[BenSchaechter]

We're currently in hiring mode and finding talent is super tough. You need people who are not only a good fit (hard enough) but are willing to leave their cush jobs, join a startup no one has heard of and believe in your vision.

Some things we've tried:

- Scouring Dribble for Designers: I built a system that allows me to search Dribble by location, then pull up all the relevant shots of people from the locations I type in. A bit of scraping work, but so much more efficient now.

- Pinging people on Forrst. I've met with a bunch of people off of Forrst. You can hack some URLs to find all people from a particular location.

- LinkedIn. I've never once used or enjoyed LinkedIn until I've had to hire people. Their search is actually pretty awesome for recruiting. Actually getting people to respond is harder.

- Emailing local universities. Finding fresh talent out of school. Sending emails to CS listservs.

Finding people is so tough. Its the hardest part of a startup I've had to do so far.

Obligatory shameless plug: Let me know if you're interested in an early employee gig in Palo Alto doing Ruby development + a bunch of awesome statistical graphing / information mining.