Ask HN: Established company planning same thing as 1-man startup – please advise

[matt_panaro]

I came up with the idea for matching up employers and potential employees based on common answers to user-submitted multiple choice questions: the idea is basically an online dating site, only for employment. I told my buddy about the idea and he pointed me to a WaPo article about how eHarmony is getting into this space, launching in December (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2014/08/08/eharmony-wants-to-match-you-with-the-perfect-boss/). At this point, I have an MVP (emphasis on 'minimum') prototype running at http://proqua.0xf1d0.net; but I'm not sure where to go next. One possibility is to try some sort of advertising campaign; another is to proceed directly to seeking capital (I have some personal money to play with, but not nearly enough to build a team and make a splash in a furious hurry). Unfortunately, I have no direct personal experience with either. If anybody has any suggestions for what a good next move would be, I'd appreciate it.

[dennybritz]

I have seen a lot of startups with the same concept, probably at least a dozen. So you are not alone. That being said, worrying about competition is silly. In fact, if one of your competitors gets traction you should see that as validation for your product, think about what you can "copy" and what you can improve upon. Just make sure you can tell the difference between what the press writes and what is actually going on behind the scenes.

The real question you should ask yourself is: How passionate are you about this product? Can you imagine spending the next 3 years working on this, giving it your full time and attention?

If yes, go ahead, keep on eye on competition, but don't obsess about it. Keep hustling. There are many ways you can beat the "bigger" players. The best marketing is usually free. The saying that Microsoft was replaced by two guys in a garage doesn't come from nothing. Also, it's a big market with enough space for multiple players.

If you are not incredibly passionate about this industry and product you should probably stop right now. In this space, with lots of competition, you are probably not going to get huge traction (or money) from one day to another. It's a marathon, and without the right motivation behind the product it's difficult to keep it up. And most of your competition will die for this reason, not due to the lack of marketing dollars.

Edit: Also, a large part of marketing such a product goes towards changing the habits of job seekers. Initially, there will be a lot of resistance (or inertia). People are not used to your way of looking for jobs. You need to teach them. Competition will be immensely helpful with this. They educate your target audience for you. Once someone is actually willing to change their habits and try out a new way of looking for jobs (e.g. your competitor's) it's much easier for them to "just switch to the better product", which is where you come in.

PS: I won a hackathon with the exact same idea once ;) But I didn't keep working on it.

[ntaso]

Before you pour in personal money, you should really think twice if you want to enter this market.

The employer-employee matching market is pretty fucked up in my opinion and personally, I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. It feels horribly broken and I understand why so many people try to get into the market. There surely must be an easier way to match employees with employers than everything out there yet.

My main objections are:

- This is not a technical problem. Matching employees to employers feels like an easy problem but is incredible hard. Hence, there are assessment centers and headhunters. Do they work? Some articles pop up on HN every few weeks that suggest that they don't.

- In my opinion, it is not even a problem. Top talent isn't hired by match-making platforms. So you try to match average Joe with average jobs. For this job, a simple job description should be sufficient (and it is, mostly).

- Match-making platforms are easily game-able, because they're only an intermediate step. The goal is to get a job interview, thus it's better to game the system as an employee than to play by the rules

- "My PHP skills are a 7 out of 10, you're looking for at least an 8. Am I really a 7?" -> there's no objective way to judge skills. It depends on the job and on the employer. Thus, the best solution is to put as many skills as possible with the highest points as possible.

- Try to think of this "problem" by comparing it to housing-platforms. You're looking for a 2 bedroom appartment. It should be bright, not much noise, under 1000$. Surely, you can now filter search results, but a match is done in real life. There's no way to tell if the appartment is really for you unless you've seen it with your own eyes and got a feeling. The same is true for jobs. There's no way to tell if someone is a good fit without having human contact. For appartments, a simple appartment description is enough. Why would you try to apply sophisticated matching-algorithms to human beings?

The only way this might work is if you try to target a specific niche that you really know a lot about.

[ricardobeat]

Recommended reading:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/24/with-1-5m-from-adecco-path-...

http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/16/path-to-shuts-down-after-l...

http://seriousstartups.com/2013/07/18/jacksonville-startup-p...

It seems something beyond smart matching algorithms is needed to really make it in the job search/recruiting space. Unless eHarmony has found such a breakthrough, they don't have any advantage but sheer weight. As someone else mentioned, smaller == faster. I wouldn't spend anything above what was already planned on marketing or whatever, you'll certainly not win that race when they have a fuckton of money available.

