Ask YC: What do you think about Startuply?
Our new site for startup jobs launched on TC early this morning, and we'd love to hear what you think. Play around with it, and you can easily reach us through the feedback box on the left side of the site (thanks to the Anyvite guys).
49 comments
As I go along...
1) First thing I care about is localising the jobs to my area. I live in London, and most jobs on this site are irrelevant. I was only able to localise to London from the "Startup Companies" tab.
2) Only one job in London, but oh well, I guess it's still a new site. Surprised not to see Songkick on there, considering a) they're YC-funded, b) they're looking for rails hackers atm.
3) Clicking on the map brought me to the company description (I suppose because i had to browse by company to drill down to London), and i had to find a link on the right hand side to figure out what the job was. If there's only one job opening, it should really be displayed too, surely?
4) Interestingly, I clicked on the "Head of engineering" job for Covestor, and was surprised to find that although the company is in NY, the job is in central London... Why wasn't it on the map?
I think it would really help your traction with international users to: 1) Make it easy to drill down by geography.
2) Allow jobs to be attached to locations, not just companies
3) Make a guess at determining the visitor's country (very easy with libraries like GeoIP) and automatically drill down to their country by default.
Hope this helps.
1) First thing I care about is localising the jobs to my area. I live in London, and most jobs on this site are irrelevant. I was only able to localise to London from the "Startup Companies" tab.
2) Only one job in London, but oh well, I guess it's still a new site. Surprised not to see Songkick on there, considering a) they're YC-funded, b) they're looking for rails hackers atm.
3) Clicking on the map brought me to the company description (I suppose because i had to browse by company to drill down to London), and i had to find a link on the right hand side to figure out what the job was. If there's only one job opening, it should really be displayed too, surely?
4) Interestingly, I clicked on the "Head of engineering" job for Covestor, and was surprised to find that although the company is in NY, the job is in central London... Why wasn't it on the map?
I think it would really help your traction with international users to: 1) Make it easy to drill down by geography.
2) Allow jobs to be attached to locations, not just companies
3) Make a guess at determining the visitor's country (very easy with libraries like GeoIP) and automatically drill down to their country by default.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the feedback! (All of it)
A couple things that I hope will help:
- To search a location, use the modifier "in". So, the search [in London] will parse jobs that have London in their location field (we have a pretty good amount of structured data).
- Right now, the map only shows company "headquarters." Many startups have multiple offices; to post a job in a different location, they first create a new branch in their profile (structure), and then assign that location when they create the posting. So, the startup directory is lacking right now.
- We're definitely planning on getting into GeoIP stuff. As the saying goes: release early, release often.
Thanks again!
A couple things that I hope will help:
- To search a location, use the modifier "in". So, the search [in London] will parse jobs that have London in their location field (we have a pretty good amount of structured data).
- Right now, the map only shows company "headquarters." Many startups have multiple offices; to post a job in a different location, they first create a new branch in their profile (structure), and then assign that location when they create the posting. So, the startup directory is lacking right now.
- We're definitely planning on getting into GeoIP stuff. As the saying goes: release early, release often.
Thanks again!
Very good and simple to implement feedback.
i think they should do something like Eluta ( http://www.eluta.ca/ ) -- very simple and straightforward job search with location..
I disagree. I think with a market like start-up jobs, browsing is more important than searching. If I was looking for a new job in a start-up, I'd probably approach companies because they seem interesting and say they have openings, not because they have a job that matches some keywords.
Some things I would revisit or work on...
1) Searching by location. Its nice to be able to do it in the search box, but I think job seekers are trained to look for an explicit location search area.
2) Put the post date on the listing page. Its nice to know when the listings start to get stale.
2a) Sort by listing date or range.
3) The company profile page should have the listings in the main column. More prominent there, as compared to the side bar which has "not as important" information. (This is a job site, get them right to it!)
4) Love the apply functionaity! No silly sign up and nonsense. I would make the cover letter input box into a text area, or make it expandable. Its hard to proof read a lot of content in an input box.
Overall everything looks great! My least favorite thing about job sites are all the postings by recruiting agencies. On that note you BAN them!
