Launching a crowdsourcing startup

[praveenaj]

Hi, I'm planning to launch my crowd sourcing startup in a few weeks. I hope you guys will review it when I do, on HN :)

This will be a place for job seekers to find work by showcasing the skills they possess. (more concern on personal branding :)

So I'm planning to do this launch in two stages--i.e first get job seekers registered and when the no. of users hits a particular milestone then let people post jobs, since I don't want job posters to lose their expectations.

What do you guys think about my approach?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers!

[rcavezza]

We thought of doing something like this for college students with crowdmarkup.com a while ago - didn't follow through after the first lean startup machine - best of luck.

My Suggestion - Build a 1 sided tool to get jobseeker contact info - solve 1 side of the chicken/egg problem first. Maybe some type of resume critique application - checks for spelling errors, makes some simple suggestions like using action words and using more qualitative numbers. Maybe matches keywords in a job description to the resume and gives a match score.

Also, make sure you know the # of job seekers you want in advance so you know the milestone you're looking for and it's not an arbitrary number.

Finally, make sure when users submit their resumes for the critique, they consent that it might also go into the next version of the application.

[Papirola]

chicken and egg problem: why would job-seekers join if there are no jobs?

[praveenaj]

hehe ya. I have to start from somewhere, so decided to have job seeker profiles first :)

[Mz]

I really suspect that's not going to work. You need to find some means to populate the site with something of value to someone to start attracting one side or the other. I don't know what that would be. I've done a bit of reading up on this topic in recent weeks/months. I gathered a few links here at one time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2126209

Here is a link to another discussion about the topic that has links to other good discussions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2239281

[praveenaj]

wow. didn't know others are also having this problem :) thanks for the reply.

[Brian_Wang]

Gread ides.It likes the ODesk. Do you have enough resources, I want to join your team, Can I ?

[praveenaj]

will let you know if i want in the future. but now im expecting your views...