cliftonmckinney

HN contributions only amounted to about 5% of the total score. Mostly it was Github contributions (measured by number of forks and watchers and a couple other things) and Stack Overflow participation.

We made money from matching our job seeking users to companies. We contracted with companies to do this. If you go to the hiring? link at the top you can see some of that. Most of our sales outreach was direct though.

Yeah, finding the homepage should probably be easier to do from the blog. I normally try to link to the homepage in the first couple sentences of the post, but not always, and not in this case unfortunately.

Edit: and I agree we could have done more with marketing. We were new entrepreneurs at the outset of this, and did a lot of things that I would completely change now that I'm a bit more seasoned. Marketing would be one of those things.

Cofounder here. Since you guys are speculating, I thought I'd jump in and try to answer a few questions and help where I can.

tl:dr it's a really hard business because matching developers to companies who are willing to pay for your services to find those developers is extremely hard work. Mostly the companies have some issue that makes it hard for them to find people, which is why they hire you in the first place.

First off: mark242, you're right about some of what you say, but not all of it. The truth is that the "talent war" isn't really as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. The real problem is that there's a huge disconnect between what developers want and what companies want. To give one example, a lot of our really highly talented developers really only want to work remotely. For some, there are family obligations, and for others it's just preference. But most SV startups don't really want to hire remote workers. And the ones that do, well they honestly don't have nearly as hard a time finding people who want to work for them. And as such you're right, they don't really care to pay any company 20% of first year salary to do their recruiting for them.

What we'd hoped to accomplish, and fell short on in the end, was a way for developers with non-traditional backgrounds find gainful employment. In Silicon Valley, where I suspect you are, this really isn't that big of a deal. Every company out there is looking at Github before they're looking at, for instance, college degrees. But here in the middle of the country, this is still a huge problem. If I'm a developer without a CS degree or significant experience, it doesn't matter that I've been writing code since I was 8 years old. So, Open Source contributions were the first logical place for us to look for a more objective measure of ability. The system was far from perfect, but it was a start.

So who's paying 20%? Non-sexy companies, or large companies that can't really handle all of the recruiting work and would rather pay money than spend time, and companies that have something they're up against--maybe a bad location, or a specific need, or whatever. This isn't the case always, but it is often enough to make it a damn hard business.

And who among developers are looking for jobs? Folks with specific needs, or who are in weird locations, or who have something working against them, like a lack of experience or a desire to switch technologies or whatever.

So those two things don't link up too well. Developer Auction and other similar sites will probably figure that out soon enough. So if you're going to do recruiting for a company you're going to have to reach out to developers who fit, unsolicited, because those are the ones who match the positions you're hiring for. Only rarely will your existing pool of mostly misfits match up with your existing pool of misfit companies. And keep in mind I don't mean misfit in a derogatory fashion. I mean, literally, that they don't fit very well.

So that's what's hard, and we just didn't have enough time or traction for those two things to match up often enough for the business to be sustainable. Some others, like the ones I recommended, probably do, though I do wonder how long they'll keep it up. Some, I'm sure, will be making the same announcement we did very soon.

Auto-delete all messages that contain the phrase "my client" and you'll eliminate 90% of spammy recruiter emails in my experience.

That's the goal, right? If the recruiter had an amazing, what you've always wanted kind of job for you, you'd probably want to hear about it. But if that were the case he'd take the time to find out what that opportunity looks like, and he'd probably just tell you the company instead of all the "my client" stuff.

Same is true for sales-type emails, I'd say. All too often, the mistake is to "sell" the reader in the initial email. That only works if you're selling something incredibly compelling and easy to understand. Most startups don't have that. The goal, then, is more to pique interest; to make the reader want to learn more.

I've learned this lesson first hand more than once, unfortunately. If you make the entire sales argument in an initial email, then you have no chance to drive the conversation. You're giving the reader an opportunity to make a 0 or 1 decision before you even have the chance to explain a bit of the gray areas. Don't do that, if you can help it.

Most companies seriously underestimate the level of exposure they have. We usually recommend applying inbound marketing techniques to your recruiting process to improve your exposure. A few tips:

1) Open source one or more useful projects. Smart people will use them, fork them, etc. 2) Have a referral program, and make sure it's easy to use. A lot of companies have a program that gives employees $1,000 or more if they refer a candidate, but not a lot of companies make the referral process an easy one. Build a landing page for each position. Include a little information about the company and the job. That way, employees have something to share on their social networks and via email. 3. If you're looking for awesome and nothing else will do, consider allowing remote work. 4. Set up a company page at Work for Pie (shameless plug) or Coderwall or similar. It'll help developers get to know your team and culture much better than a simple job description.

Good luck!

I've been playing around with it recently, among other options. I'd definitely say it's closer to the way I work, but not quite "it" yet. Two things I think might help:

1) Integration with something like Full Contact so that folks can get social data about prospects. Having that makes it easier to personalize outreach and stay up to date with what folks are doing.

2) Outreach tracks. For a long time I've wanted a CRM to have adjustable sales tracks. So the way that might work is there's an initial outreach, and then the next step changes based on what the outcome of that was. If I get no reply, then remind me to follow up in a week or so and let me add a template for that follow up. If I get a reply, then let me note what happened and then go down a different path to closing. If I get an objection, then let me choose from a list of objection options with a template that I've already developed for each of them.

I'm a single data point, so don't take it as gospel. I really do love the email integration. It's amazing to me that so many sales efforts rely on email these days, but that so few CRMs handle email with anything close to something that works. I think you guys get that right more than most other options.