HN contributions only amounted to about 5% of the total score. Mostly it was Github contributions (measured by number of forks and watchers and a couple other things) and Stack Overflow participation.
We made money from matching our job seeking users to companies. We contracted with companies to do this. If you go to the hiring? link at the top you can see some of that. Most of our sales outreach was direct though.
Yeah, finding the homepage should probably be easier to do from the blog. I normally try to link to the homepage in the first couple sentences of the post, but not always, and not in this case unfortunately.
Edit: and I agree we could have done more with marketing. We were new entrepreneurs at the outset of this, and did a lot of things that I would completely change now that I'm a bit more seasoned. Marketing would be one of those things.
Cofounder here. Since you guys are speculating, I thought I'd jump in and try to answer a few questions and help where I can.
tl:dr it's a really hard business because matching developers to companies who are willing to pay for your services to find those developers is extremely hard work. Mostly the companies have some issue that makes it hard for them to find people, which is why they hire you in the first place.
First off: mark242, you're right about some of what you say, but not all of it. The truth is that the "talent war" isn't really as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. The real problem is that there's a huge disconnect between what developers want and what companies want. To give one example, a lot of our really highly talented developers really only want to work remotely. For some, there are family obligations, and for others it's just preference. But most SV startups don't really want to hire remote workers. And the ones that do, well they honestly don't have nearly as hard a time finding people who want to work for them. And as such you're right, they don't really care to pay any company 20% of first year salary to do their recruiting for them.
What we'd hoped to accomplish, and fell short on in the end, was a way for developers with non-traditional backgrounds find gainful employment. In Silicon Valley, where I suspect you are, this really isn't that big of a deal. Every company out there is looking at Github before they're looking at, for instance, college degrees. But here in the middle of the country, this is still a huge problem. If I'm a developer without a CS degree or significant experience, it doesn't matter that I've been writing code since I was 8 years old. So, Open Source contributions were the first logical place for us to look for a more objective measure of ability. The system was far from perfect, but it was a start.
So who's paying 20%? Non-sexy companies, or large companies that can't really handle all of the recruiting work and would rather pay money than spend time, and companies that have something they're up against--maybe a bad location, or a specific need, or whatever. This isn't the case always, but it is often enough to make it a damn hard business.
And who among developers are looking for jobs? Folks with specific needs, or who are in weird locations, or who have something working against them, like a lack of experience or a desire to switch technologies or whatever.
So those two things don't link up too well. Developer Auction and other similar sites will probably figure that out soon enough. So if you're going to do recruiting for a company you're going to have to reach out to developers who fit, unsolicited, because those are the ones who match the positions you're hiring for. Only rarely will your existing pool of mostly misfits match up with your existing pool of misfit companies. And keep in mind I don't mean misfit in a derogatory fashion. I mean, literally, that they don't fit very well.
So that's what's hard, and we just didn't have enough time or traction for those two things to match up often enough for the business to be sustainable. Some others, like the ones I recommended, probably do, though I do wonder how long they'll keep it up. Some, I'm sure, will be making the same announcement we did very soon.
I generally agree that the "Talent War" is largely self-imposed: unwillingness to interview candidates outside of a 25 mile radius or relocate Engineers, being slow, disorganized or indecisive in the hiring process, trying to get Engineers to take massive paycuts from what they are earning at LinkedIn/SalesForce/Google/VmWare/Facebook, or simply requiring Engineers to work 80-hour weeks...
Some of the biggest & most successful companies also achieve major talent lock-in by compensating people really well, making it difficult for cash-strapped seed stage start-ups to compete with a lower budget.
Interestingly enough, RE: GitHub, we've seen zero positive correlation that having a GitHub account increases the number of interview requests that Engineers get on our marketplace when we analyzed our data.
Github helps technical managers get a feel for an unknown candidate. This helps when capturing arbitrage opportunities in the talent market. Your business is built on selling known candidates at a premium, or at least using the social signals of big name degrees and employers. Someone like daeken has enough of a track record to not even need those.
Thanks for the reply. Very thoughtful. I have a couple of points.
"What we'd hoped to accomplish, and fell short on in the end, was a way for developers with non-traditional backgrounds find gainful employment."
First: I think you'll find that a lot of developers have "non-traditional backgrounds" (where by "non-traditional" you mean "didn't graduate in CS", I'm guessing). Is a person with a MS in CS going to have an easier time finding a job in, say, Iowa? Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. If someone is having a hard time getting their foot in the door in Iowa because they don't have a degree, giving them +K isn't going to help much (and I'm guessing you found this out from the companies you contracted with).
Second: "There's a huge disconnect between what developers want and what companies want. You're going to have to reach out to developers who fit." I know this is too late, but that statement should have been front and center on your site. You're hiding the true intentions of your application behind this layer of developer competition, when in reality "We can help you find a job" should have been your number one point. (In the language of your site, "Discover" should have been front and center, and "Compete" should have been 86'ed.)
Last, the remote thing: I don't think that there is -- yet -- enough of a market for recruiting agencies for remote workers, especially at your typical Fortune 500 company. Office culture is ingrained in this country, and probably will be for another generation or two. If someone is in a "weird location" and they're unwilling to accept a relocation offer, that's (currently) a massive hurdle in their career growth, and as a talent agent it's up to you to tell people this. It would be like a rookie in baseball with a no-trade clause; that doesn't work.
Anyways, good luck in the future and all that; I'm sure this was, if nothing else, a great learning experience.
