Thanks! I thought the concept of a temporary unfollow that was 100% client-side was interesting. The best analogy I could come up with for that was a "penalty box" ... again, thanks for giving it a try, very much appreciate it.
Great post, Dan. It reminds me of the article the Buffer App guy wrote on his experience getting everything up and running. very smart and disciplined to root out the demand before committing dev. keep up the good work
Thanks a lot! It took me a while to learn that lesson. My instinct was always to code first and ask questions later. I would recommend 4 Steps to The Epiphany - it was a big eye-opener for me about the development process.
Welcome to the recruiting space, try not to go crazy :) To get your service started, using email as the main messaging medium is smart as you want to build up your candidate-base, so offering something (in this case, information and job leads) will help you win adopters. Charging on a per job posting basis is a difficult sell as there are literally thousands of others offering very similar services. Showing job-seeker numbers can help motivate the employer to go with you as can past success stories. I'd recommend focusing on achieving those before you start charging. Think about offerings above and beyond just job postings, those are a commodity.
I've been running CollegeJobConnect for the past year and be happy to chat with a fellow entrepreneur who is trying to make student recruiting better. This is a really, really difficult space to be a startup in, so as much as we can all help each other the closer we will be to bringing improvement.
Adam, great post. We are aiming to do that with www.collegejobconnect.com. Undergraduate recruiting needs more diversity and a better way for students to connect with a whole host of employers, not just those in consulting, finance, or the big tech companies (although these are great places to work too, I myself went to Wall Street before jumping into startup land). Startups offer a great place to work, you'll likely not a find a place where you'll work harder or learn more. I think pay and uncertainty are strong detractors, however.
The overall point is there should be more optionality and more exposure. I'd be happy to chat further, we have some cool stuff going on and I'd like to get your thoughts. In November we generated 50 interview offers to companies that never have the opportunity to recruit on campus and we just signed up a big player in the geo-social space. Hit me up at jeff _at_ collegejobconnect _dot_ com
I took part in the Tech Wildcatters' first class this past Summer. Happy to chat with anyone that has questions, hit me up at jeff@collegejobconnect.com
I'd also add it is upsetting to see engineers and comp sci grads head off into finance to build credit default swaps and binary exotic options instead of, as you said, working on things that really matter. I'm guilty of it myself, but escaped 2 years ago and started a company to help soon to graduate students find cool companies, rather than just those that can come to campus.
I believe the reason for the Wall St / hedge fund path is the promise of working in a challenging work environment, solving difficult problems, and earning a lot of coin. The first two wore off for me after 2ish years and the financial crisis detracted from the last. They can be a persuasive siren song though and it is easy to settle when there aren't a lot of other options that are immediately available.
I added it a while back to my startup's site (http://collegejobconnect.com) and used my college email address that was already on file to get my api key.
Depending on what language your site is coded in, it's not terribly difficult to integrate and gives another way for potential customers, users, etc. to access any "registered users only" sections ... you can also pull a lot of data out of the open graph api if need be. Documentation is not great, but there enough tutorials out there should you get stuck (or just ping me).
Unless you have a personal financial runway that you can / are willing to burn through or investors lined up, you should focus on the revenue-oriented ideas otherwise you'll simply run out of capital.
When you are deciding what your venture should be, I try to think about risk vs. reward ... make sure those "fun" (read: risky) projects have the potential to be home runs, otherwise it is a bad investment of your time and effort.
