Honest question - why would you do this? Without any possibility of direct revenue for any skills you build, what’s the motivation? It seems that all you’d be doing is enriching the Alexa ecosystem out of your own pocket.
At the moment, this is mostly the service we offer, although we have done some extra work for our early users (resume reviews, interview prep). But the listings are hand-picked by a competent human, we do it for free, and we aren't trying to push you into companies that we are hired by. Going forward, we're hoping to expand the pool of job-seekers and companies we work with so that we can offer job opportunities that aren't publicly available.
1. We make money from companies via recruiting fees. In this scenario, our goal would be to present listings that we make money from via "sponsored links" a la Google search. As we grow our pool of job-seekers, we'd concurrently be able to expand the number of companies we have recruiting agreements with, thus making our implicit incentive to be biased towards a small number of companies weaker and weaker. If we got a significant portion of all job-seekers using our service, we'd probably be able to introduce a standardized recruiting agreement that companies could sign onto online in a self-serve fashion, minimizing our need to do "on the ground" sales.
2. If that approach doesn't work, we'd hope to offer services to job-seekers that they're willing to pay for, such as resume reviews, interview coaching, and the like. There's also the possibility that we could come to some agreement with seekers for a (very small) percentage of their signing bonus/salary at a new job that we help them find. Obviously we have to provide excellent service to earn this, but that's what we aim for!
Approach #1 sounds like many that of existing recruiting firms. Until you achieve scale, you will be influenced by the same incentives that haunt this industry.
Approach #2 is more interesting. You're basically acting an "agent" for a job seeker. It's an idea I've seen discussed a fair amount (including on this site), but I don't know of anyone who's succeeded at it at scale.
Good points in both cases. For approach #1, I do think the Google example is somewhat analogous—ideally we'd survey all existing options more and more effectively, and explicitly call-out our "sponsored links." The incentives are more clearly aligned with the seekers in approach #2, but we're still in the early stages of exploring the willingness-to-pay or willingness-to-revenue-share of our users.
Our near-term goal is to grow the pool of seekers as quickly as possible and test the viability of both approaches. Having worked on some products that people like-but-don't-love, this one is much easier to market because the users genuinely love it.
I'm intrigued by your comments that you're interested in funding social networks—it seems like a new one launches on Product Hunt every day, but few are able to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem and achieve scale.
What's your take on the best way to make the network useful on day one for a small number of users? What are you looking for in a YC app for a social network (with or without traction)?
The thing we look for the most is a small number of users that are super, super engaged with the product.
Most new social networks we see point to their top-level growth of new users. These usually eventually fade.
What you want instead is something that starts with a small number of users that use it many times every day. Snapchat is a good recent example of this phenomenon.
I recommend validating your market with a newsletter or some other channel that already has social engineering baked in. In the case of Product Hunt & Mattermark, this allowed them to demonstrate value with curation of highly valuable content for a particular group of people. Once you have validated it, creating the application seeded with those users will ensure you have the well in place. Spending time building the app without having the ability to iterate first on the differentiating aspect might be a waste or at least an inefficient use of early resources.
Right now we have it set up to create live chats between Slack teams, but if you're interested in a web-hosted version of the chat, that's good to know for our next feature to work on!
I'd still love to hear Peter Thiel and PG duke it out/reconcile the "choose an idea that avoids competition at all costs" vs. "don't worry about competition at all" messages.
You could look at them as two sides of the same perspective: Paul is saying basically that competition doesn't exist because if you focus on the customer need enough it ensures uniqueness, and Peter is saying don't copy what someone else has done, be unique.
Zappos is not unique. They don't have a monopoly on anything and ultimately sold out to Amazon probably because there wasn't a way to grow much beyond their market of people who pay premiums on everything to get easier returns.
I think competition on a "macro" scale isn't what counts, it's more the competition at any given moment in the user's story.
When they hear about it or get the invitation, do they get it via a medium filled with a lot of spam?
When they follow the invitation, and see your service for the first time, will they go through the onboarding process?
