Well, so far, the general consensus seems to be to carry on as initially planned.
Ask HN: Established company planning same thing as 1-man startup – please advise
11–20 of 28 posts
Re: Ask HN: Established company planning same thing as 1-man startup – please advise
#12Established companies are notoriously bad at the pace at which they respond to users - so don't worry about the fast that you have an established company entering the space.
The bigger challenge in my opinion is that this is a two sided market (and building such business is very hard).
Re: Ask HN: Established company planning same thing as 1-man startup – please advise
#13How did you plan to market and sell your service before you found out about potential competition? You should execute that plan without regard to what others are doing. The biggest threat to your ability to get off the ground is not eHarmony. In your general market (services that connect job seekers and employers), there is already significant competition, so what one company does or doesn't do will matter a whole lo…
> If you called each and every one of them, do you think you could get a few interested in working with you on a trial basis?
This is a smart play, market validation. Your system solves a problem for the heads of Talent Acquisition and Human Resources. But a CTO/CIO might be the true economic buyer.
Re: Ask HN: Established company planning same thing as 1-man startup – please advise
#14This is a two sided market, and many people see that as a challenge. However, one side of the market is unemployed people, who are generally desperate and willing to submit their resume just about anywhere. (Apologies if that sounds insensitive to anyone, but it's true in the general case.)
Here's your strategy, at a high level:
> 1. Acquire as many employee leads as possible.
> 2. Sell the leads to companies.
So your first step is acquiring employee leads. The easiest way to do this is to set up a google docs form, with the set of questions you want to ask employees. Include name, location, contact info, and resume.
Post on the employment section of craigslist in every city, every day. There are ("blackhat") services that will do this for you, or you can setup your own system with proxies and automation. I guarantee you will get an absurd conversion percentage. Unemployed people will submit their resume almost anywhere.
In your CL post, be upfront about what you're doing. Tell the employees that you are matching them to companies based on questions they answer. Feel free to lie about how many companies you have signed up. Say it's something like 1000, which sounds like a lot and will convince them to give you their info, but also gives you plausible deniability when they don't hear from any companies for a while.
Once you have a sufficient number of leads, it's time to get the other side of the market. Pick some companies you want to sell customers to. Go through your spreadsheet, and answer questions how you think that company might answer them. Then, go to the company. Seriously... physically go there. If you can't do that, send a first class fedex envelope with some really nice marketing materials. Explain to them what your service is, and tell them you have X employee leads who answered this set of questions. If they're interested, they can pay you per lead or a percentage of salary for any hire.
Boom. Leads sold, money made.
Notice how you do not need to build out your product. You have everything you need right now. Maybe make a nice landing page for your Google docs form, but otherwise, you don't need to do any coding. Get the leads, get the companies, then build out the product.
Move fast. You are not eHarmony. You don't need to put out some polished product, and you don't need to play by the rules. Hustle!
Re: Ask HN: Established company planning same thing as 1-man startup – please advise
#15Before you pour in personal money, you should really think twice if you want to enter this market.
The employer-employee matching market is pretty fucked up in my opinion and personally, I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. It feels horribly broken and I understand why so many people try to get into the market. There surely must be an easier way to match employees with employers than everything out there yet.
My main objections are:
- This is not a technical problem. Matching employees to employers feels like an easy problem but is incredible hard. Hence, there are assessment centers and headhunters. Do they work? Some articles pop up on HN every few weeks that suggest that they don't.
- In my opinion, it is not even a problem. Top talent isn't hired by match-making platforms. So you try to match average Joe with average jobs. For this job, a simple job description should be sufficient (and it is, mostly).
- Match-making platforms are easily game-able, because they're only an intermediate step. The goal is to get a job interview, thus it's better to game the system as an employee than to play by the rules
- "My PHP skills are a 7 out of 10, you're looking for at least an 8. Am I really a 7?" -> there's no objective way to judge skills. It depends on the job and on the employer. Thus, the best solution is to put as many skills as possible with the highest points as possible.