1) Searching by location. Its nice to be able to do it in the search box, but I think job seekers are trained to look for an explicit location search area.
2) Put the post date on the listing page. Its nice to know when the listings start to get stale.
2a) Sort by listing date or range.
3) The company profile page should have the listings in the main column. More prominent there, as compared to the side bar which has "not as important" information. (This is a job site, get them right to it!)
4) Love the apply functionaity! No silly sign up and nonsense. I would make the cover letter input box into a text area, or make it expandable. Its hard to proof read a lot of content in an input box.
Overall everything looks great! My least favorite thing about job sites are all the postings by recruiting agencies. On that note you BAN them!
You're getting a lot of comments about how it needs to be easier to search by location, and I admit I was going to post one, too. Thinking about it, though, it's a mistake. Searching by location is the kind of searching you do on regular job sites, where the goal is to convenitenly get out of your current lousy job and into a less bad one.
If startups are about passion and commitment, why even list location? Founders need that kind of dedication, but I guess that's a pretty small market so you may also need to help companies find early employees. Hm.
Maybe the whole concept of a job listing is the problem here. It's not a job, right, it's a startup? How do you present startups that makes them different than any other workplace? Instead of jobs, you could just list companies. Pull in news items from their blog, use daylife.com to pull in stories about them. Maybe I'm just retartgeting visualcv.com for companies.
I'd like to see a site that sells me on how great it is to work at a company I can be passionate about, and I fill in my interests to find a company that could be a calling for me. Right now Startuply just another job site that happens to have the word "startups" at the top.
Also, your favicon looks a like the Firefox error icon at a
If startups are about passion and commitment, why even list location? Founders need that kind of dedication, but I guess that's a pretty small market so you may also need to help companies find early employees. Hm.
Maybe the whole concept of a job listing is the problem here. It's not a job, right, it's a startup? How do you present startups that makes them different than any other workplace? Instead of jobs, you could just list companies. Pull in news items from their blog, use daylife.com to pull in stories about them. Maybe I'm just retartgeting visualcv.com for companies.
I'd like to see a site that sells me on how great it is to work at a company I can be passionate about, and I fill in my interests to find a company that could be a calling for me. Right now Startuply just another job site that happens to have the word "startups" at the top.
Also, your favicon looks a like the Firefox error icon at a
I see what you are saying, but I work for a startup in NYC, and there are a lot of places I would go (Boston, Boulder), but I would never move to silicon valley, so you have to be able to search by location.
We're with you on this - the startup itself is tremendously important.
All the startups on Startuply have company profiles, where they can talk about their mission, team, work environment, etc., upload pictures of their office, import company and team blog feeds, and more.
Think we're headed in the right direction?
All the startups on Startuply have company profiles, where they can talk about their mission, team, work environment, etc., upload pictures of their office, import company and team blog feeds, and more.
Think we're headed in the right direction?
I spent a few more minutes poking around and saw the company profiles I missed before (oops). But I still don't see anything that differentiates from other job sites except that you (deliberately) have fewer jobs listed.
The back/forward buttons don't work with pagination on Safari 3.1.2
Interesting, you don't see too many folks on ASP.NET
What made you choose that platform?
Interesting, you don't see too many folks on ASP.NET
What made you choose that platform?
curl -I http://www.startuply.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:57:46 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-Powered-By: PleskWin
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Set-Cookie: ASP.NET_SessionId=xxxxxxxxx; path=/; HttpOnly
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 72915It does slightly worry me that the bubble is growing and getting frothier. When you start seeing companies starting up to serve companies starting up, you have to wonder. Is there that large a market for such a niche? Do monster etc do such a bad job?
The site itself looks cool though. Although I don't understand the business model. Recruiters and job sites etc would expect a large commission on each successful pairing, but I can't see anything like that on startuply.
Sorry to be slightly down on it, but I can't quite see how it can grow that big, or make revenue. Are you planning to expand out of the 'startup niche' and take on the big job sites? If so what will you do better than them?
The site itself looks cool though. Although I don't understand the business model. Recruiters and job sites etc would expect a large commission on each successful pairing, but I can't see anything like that on startuply.
