bookmarking site, but then there's resumes. It's a gated community, but read only to the public. I'm not sure any of this is BAD, and I may just be stupid, but the 'why the hell should I care' bit seems to be confusing? Is it a job board, or a news/content sharing site? Both?

Not really a job board -- but a easier way for IT pro's to share that aspect. We've had people be contacted because of their talentopoly hosted resume already from some of the big boys -- so that function is getting noticed.

Re: Review my startup

#14

I launched the site in late Oct of last year and it is growing by leaps and bounds. It's built with Ruby on Rails. My hope is to build a community around sharing links strictly related to development and design. No general tech news links or other distractions. I'd love to get some feedback on it from the HN community.

How did you overcome the "chicken and egg problem" of getting the first batch of people to join?

Re: Review my startup

#15
This looks like a crowdsourced curation of content relevant to a particular vertical (have I thrown in enough buzzwords?).

That actually seems like a reasonable idea. The problem you may have is that a site like Stackoverflow could (and IMHO should) copy it and integrate it into what they have. It actually seems like a good extension for the SO model.

Re: Review my startup

#16
post #8

I launched the site in late Oct of last year and it is growing by leaps and bounds. It's built with Ruby on Rails. My hope is to build a community around sharing links strictly related to development and design. No general tech news links or other distractions. I'd love to get some feedback on it from the HN community.

I recently(ish) starting to work on web design after years in desktop product management. A community like this could be terribly helpful.

Hah, I'm in the exact same boat and had the same initial reaction.

Re: Review my startup

#17

I launched the site in late Oct of last year and it is growing by leaps and bounds. It's built with Ruby on Rails. My hope is to build a community around sharing links strictly related to development and design. No general tech news links or other distractions. I'd love to get some feedback on it from the HN community.

How did you overcome the "chicken and egg problem" of getting the first batch of people to join?

If it's just link aggregation, you can do it yourself. It's difficult, but possible.

When I was doing newslily (which isn't entirely abandoned, but we've moved on to new projects), we pretty consistently had better quality links than reddit or digg, but doing so took a ton of work on the part of my co-founder and I.

I haven't signed up for OP's service, so I can't say with certainty that it's a link aggregator, but that's what it sounds like. If it is, I suspect that OP is spending a lot of their time searching out quality content.

And if this is the case, good on them. They're probably learning a ton in the process.

Re: Review my startup

#18
post #4

While I do think the design is very well done, I'm not sure I see the benefit of something like this, vs. Delicious and other social bookmarking things. Keeping it a gated community is going to make taking off VERY difficult, unless you have some over-sharing, highly prolific people in out of the gate (no pun intended). While there may be groups that do want to keep their sharing semi-private, are there enough to bui…

I do have a few members who share ~5 links per day on the site including myself. In a given day the site receives ~20 new links. Most of this is just now starting to gain momentum as Feb 1st is when the site launched with a new design and a few new features. The site has close to 100 return visitors daily and building. Revenue is not a concern at the moment.

>The site has close to 100 return visitors daily and building.

How many of those users actually post content?

Re: Review my startup

#19

Seems like it's forrst.com + resumes.

John -- Forrst is more for sharing actual work, we aim to be sharing what you're reading. We want it to be about the links to the stuff that matter to a developer or designers bottom line: new Google fonts, jquery plug-in, coffee code, etc.etc

Re: Review my startup

#20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do have a few members who share ~5 links per day on the site including myself. In a given day the site receives ~20 new links. Most of this is just now starting to gain momentum as Feb 1st is when the site launched with a new design and a few new features. The site has close to 100 return visitors daily and building. Revenue is not a concern at the moment.

>The site has close to 100 return visitors daily and building. How many of those users actually post content?

Around 5% post new content daily. This number is steadily going up. But the site has only started to gain traction this month. There's a lot of room for improvement, but I feel like it's off to a good start. ;)
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