Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
beamjobs.com
Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
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Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#2I like the clean design of Beamjobs.com. Wish that was more common.
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#3At least they made it out of that first stage! Full-time employees get stuck in that stage all the time by just scheduling meetings but never actually getting any real work done that drives revenue. Looks like they were able to realize that meeting with people without a specific agenda and monetized path forward is usually just wheel-spinning.
By making that leap and going out on their own, they were able to accelerate that learning process and condense it to months rather than years (or never). Painful, but useful.
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#4I like the clean design of Beamjobs.com. Wish that was more common.
Thank you, the credit for that goes to my brother. If it was left to me the site would look like some 90s monstrosity.
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#5I can't tell who their target market is. Sounds like it switched from B2B to B2C but maybe they don't think B2C can actually scale so long term it's B2B? The author writes with a level of irony and self-awareness but it feels like he just wants to give it his best and see what happens without a particular need to be successful. And maybe that's fine. But I'd rank this particular approach as low probability of success and low potential of profit given success has been achieved and jeez running forward with this with one year of leeway in this economy is a scary idea to me. The again I'd never run a start up so not my idea of a good time to begin with.
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#6I think I understand that you’ve pivoted to selling a resume builder for data science workers.
It seems to me from your story that you could use some slightly more hard-nosed business sense. I won’t pretend I know what you should do, but I do have a few reactions to your story and situation.
Building out a data science/ML jobs site that is trusted by ML workers is a good idea, and could be really valuable. One downside; it’s such a large and competitive market that you will be competing with well-financed groups. But, it has a lot to recommend it, not least that these workers are extraordinarily valuable to corporations right now.
I get that you want to aim at workers first for cultural reasons.
What I would do, immediately, as in today, would be to reboot your recruiting business and start getting set up with corporations who are hiring ML workers as a recruiter.
The problem you have right now is that you are charging the side of the two-sided ML jobs market that has no money; the workers. You should charge the side that is willing to pay up to seven figures for good ML workers.
Now, how do you keep your culture and values? There are lots of possibilities — you could keep charging the $10, but offer to forward the candidate to companies that match the resumé. You could make a ‘transparency pledge’ to the workers, as well as do revenue sharing with them.
You could build out the site into a trusted sort of glassdoor for ML workers where people (that you have vetted, I’d suggest) can anonymously tell others (and most importantly, you) which companies are good and which are bad.
At any rate, I’d strongly urge you to think about hitching up your economics to the side of the market that can get tens of millions of dollars of value out of the people you’re working so hard to help — keep helping the people you want to; getting them a job is a lot more help than prettying up their resume.
And, congrats on the sale! It feels good when someone wants what you’re selling :)
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#7At least they made it out of that first stage! Full-time employees get stuck in that stage all the time by just scheduling meetings but never actually getting any real work done that drives revenue. Looks like they were able to realize that meeting with people without a specific agenda and monetized path forward is usually just wheel-spinning. By making that leap and going out on their own, they were able to accelera…
It's a good point, I just wish I learned that lesson a bit quicker. I guess some lessons you have to learn the hard way.
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#8As a guy in a, eh, boutique software consultancy with an employee count of "myself" and no idea where my next project after the one I'm currently working on will come from (although I've had some interesting calls lately), I'm just here to support your efforts and say thanks for blogging about your experiences.
What's your stack? (Since I work with Elixir which runs on the Erlang BEAM VM, I had to ask, lol)
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#9I've always thought that the talk to customers advice was bad as a starting point. If you don't have the domain experience to go to your first customer and say I built X and it solves your problem Y then I think you're barking up the wrong tree. Once you have customers it becomes important to talk to them for improvements. And when you have a product obviously you've gotta talk to people to sell it.
Re: Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
#10Just a hint, a lot of engineers I talk to are desperately in need of career advice and they don't find a port of a call.