450 karma · joined March 21, 2011
The two easiest ways to find companies already doing a 4 day week would likely be: 1. Dedicated 4 day week job boards, such as 4 Day Week (https://4dayweek.io/). 2. Looking for articles highlighting companies with 4 day weeks, such as this piece from Angel (https://angel.co/job-collections/20-startups-with-4-day-work...).
GooseChase is a successfully bootstrapped web and mobile platform for creating and facilitating scavenger hunts. Through our website, organizers create custom "hunts" for anything from on-boarding new employees, touring museums, educating students and more! Participants can compete as teams or individuals to submit photo/video, text or GPS based missions through our native Android and iOS apps.
We've grown quite a lot this year and are looking to hire a Senior Full Stack Engineer that will take major ownership of our back-end going forward. We've historically been a Django monolith (React front-end), but are increasingly moving towards breaking that up into microservices (mostly with node) to better handle our growing engineering team and load.
Our posting can be found at https://www.goosechase.com/careers/full-stack-engineer/
If you love working on something fun, but challenging, we'd love for you to apply at careers@goosechase.com, or email me directly at andrew[at]goosechase[dot]com.
In this case, if you get bloggers using your product, logging their trips, etc, you'll slowly build up your content. Once it's comprehensive enough for travellers to get value from it, you'll be able to build network effects from a much stronger position.
Why don't you just focus on the travel bloggers side to begin with? Specifically, I think there's a need for a Soundcloud-esque embeddable widget that people can put directly in their blogs (naturally linking back to you). THAT provides real value IMO. Most blogs are highly entertaining, but they rarely have mapped content - you can provide that.
From someone that's founded a travel marketplace & failed, avoid network effects in the beginning if at all possible. It's a whole other level of pain, that in your case at least, I don't think is needed.
I'm actually going backpacking for 3 months starting next week, so if you come out with a widget, I'm more than happy to use the beta versions and give you feedback.
The biggest request I have is for alternative rule-sets. The pools I typically participate in are a lot less involved - e.g. pick the winner & runner up for a each group and go from there. Going game-by-game with scores is too much for a lot of people.
“It seems like we're a great fit. I'm excited. Before we go any further exploring a potential deal I want to bring up that we're fully focused on building world class technology and on servicing and supporting our customers to massive success. What that means is that we're not investing in marketing and sales as heavily because our happy customers are referring us to others who could benefit from our product. Does that sound like a fair arrangement to you?”
What a great way to phrase the ask. Switches from you pressuring them for the referral to making them want to help.
Travel in general is seen as a high risk industry. Try going to a bank for a merchant account, tell them you run a travel company and watch their reaction. They don't really want you as a customer anymore. The risk profile is too high.
There's a couple main reasons for this.
One, there's a higher than normal chargeback rate in travel. Think about this, you get to your destination and find out that the online pictures of your hotel are nothing like reality. You feel like you've been scammed, but the owner refuses to give you a refund. You aren't left with a lot of options. But if you booked with your credit card, you can request a chargeback and go stay some place nicer.
This same idea can be applied to inclement weather, an inferior tour, etc. Your expectations are different than reality, you can't get a refund, so you request a chargeback.
Two, the average transaction size is travel is quite large. If I'm upset with my dinner at a restaurant, I might be out $20. If I'm upset with my hotel on a vacation, I might be out $500-$1,000. That's a big difference. I might be able to live with losing $20, but definitely not $500+. So I go through the hassle of a chargeback since the dollar amount makes it worth it.
Between the two of these reasons, you end up with a high risk industry.
I'd imagine all the other industries that are prohibited have similar risk profiles.
It definitely won't scale, but we'd rather have a few people who really buy in than thousands who wouldn't feel comfortable dropping us a line with suggestions.
For me, I'm going for a home run because I think it will allow me to have the biggest impact on the world. I was living in Chile for 6 months last year and have seen what my company (a p2p marketplace for trips planned by locals) could do globally. That worldwide impact is the driving force.
What it isn't is a money or peer pressure play. My first startup is actually set to double in revenue this year (to low-mid 6 figures) and I barely touch it. The money thing will come, whether I go for a home run or not.
1) Show a nice big picture of grapes or wine or both on your home screen. This alone will boost the appearance tenfold.
2) Way too much explaining how it works. I don't really care if it's social or there's thumbs. Just get me wishing I had a glass of wine now.
3) Don't make me sign up to experience the value. The best call to action I can think of is to have me put in a wine I like and you show me a whole bunch of wines you think I would also like. No need to signup for that.
Now on my 2nd startup, my highly technical co-founder recently left. If I hadn't learned how to code, I'd be in full panic mode right now. Going from "the business guy" a couple years ago to being able to build an MVP is huge.
Since you are technical & have social skills, you might want to focus on trying out "hybrid" roles (e.g. growth hacker).
My mental model of sharing (and I'd bet it's shared by many others as well) is that there needs to be an explicit "sharing action" taken. I should know exactly what happens when I do something - I don't on your site. As a result, I never get to the "aha" moment because I'm afraid to click on anything.
It's actually the main reason why I stopped using SocialCam & Viddy. I couldn't trust the service. "Normals" probably don't have the same problem with it, but I personally hate it.
(As a side-note, I have no problem posting great songs I listen to on Hype Machine to Facebook & Twitter. I just want to be in control of what is posted.)
I get it from your perspective, you want to get their info so you can follow up, etc. It's just risky since a lot of people won't get to the "Aha" moment and will just end up leaving.
1) Stupidly simple messaging. To do this, talk to the people that are already using it and ask them how they'd describe it to someone who's not that tech-savvy. Try and phrase what they say as close to word-for-word as you can. "Supercharge your database development" meant nothing to me.
2) A very clear list of use cases/examples. I didn't actually get what it was until I saw the expense report example at the bottom of the page. These examples need to be called out very quickly.
3) A stupidly simple demo before requiring any input. I'd have the call to action say "Try a simple demo" and definitely don't require registration before seeing it. Trying to get me to start a 30-day free trial right away makes me leave the page before I even try a demo.