Correct, engineers get a portion of the fee that we charge employers.
426 karma · joined June 3, 2009
f804288e0af39623eb0595f036cc83549e3aca6485655810b568fa2bd50df667
I don't necessarily think that camera lens rentals is "biggest player wins" either, unlike crowdsourcing graphic design (you go to the site with the most designers) or selling websites (you go to the marketplace with the most buyers) or even engineering recruitment (you go to the marketplace with the largest number of VC funded employers participating).
Unlike the three use cases above, the end consumer will only care:
1.) is the site trustworthy
2.) is the pricing competitive with what else is out there
You could also try posting to various email lists/meetup groups/forums where photographers hang out asking for beta testers with whom you take 0% commission. Most likely, this is where you'll see the most success.
You could also go for the Chegg/Zipcar model, which obviously has much higher capital costs, where you own the inventory.
PPC could be a viable customer acquisition channel for you as well as "camera lens rental + city name" has decent volume, as does "lens name + rental" and "lens name + rental + city", so there's a long tail that you can exploit.
All that being said, there is quite a bit of competition in this market and it will be difficult to differentiate:
http://www.cameralensrentals.com/
P.S. Glad to hear that 99designs ended up driving some good traffic to your site... I've also seen people list websites on Flippa.com (often with incredibly high prices) as a form of a growth hack when trying to reach internet marketers/affiliates, though we strongly discourage it.
In our case, we picked "Developer Recruiting in SF" as our initial market after years of personal experience dealing with incompetent recruiters, expensive job board ads that didn't produce results and talking to hundreds of founders/CEOs/CTOs who where all complaining about the same thing.
There's also a video version of it somewhere else.
This is why Optimizely.com is so great, you can test drive their product without ever creating an account.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/vc-investing-soars-22-perce...
997 of these where Internet companies.
We're rolling out a re-design soon.
You definitely pass every possible measure of "quality", so we included in you in the auction to see whether any of the companies would be interested in your unique security skills. One company was, but they wanted you onsite in Silicon Valley.
Last time I checked though, your Developer Auction profile said you're in the New York City Area :)
It's a lot easier to recruit local talent vs. convincing people to pack up and move -- especially if they own a house, have family/partners/friends or other strong ties to their current location.
That acceptance criteria was used for the first auction, but we're opening it up now.
The LinkedIn "honeypot" setup by Elaine Wherry is now getting an email every 31 hours, despite the fact that the profile is disclosed as being face in her blog.
It's a shame though, because of all the noise, the good opportunities get tossed out with the bad ones. It's easier to stay put then go in for a half-day interview only to find out they want you to take a 30% pay cut.
The phone number will not be disclosed to anybody without your permission. At the end of the auction, you get the select what offers you're interested in and which ones you're not. When you say "yes", we shoot out an intro email.
Employers & education history are only rudimentary filters for the time being, and only part of our vetting process.
And you're right, the real value lies in being offered a larger salary.
The cash-back is just one more way we're trying to be different from everybody else in this space.
We offer a cash-back on our fee (which your recruiter probably doesn't) and we'll present you to a much wider pool of vetted, venture-funded companies than a single recruiter will. And because it's a competitive bidding environment, the offers you get should be the same or higher than you would get through the other process.
Employer & education are only a rudimentary filter for the time being - some of the best engineers I know are self-taught and work at companies you might not have heard of. It's a big challenge, and we'll get there eventually.
I'd love to get your ideas on how to filter through candidates and then communicate their value to prospective employers in a credible way.
They can then choose which offers are worth following-up with via phone or in-person interviews based on any number of factors (location, product/service, company stage, who the investors are, equity, salary, etc.).
Like you say, there's much more to a job than a salary but in an environment where the average SF Developer gets recruitment spam every 40-hours, we hope to provide a more efficient way of vetting & comparing opportunities.
It's just a rudimentary filter for the time being.