Wrote a relevant blog post about this issue not too long ago. The article states the obvious of course. Talent isn't evenly distributed, but it is distributed. What's most compelling for perhaps Valley and New York companies only, is the wide disparity with regard to compensation:
Two Silicon Valley startups raise $1M and they each have need for a great team. Team One is on site. They spend a lot of otherwise productive time attempting to hire great engineering talent away from other equally impressive startups in the area. They pay $150k per person (let's call it $200k fully loaded) for talented, but not phenomenal people. Team Two is fully distributed. They decide to hire the best, no matter where they are, and at $150k per person everyone outside of Silicon Valley gives them a look with much less effort on their part. They save time, they save on office space in SV, and, best of all, they build a team of truly phenomenal folks who are happy to be making $150k, because it's likely $50k higher than they were making at whatever job they had before they got recruited.
Assuming you can build a better team in the Valley is only relevant if you have a reasonable expectation that you'll find similarly talented folks at the same price no matter where you are. That is simply not the case.
But that's part of the point, isn't it? If SV companies need to adjust for cost of living in SV, the same salary could attract a better employee in an area where adjustment is not so necessary.
The cost of living in California is high only compared to...the rest of the USA. But if you are talking international, I find San Francisco to be a bargain on everything but rent, and for many cities it is very much a toss up even there.
You should see the ridiculousness in the Santa Barbara/Goleta area... Same cost of living as Silicon Valley, Less Pay. Higher cost of living than LA, San Diego and Seattle but engineers get paid less than those areas.
I know that Montecito was one of the highest priced zip codes in the USA, as of a few years ago. SB is stuck between the ocean and the mountains, with no room to grow.
Auto-delete all messages that contain the phrase "my client" and you'll eliminate 90% of spammy recruiter emails in my experience.
That's the goal, right? If the recruiter had an amazing, what you've always wanted kind of job for you, you'd probably want to hear about it. But if that were the case he'd take the time to find out what that opportunity looks like, and he'd probably just tell you the company instead of all the "my client" stuff.
Same is true for sales-type emails, I'd say. All too often, the mistake is to "sell" the reader in the initial email. That only works if you're selling something incredibly compelling and easy to understand. Most startups don't have that. The goal, then, is more to pique interest; to make the reader want to learn more.
I've learned this lesson first hand more than once, unfortunately. If you make the entire sales argument in an initial email, then you have no chance to drive the conversation. You're giving the reader an opportunity to make a 0 or 1 decision before you even have the chance to explain a bit of the gray areas. Don't do that, if you can help it.
It's analogous to job ads that spend the first 500 words describing what the company is trying to do and how much foosball and dinners yadda yadda, the actual job details being haphazardly compiled at the bottom. Narcissistic business model syndrome.
Most companies seriously underestimate the level of exposure they have. We usually recommend applying inbound marketing techniques to your recruiting process to improve your exposure. A few tips:
1) Open source one or more useful projects. Smart people will use them, fork them, etc.
2) Have a referral program, and make sure it's easy to use. A lot of companies have a program that gives employees $1,000 or more if they refer a candidate, but not a lot of companies make the referral process an easy one. Build a landing page for each position. Include a little information about the company and the job. That way, employees have something to share on their social networks and via email.
3. If you're looking for awesome and nothing else will do, consider allowing remote work.
4. Set up a company page at Work for Pie (shameless plug) or Coderwall or similar. It'll help developers get to know your team and culture much better than a simple job description.
I've been playing around with it recently, among other options. I'd definitely say it's closer to the way I work, but not quite "it" yet. Two things I think might help:
1) Integration with something like Full Contact so that folks can get social data about prospects. Having that makes it easier to personalize outreach and stay up to date with what folks are doing.
2) Outreach tracks. For a long time I've wanted a CRM to have adjustable sales tracks. So the way that might work is there's an initial outreach, and then the next step changes based on what the outcome of that was. If I get no reply, then remind me to follow up in a week or so and let me add a template for that follow up. If I get a reply, then let me note what happened and then go down a different path to closing. If I get an objection, then let me choose from a list of objection options with a template that I've already developed for each of them.
I'm a single data point, so don't take it as gospel. I really do love the email integration. It's amazing to me that so many sales efforts rely on email these days, but that so few CRMs handle email with anything close to something that works. I think you guys get that right more than most other options.
Good feedback, thanks - we definitely have work to do in both those areas. While not fully what you're asking for, our Smart Views are designed so that you could quickly go down a list of people with X criteria (e.g., haven't replied since last emailed > 5 days ago) and send them email from a specific Email Templates.
I think this is correct, for the most part. Call me a dirty capitalist, but I think that especially for problem no. 1 the solution probably needs to involve--in a significant way--those who have the most incentive to see it solved. Generally, the incentive for students comes from curiosity, desire to learn new things, and maybe the desire to broaden career options, but not really from "profit," at least in the short term.
But, the companies that have immediate need for a data scientist--those are the folks who have a vested interest in the problem being solved. The trick I think will come down to getting companies involved without having them mucking them up like most "corporate training" is these days.
I guess that's a bit of what's missing for many of the online options so far--a direct "if you do this this will happen" value proposition for the students. Right now it's all driven by our curiosity and a desire to learn, which is great and drives many of us to sign up, but sometimes doesn't trump all the "life" that gets in the way after the coursework gets tough.
Took the words right out of my mouth. Have you had any experience with getting companies/employers involved in something like this? I've been thinking about how MOOCs would fit into streams (or tracks as someone else here said) that lead a learner to an end goal e.g. data scientist, and companies are the most qualified to come up with the criteria for meeting such goals.