[chatmasta]

This is a two sided market, and many people see that as a challenge. However, one side of the market is unemployed people, who are generally desperate and willing to submit their resume just about anywhere. (Apologies if that sounds insensitive to anyone, but it's true in the general case.)

Here's your strategy, at a high level:

> 1. Acquire as many employee leads as possible.

> 2. Sell the leads to companies.

So your first step is acquiring employee leads. The easiest way to do this is to set up a google docs form, with the set of questions you want to ask employees. Include name, location, contact info, and resume.

Post on the employment section of craigslist in every city, every day. There are ("blackhat") services that will do this for you, or you can setup your own system with proxies and automation. I guarantee you will get an absurd conversion percentage. Unemployed people will submit their resume almost anywhere.

In your CL post, be upfront about what you're doing. Tell the employees that you are matching them to companies based on questions they answer. Feel free to lie about how many companies you have signed up. Say it's something like 1000, which sounds like a lot and will convince them to give you their info, but also gives you plausible deniability when they don't hear from any companies for a while.

Once you have a sufficient number of leads, it's time to get the other side of the market. Pick some companies you want to sell customers to. Go through your spreadsheet, and answer questions how you think that company might answer them. Then, go to the company. Seriously... physically go there. If you can't do that, send a first class fedex envelope with some really nice marketing materials. Explain to them what your service is, and tell them you have X employee leads who answered this set of questions. If they're interested, they can pay you per lead or a percentage of salary for any hire.

Boom. Leads sold, money made.

Notice how you do not need to build out your product. You have everything you need right now. Maybe make a nice landing page for your Google docs form, but otherwise, you don't need to do any coding. Get the leads, get the companies, then build out the product.

Move fast. You are not eHarmony. You don't need to put out some polished product, and you don't need to play by the rules. Hustle!

[impendia]

> However, one side of the market is unemployed people, who are generally desperate and willing to submit their resume just about anywhere.

Indeed: I think that this is the opportunity that the OP has!

It is interesting that eHarmony is getting in this space, because very much the same is true of dating. One big difference between EH and other dating sites is that it throttles which profiles you see and can message.

But EH is corporate and very clean-cut, if I anthropomorphized them then they would be wearing a suit and tie. I can imagine them setting up new lawyers with law firms, say, but the messy startup scene? Seems to me like you have a clear opportunity.

Good luck to you (i.e., OP)!

[afarrell]

> feel free to lie about how many companies you have signed up. Say it's something like 1000.

Is this really the sort of advice we give here?

[adventured]

It's a complicated line sometimes to walk.

Reddit for example faked their user base to get started, and have admitted such, here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeDzx4SUME

This is a common approach to demonstrating a product early on when there's little to no traction. If users show up and it's a ghost town, they will leave.

[tptacek]

It's really not that complicated.

[chatmasta]

Lying is not always bad. In this case, it actually works out better for the employee:

OP lies -> More employee leads -> More companies interested

Employees want as many companies on board as possible, so they win.

[afarrell]

If the OP is successful. If not, then the job-seeker just wasted effort. Which is fine if 1 OP does it, but if many people copycat...

[7Figures2Commas]

How did you plan to market and sell your service before you found out about potential competition? You should execute that plan without regard to what others are doing.

The biggest threat to your ability to get off the ground is not eHarmony. In your general market (services that connect job seekers and employers), there is already significant competition, so what one company does or doesn't do will matter a whole lot less to you at this point than your willingness and ability to hit the pavement and sell what you have.

eHarmony is working with three Fortune 100 companies. There are 1000 Fortune 1000 companies. If you called each and every one of them, do you think you could get a few interested in working with you on a trial basis? The answer to this question will reveal more about your chances of success than a Washington Post article.

[JSeymourATL]

> If you called each and every one of them, do you think you could get a few interested in working with you on a trial basis?

This is a smart play, market validation. Your system solves a problem for the heads of Talent Acquisition and Human Resources. But a CTO/CIO might be the true economic buyer.

[apinstein]

Competition isn't bad. Markets are huge, don't let that part scare you.

However, two-sided market startups are very, very hard. Unless your business model works before having a liquid market form, you're probably doomed. Especially as a 1-man startup, it just sounds crazy. The thing with 2-sided market business is that the more you succeed, the more you have to grow the business, and it's usually not profitable at first.

