sounds like some boilerplate we weren't aware of. thanks for bringing this up! will check it out and probably remove it. seems totally irrelevant, and i agree with your comments.
it's not about "highest bidder" - it's about efficiency and transparency.. in two weeks, developers have 5-20 detailed offers to pick from, and can then choose where to interview based on what companies look interesting, with all things considered. we're considering new names right now that make this clearer :)
> To raise conversion, it would be more beneficial to allow people to create a profile and then put themselves on the market at a point that they decide.
That is exactly how it works, although it sounds like we did not do a good job communicating it.
- first you create a profile, and submit it for review (not visible to ANYONE except for site admins at this point)
- receive an invitation to participate in an auction
- opt-in to the auction
- only then, when an auction starts, your profile will visible (and only to pre-approved employers during the course of the two week auction)
Thanks for the suggestion - we need to communicate this more clearly during the signup flow.
There's no newsletter, but you can sign up now and will be notified when we start approving developers from your region. We already have a lot of people signed up different geographies, which will help us figure out what regions to launch next.
As a fellow self-taught "ghetto" developer, and one of the cofounders of Developer Auction -- believe me, this is a problem we plan to solve. :)
Limiting it to developers from places that already have rigorous selection practices is just a starting point. Any suggestions for how to evaluate talent otherwise? We have a few ideas, but would love to hear yours.
This is just the starting point, because these organizations already have rigorous hiring practices. I know - this sucks. But it's just a starting point.
We're trying to come up with ideas for how to open it up to a wider audience while still keeping up quality. Any ideas?
Recently we launched a site with several pages copied from 37signals' Highrise. We did more than take inspiration from their design - we actually used html & css code, and hotlinked to images on their site. We apologize to David and 37signals for ripping off their work. It was stupid, lazy, and disrespectful of their creative efforts. It's particularly painful for us to have done this to 37signals because they are big heroes of ours. We just hope they will accept our apologies.
Hey - I'm one of the founders of Curebit, and yes - it was a boneheaded move..
We had a different homepage, were a/b testing different pages, came across the 37signals post and were like 'wow we should see how that converts!' We are big fans of rails and what 37signals is doing and did not really think through the implications of what we were doing. We just kind of thought about it as a fun test to run.
Clearly it was stupid. It was not meant to offend anyone and we are adding credit where due. (We'll take it down if DHH insists!)
Our new designer will take a crack at more than our homepage... we need all our UI "designed".. not redesigned, but designed - because we're primarily backend guys. Yes, this landing page variation was heavily inspired (read: blatantly ripped off) from Highrise -- because these are the peeps we aspire to, and they've done a lot of testing to figure out what works: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes...
We're running a "ghetto test" - this homepage variant does not even share a common CSS file with the rest of the code base. It's been live less than a week.
The idea was to just see how the conversion characteristics were before investing a lot of time into making a "real design" out of the lessons (prominent testimonial, light copy focused on value props). Hence the hot linking, inline styles, etc. It is personally my fault for not including a credit to Highrise for the design.. that credit is well deserved and will be added shortly - a big oversight on my part.. we launch some stuff fast (other things deliberately), and this was one of those fast things.
Lesson to us: add credits, and be more explicit what we're testing... ask permission instead of asking for forgiveness. In the meantime, please forgive us? :)
My cofounders and I met at FounderDating 2 years ago. All 3 of us are hackers, so the first time we got together after that we wrote & launched our first project together in 12 hours. Super impressed with the high caliber hackers & designers at this event! Definitely not your typical networking schmooze.
My cofounders and I met through Founder Dating last April. Then we met at a coffee shop to hack out & release a product in 12 hours.. pretty good so far. We kept working together all summer (evenings & weekends) before deciding to move in together for 3 months and start a company (Curebit) together. At the end of those 3 months we had customers & traction, so we got funded by YC. Now we just finished demo day, got additional funding, and are happily growing.
So yeah -- Founder Dating works. If you're looking for a cofounder, check out the Founder Dating event in SF on April 27th. Apply by April 15th.
We started with one simple model under the assumption there's a "best" model. Now we're discovering there's more than one "ideal" model - different models work better on different sites (although some things work well consistently, and some things consistently don't). For example, on some sites providing an incentive for the referrer increases conversion (not surprising).. but on other sites, it hurts conversion - the social value of altruistically sharing a good deal outweighs to social cost of sharing something to your own benefit.
Now our product vision is to offer a small variety of simple models proven to work well, to get people started. But we also let hackers tweak stuff so it can work more seamlessly with their products.
Edit: Fixed; confirmed as of 13:37 GMT+11, March 12, 2024.