After they complete onboarding, will they have a compelling reason to come back? Such as transactional notifications?
If they come back, will they form a habit in their mind of using your service for something? This is the "mindshare" that you are fighting for, that is the level on which competition really matters. How do you position yourself?
What network effects, social proof and social convenience / pressure will cause the person to use your service?
What are your customers currently paying for that you can do better / cheaper?
I think they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, just different ways to look at things. A good marketer can "invent" a new area of competition where you are the leader.
Thus, one aproach is to tackle this problem at the start, the other is to tackle this problem later on.
Hey, one of the Streak makers here. I would say we had the idea to do a trivia game before Trivia Crack, but who would believe me?
I agree that 99% of the time instant gratification is what you want from a trivia game, but we dream of many many people playing at once, which would be pretty unique, no?
I mean who's first doesn't matter, before trivia crack there was quiz up, and etc. I only mentioned it cause it seems recently trivia crack as blown up.
> but we dream of many many people playing at once, which would be pretty unique, no?
Isn't this kinda like quiz-up, but instead of matching me with a random stranger it's a group?
Not to kneejerk defend Taleb, but I believe his stated position is that he loses money on his trades almost all the time, and then makes it all back and more when a black swan event occurs. I don't believe a black swan has occurred in the treasury market in the last 5 years, so it would be interesting to hear if he's still waiting for one there.
If you're interested, here's a good article behind rationale and personality of Nassim Taleb's strategy. http://gladwell.com/blowing-up/
Everything in options trading is probability-based. So you can either buy a $1 lottery ticket that wins $1000 for 0.01% time, or sell a $1 lottery ticket to one counterparty that may only be redeemed for $1000 for 0.01% of time.
So for the lottery buyer, you know you're going to lose most of the time; so you size your bets accordingly to your expected value (formally known as Kelly's Criterion) to ensure that you still have enough stake while you're losing most of the time to keep betting and win in the long run when your loss rate regresses to the mean probability.
Likewise, the lottery seller's P&L profile is like an insurance disaster company. On most days, you steadily collect the insurance premium from your policyholders. But you have to size your "risk pool" and watch it carefully to ensure that you are well-capitalized to be able to pay out insurance claims when disasters hit. And if your expected value, again with Kelly's is no longer viable, you'll have to either sell your insurance policies to another trader or buy a hedge to re-insure yourself (formally known as keeping delta, gamma or vega neutral depending on the risk type in the options market).
Nassim Taleb's strategy involves mostly buying option straddles on indices and also large-cap blue chips. With options, based on expiration date and the current market's implied volatility, he can pick and choose accordingly the daily "loss rate" he is willing to take and also more importantly, what he thinks the market's "real volatility" level should be over the current "implied volatility" expressed in the options pricing.
So by sizing his bets properly, choosing an option series that limits his daily decay and expresses his opinion about volatility, he is able to make money over the long run (e.g., 2008 when the market mispriced volatility and VIX shot up to 200 and SPY went down a lot; his straddle gained in both implied and realized volatility).
There is an extensive Wikipedia article[1] on this topic. Here's an excerpt:
In economics and finance, a Taleb distribution
is a returns profile that appears at times
deceptively low-risk with steady returns, but
experiences periodically catastrophic drawdowns.
The general idea is that because black swans occur infrequently, their risk is significantly under priced by most people.
NB: Taleb does not advocate investing using a Taleb distribution; instead he warns against that sort of investing.
By definition, a specific Black Swan is unpredictable, but in general the likelihood of any Black Swan event is higher than the markets factor in.
You'll never pick the day it happens. But if you invest everyday, eventually you'll be right (according to the theory). Take a trade that will almost certainly lose you 1% per annum BUT, in a Black Swan event will return you 1000%. Every year you 'bleed', and it takes guts to keep investing. Then one day something hits the fan, and you were the only one exposed to the upside.
We are seed funded and looking to continue growing our user numbers and team, email me if you want to hear more!