Comment by beager | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beager | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for sharing. Some notes:

1. Signups go right to waitlist, so it's hard to validate any of this. Is this vaporware? Why waitlist? Are you still in dev, or is this an artificial scarcity play?

2. All I see here conceptually is headhunter lead-gen, so I don't understand why you're charging $708+/yr for chatting. Why not offer your service for free, register orders of magnitude more users, and make your money as an agency by placing users in new jobs? If they are engaged with your platform, you'll know it's time to do that before any other platform or agency does, and you have a qualitative advantage over other agencies because you will have counseled your candidates for a long time prior. Seems like the focus of Jobstart before you rebranded it, n'est pas?

3. Your job functions in registration are constrained to tech and tech-adjacent functions only. Is that a limitation of the advisors you have on your platform, an unconsciously narrow scope, or is it related to your market designs for point 2?

4. How will you not get obliterated in court for encouraging the transmission of proprietary or privileged information?

5. Back to the $708+/yr point, so many alternatives could provide the same use for less. A private curated Quora, a user mentor network with perks (advise other users for incentives), even curated career resources in a newsletter or Amazon book-of-the-month club. I realize that a service like this might pay for itself in boosting one's earning potential, but many less-expensive incarnations of the same are at anyone's disposal.

6. Why chat? Why not email? Why not Hangouts? I feel like chat is such a restrictive medium.

Hey Beager!

1. We actually have a load balancer of sorts. When we get flooded with requests and won't be able to maintain conversational quality, people get put into the line. It's effective for launches like this. We prefer to not put people into the line, as instant-access users are 38% more likely to engage, but quality trumps all else.

2. Fun you mention this! This is how our business worked at the beginning, but it led to some really absurd dynamics at scale. People above mentioned ethics questions... well, when the company's and coach's profit-motive is to place you in a new role, the advice slants that way. Especially if it's $15k a pop for an engineer. Secondly, this model only work with engineering and SV-based recruiting... and we want to help people who are facing uphill battles in the US -- not just those who already have it pretty good.

3. As we develop a larger network of industry experts and train our coaches, we'll be able to expand further.

4. People can send us whatever they want, but we don't actively encourage proprietary information in any specific way.

5. We attempted a user mentor network before and it didn't scale. The user experience was often terrible for users because we couldn't guarantee consistency or quality of advice -- a LOT of mentors would give terrible advice, and then we'd have to come in to fix the situation. To even detect that, you have to give mentors a shot. Secondarily, if a mentee slacked, the mentor wouldn't feel empathy for them and also slack. When we control the experience, we can play "coach" and get real with people -- mentors don't look to do that usually. Sometimes there are hard conversations and people need to be told their being lazy, making excuses, etc.

6. It works with chat and email. We're trying to think about scale, and live video would require a price point that is about double or triple. That would make it unaffordable for middle America.

Thanks for the thoughts + analysis! Curious your take on my replies.

Disclaimer, I have gotten much value out of their previous project, jobstart.

1/ it's based on personal advice so needs to scale on both sides. I've spoken w the founders and they legit.

2/ I intend to get my work to pay for it under "high quality outsourced good management". I don't expect to use it for a new job, but to perform better in my current.

3/ it is my understanding that it's a scaling thing.

5/ in my job, a 10% improvement in efficiency Uncompounded is worth thousands of dollars in direct costs per month. Well worth it, based on my jobstart experience w the same team.

With respect to #2, why would any employer pay for their employee to use a service that has a strong financial incentive to place them in a new job?

If the service ($) actually develops an employee to a higher level of performance, the employer gets the benefit of a more senior hire who is already at their company instead of having to recruit ($$) and on-board ($$) one & hope they work out ($$$).

Even if they need to give the current employee a healthy raise ($$) to retain them, they'd still probably net save money.

(in theory)

If some high % of employees who use this tool discover they really ought to be working elsewhere, well, that's probably better for the industry's cost/productivity as a whole, so everyone wins in the end yayy!! But sure maybe it's optimal for an employer to hide this sort of tool if they rely on employees having inefficient market information to retain them & that somehow fits with their ethics...

(Looking at you, the giant companies that got sued for their illegal informal non-competes...)

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