mlchild

Amazon’s Alexa github has a number of solid tutorials/example code

There is very much the possibility of direct revenue, stay tuned

Shameless plug: I’m the co-founder of a company building entertainment & games on Alexa and we’re hiring node.js engineers in SF Bay.

We are seed funded and looking to continue growing our user numbers and team, email me if you want to hear more!

Good points in both cases. For approach #1, I do think the Google example is somewhat analogous—ideally we'd survey all existing options more and more effectively, and explicitly call-out our "sponsored links." The incentives are more clearly aligned with the seekers in approach #2, but we're still in the early stages of exploring the willingness-to-pay or willingness-to-revenue-share of our users.

Our near-term goal is to grow the pool of seekers as quickly as possible and test the viability of both approaches. Having worked on some products that people like-but-don't-love, this one is much easier to market because the users genuinely love it.

At the moment, this is mostly the service we offer, although we have done some extra work for our early users (resume reviews, interview prep). But the listings are hand-picked by a competent human, we do it for free, and we aren't trying to push you into companies that we are hired by. Going forward, we're hoping to expand the pool of job-seekers and companies we work with so that we can offer job opportunities that aren't publicly available.

There's two ways we think this could go:

1. We make money from companies via recruiting fees. In this scenario, our goal would be to present listings that we make money from via "sponsored links" a la Google search. As we grow our pool of job-seekers, we'd concurrently be able to expand the number of companies we have recruiting agreements with, thus making our implicit incentive to be biased towards a small number of companies weaker and weaker. If we got a significant portion of all job-seekers using our service, we'd probably be able to introduce a standardized recruiting agreement that companies could sign onto online in a self-serve fashion, minimizing our need to do "on the ground" sales.

2. If that approach doesn't work, we'd hope to offer services to job-seekers that they're willing to pay for, such as resume reviews, interview coaching, and the like. There's also the possibility that we could come to some agreement with seekers for a (very small) percentage of their signing bonus/salary at a new job that we help them find. Obviously we have to provide excellent service to earn this, but that's what we aim for!

I'm intrigued by your comments that you're interested in funding social networks—it seems like a new one launches on Product Hunt every day, but few are able to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem and achieve scale.

What's your take on the best way to make the network useful on day one for a small number of users? What are you looking for in a YC app for a social network (with or without traction)?

Right now we have it set up to create live chats between Slack teams, but if you're interested in a web-hosted version of the chat, that's good to know for our next feature to work on!