- Try to think of this "problem" by comparing it to housing-platforms. You're looking for a 2 bedroom appartment. It should be bright, not much noise, under 1000$. Surely, you can now filter search results, but a match is done in real life. There's no way to tell if the appartment is really for you unless you've seen it with your own eyes and got a feeling. The same is true for jobs. There's no way to tell if someone is a good fit without having human contact. For appartments, a simple appartment description is enough. Why would you try to apply sophisticated matching-algorithms to human beings?
The only way this might work is if you try to target a specific niche that you really know a lot about.
Re: Ask HN: Established company planning same thing as 1-man startup – please advise
#16This is a two sided market, and many people see that as a challenge. However, one side of the market is unemployed people, who are generally desperate and willing to submit their resume just about anywhere. (Apologies if that sounds insensitive to anyone, but it's true in the general case.) Here's your strategy, at a high level: > 1. Acquire as many employee leads as possible. > 2. Sell the leads to companies. So you…
> feel free to lie about how many companies you have signed up. Say it's something like 1000.
Is this really the sort of advice we give here?
Re: Ask HN: Established company planning same thing as 1-man startup – please advise
#17Competition reduces marketing expenses and adds parameters for differentiation.
I agree with you, but I'm not sure how effectively I can compete as a 1-person operation.
A 1-person operation can do things that don't scale. When you read PG's story about Viaweb, their small operation played in their favor, because their customers would call up, and PG would solve their problem while they were on the phone with them. Customers love this kind of experience even more than not having any issues in the first place. One way to differentiate yourself is to offer this high level of customer service.
Also, large operations have higher overhead, and have to grow more quickly. This is usually at the expense of quality. Success for them may require $2M/year revenue or their division will be shut down. You may only need $200K/year to live quite comfortably. That means you can solve a small subset of the problem really, really well, and a lot of people will be very happy to use you because your product works every single time and you always answer their questions right away, and the other company just has a bunch of extra bells and whistles and upsells and annoying growth hacking stuff that gets in their way.
Re: Ask HN: Established company planning same thing as 1-man startup – please advise
#18This is a two sided market, and many people see that as a challenge. However, one side of the market is unemployed people, who are generally desperate and willing to submit their resume just about anywhere. (Apologies if that sounds insensitive to anyone, but it's true in the general case.) Here's your strategy, at a high level: > 1. Acquire as many employee leads as possible. > 2. Sell the leads to companies. So you…
> However, one side of the market is unemployed people, who are generally desperate and willing to submit their resume just about anywhere.
Indeed: I think that this is the opportunity that the OP has!
It is interesting that eHarmony is getting in this space, because very much the same is true of dating. One big difference between EH and other dating sites is that it throttles which profiles you see and can message.
But EH is corporate and very clean-cut, if I anthropomorphized them then they would be wearing a suit and tie. I can imagine them setting up new lawyers with law firms, say, but the messy startup scene? Seems to me like you have a clear opportunity.
Good luck to you (i.e., OP)!
Re: Ask HN: Established company planning same thing as 1-man startup – please advise
#19I am building a similar product for the same market and what everyone has told you on this thread is great advice. People thinking that there is a one size fits all solution to hiring methods usually go out of business (path.to work4pie etc). Big hitters entering the market validates what you are doing. We have a very specific proposition for a very specific group of people which we want to solve best. If you are really interested in this problem maybe we could talk more outside of HN.
Re: Ask HN: Established company planning same thing as 1-man startup – please advise
#20Only because Ask Jeeves was popular didnt meant for few folks to create Google. Facebook? Twitter?
Use others experience to avoid mistakes and use being one man army as advantage - you dont follow stiff corporate code. Why Google and Facebook have issues with creating new service that will rock the world? WHy they need to buy startups? Use this as advantage!