Unless you're willing to get external funding and be in it for the long-haul and be OK with a largely binary outcome in terms of success (complete failure or big success), this is the type of business scenario I'd advise against being the best place to apply your efforts.

[goodwink]

This is a good thing, not a bad thing. A market of one is a lonely place to be. It's much better to have a large company creating the market and bearing the expense and then leaving niches open for you to fill.

[walterbell]

Competition reduces marketing expenses and adds parameters for differentiation.

[matt_panaro]

I agree with you, but I'm not sure how effectively I can compete as a 1-person operation.

[ChiperSoft]

In terms of marketing, no, you'll never be able to compete with eHarmony, they were one of the first online dating sites with a TV presence, they know how to sell their wares.

However, a one man show can absolutely out-react a large company like eHarmony. Assuming you've got the chops, you can push out new features and respond to user needs much quicker than a large development team can, simply by virtue of having no debate or discussion to get in your way.

So if you can get known, you can compete.

I had a similar idea to yours a little bit ago, but don't have the freedom of time to develop it. I extended the questionnaire system it to the business model, where the more questions answered and details provided by the employer, the cheaper it is for them to list. Take advantage of the high cost of posting on most job boards to drive for better matches. The idea being that large corporations would likely just pay the extra cost to get their opening out there, but small companies would be incentivised to provide more indexable data in order to get better matches.

Dunno if its something that fits into your idea, but I give it up simply because I'm sick of how awful all the job sites are.

Also, if you need a source for questions: https://github.com/ChiperSoft/InterviewThis/blob/master/Inte...

[nthj]

A 1-person operation can do things that don't scale. When you read PG's story about Viaweb, their small operation played in their favor, because their customers would call up, and PG would solve their problem while they were on the phone with them. Customers love this kind of experience even more than not having any issues in the first place. One way to differentiate yourself is to offer this high level of customer service.

Also, large operations have higher overhead, and have to grow more quickly. This is usually at the expense of quality. Success for them may require $2M/year revenue or their division will be shut down. You may only need $200K/year to live quite comfortably. That means you can solve a small subset of the problem really, really well, and a lot of people will be very happy to use you because your product works every single time and you always answer their questions right away, and the other company just has a bunch of extra bells and whistles and upsells and annoying growth hacking stuff that gets in their way.

[rl3]

Generally speaking, large companies tend to suck at executing on anything but their core products. Other startups are a far greater threat, simply because they tend to move faster and with greater focus, usually with a much higher-quality product.

In this case though, I'd say the threat is about equal since eHarmony has a massive amount of users. Keep in mind that many startups looking to foster a two-sided market fail because they can't reach the minimum threshold of initial growth required for their product to work as intended.

[mangrish]

I am building a similar product for the same market and what everyone has told you on this thread is great advice. People thinking that there is a one size fits all solution to hiring methods usually go out of business (path.to work4pie etc). Big hitters entering the market validates what you are doing. We have a very specific proposition for a very specific group of people which we want to solve best. If you are really interested in this problem maybe we could talk more outside of HN.

[benologist]

There's lots of good things about this. They're going to spend money educating the market about this kind of service but they're never going to be a monopoly, they'll have lots of competitors if the market is big enough, and someone else had a similar idea and thought it wasn't horrible too.

You should launch and carry on with your existing plans, faster.

[funkyy]

Only because Ask Jeeves was popular didnt meant for few folks to create Google. Facebook? Twitter?

Use others experience to avoid mistakes and use being one man army as advantage - you dont follow stiff corporate code. Why Google and Facebook have issues with creating new service that will rock the world? WHy they need to buy startups? Use this as advantage!

[orionblastar]

Hire a lawyer, file IP for your code and invention, backdate it to the time you started and show the logs of your Git account as evidence.

Write the other company a C&D letter, that references you IP.

You need two things when you first start out a lawyer to file IP and an accountant to figure out your money flow and forms.

[vineet]

Established companies are notoriously bad at the pace at which they respond to users - so don't worry about the fast that you have an established company entering the space.

The bigger challenge in my opinion is that this is a two sided market (and building such business is very hard).

[matt_panaro]

Thanks a lot, everybody, for taking the time to read & respond. I'm grateful for the advice & encouragement.

[matt_panaro]

Well, so far, the general consensus seems to be to carry on as initially planned.