[leeny]

This story is heartbreaking to read as a founder, but boy oh boy are there parallels between making bras and recruiting marketplaces. I"m the founder of interviewing.io, and we think about stuff like this a lot.

1. To scale, you must first become recruiters. And then, unless you're careful, you are become Shiva, a recruiting agency. And then you can't scale because you hired a bunch of in-house recruiters (maybe you're clever and call them "talent advocates") and are forever constrained in the best case to linear growth, growing as a function of how many recruiters you hire.

2. AI-based recruiting solutions that claim to match candidates to companies don't work for the same reason you can't use ML to engineer bras. The data isn't there. Scraping LinkedIn and GitHub doesn't do it, and then you have to bespoke "measure" a bunch of candidates. The hard part of that venture, in this market, isn't doing the ML. It's getting candidates (who have more leverage than you and don't need you) to give you interesting data about themselves.

3. "I thought that the likeliest outcome of launching is to end up like Peach/Zyrra, in which they launched their patented custom-made bra service, pivoted to a traditional lingerie product, and now sell women’s apparel loungewear. While the concept sounded promising, they were in the end unable to turn the concept commercial with the capital they received"... How many recruiting marketplaces have pivoted to do SaaS hiring assessment tools? I can think of at least 3.

Automating stuff by hand is hard. It's even harder when you don't have data and when it was never done well by hand in the first place.