| I think I understand that you’ve pivoted to selling a resume builder for data science workers. It seems to me from your story that you could use some slightly more hard-nosed business sense. I won’t pretend I know what you should do, but I do have a few reactions to your story and situation. Building out a data science/ML jobs site that is trusted by ML workers is a good idea, and could be really valuable. One downside; it’s such a large and competitive market that you will be competing with well-financed groups. But, it has a lot to recommend it, not least that these workers are extraordinarily valuable to corporations right now. I get that you want to aim at workers first for cultural reasons. What I would do, immediately, as in today, would be to reboot your recruiting business and start getting set up with corporations who are hiring ML workers as a recruiter. The problem you have right now is that you are charging the side of the two-sided ML jobs market that has no money; the workers. You should charge the side that is willing to pay up to seven figures for good ML workers. Now, how do you keep your culture and values? There are lots of possibilities — you could keep charging the $10, but offer to forward the candidate to companies that match the resumé. You could make a ‘transparency pledge’ to the workers, as well as do revenue sharing with them. You could build out the site into a trusted sort of glassdoor for ML workers where people (that you have vetted, I’d suggest) can anonymously tell others (and most importantly, you) which companies are good and which are bad. At any rate, I’d strongly urge you to think about hitching up your economics to the side of the market that can get tens of millions of dollars of value out of the people you’re working so hard to help — keep helping the people you want to; getting them a job is a lot more help than prettying up their resume. And, congrats on the sale! It feels good when someone wants what you’re selling :) |
Right now the resume builder is general purpose for people wanting to work in tech. We went down the path of charging companies for access to qualified candidates and the lesson we learned is that you first need a critical mass (which is bigger than we initially thought) to make it scaleable.
To get enough job seekers looking for a specific job in a specific location with a specific skillset with a specific number of years of experience (companies are very specific with what they're looking for) requires a large number of job seekers on your platform.
We want to start with a resume builder to provide value to these people at the first stage of their job searching process so we can then layer in more services and tools as we grow to that necessary critical mass.
Eventually, we intend for one of those services to be the forwarding to companies when the candidate matches what the company is looking for and vice-versa.