Sorry to be slightly down on it, but I can't quite see how it can grow that big, or make revenue. Are you planning to expand out of the 'startup niche' and take on the big job sites? If so what will you do better than them?
A site like this will live or die by the community. If Startuply can gather a group of clever hackers around their site, startups would gladly pay to advertise jobs to them. (You can see the site trying to sow the community seeds with their startup news section.)
Hijacking the HN community would be a tremendous step in this direction, which means the YC funding should be a big boost to Startuply.
Hijacking the HN community would be a tremendous step in this direction, which means the YC funding should be a big boost to Startuply.
In a very real way, we built Startuply for you. What do you think? Are these good jobs at cool startups? Can you see yourself as a key part of some of these teams?
My understanding is that the incumbents (i.e. Monster, Dice, Workopolis [in Canada]) have huge reach, but are expensive to post ads to. The signal to noise ratio can be really bad too.
Niche job sites like Startuply and the 37signals job board offer a nice revenue stream that can tie in with a brand or product mix (i.e. "We're a startup, so we post our jobs on Startuply").
The more you take away the hiring process from the company with the open position, the greater a payment you want. Recruiters, in theory, do a large amount of screening and so on for their clients, so they want a big payoff. Most niche sites appear to simply be billboards, so they charge a lot less.
Niche job sites like Startuply and the 37signals job board offer a nice revenue stream that can tie in with a brand or product mix (i.e. "We're a startup, so we post our jobs on Startuply").
The more you take away the hiring process from the company with the open position, the greater a payment you want. Recruiters, in theory, do a large amount of screening and so on for their clients, so they want a big payoff. Most niche sites appear to simply be billboards, so they charge a lot less.
At any given time there are thousands of startups.
Sure, but thousands of startups looking for employees? It just strikes me as a small niche, and one that may be hard to make money at.
Having said that though, I can see it being useful for people like me. There's nothing worse than looking on a standard job site and seeing pages of "corporate type jobs asking for a list of meaningless buzzwords". But I'm a very very small minority :)
Having said that though, I can see it being useful for people like me. There's nothing worse than looking on a standard job site and seeing pages of "corporate type jobs asking for a list of meaningless buzzwords". But I'm a very very small minority :)
Considering that a) recruiting fees can be up to tens of thousands of dollars and b) recruiting the right employees is crucial to a startup's success (much more than a big business), it's a high value niche.
Very true, but does that mean a startup is going to pay startuply a massive fee for finding those crutial employees? Is startuply going to ask for equity? :/
If they people on startuply are measurably and consistently better, wouldn't it be worth paying more for?
Yes, it is a small niche at the moment, but there is no reason that the world economy can't shift to comprise many more startups and fewer crappy desk jobs. Paul Graham has argued eloquently for this (e.g. http://paulgraham.com/boss.html).
1)Monster sucks so hard it is ripe for taking down
2)Our startup is small (15 people at the moment) but we are funded, we go through a lot of people for short contractual stuff so and we always have job listings. In the past we put the listings on our own site and hoped for the best, but this will get people that might not otherwise hear of us.
2)Our startup is small (15 people at the moment) but we are funded, we go through a lot of people for short contractual stuff so and we always have job listings. In the past we put the listings on our own site and hoped for the best, but this will get people that might not otherwise hear of us.
1) Yes!! We think so too.
2) Post your jobs on Startuply! We're happy to help - you can reach out at support AT startuply DOT com.
The page is about 1200px wide. That's a bit too much for me. I'd have browse with the window maximized to see the whole page...
Perhaps you could put the search box and the browse filters on top of the page and use a vertical layout?
Perhaps you could put the search box and the browse filters on top of the page and use a vertical layout?
Hi, this idea definitely fills an important need. There are a few things that could improve the execution:
1) I should tell the site where I am searching for jobs only once. After that, it should use this as a default.
2) There is room for innovation on the contents for each job listing. For instance, it would be cool if a listing included a profile of a really smart engineer who currently works for the company. Smart people attract other smart people, etc. How about space for a video 'tour' of the company?
3) The location based search should be smart enough to give job postings outside an area if none come up (eg, searching for ruby in Los Gatos gives nothing, but the search could be widened to a 20 mile radius automatically for instance).
4) A site like this would be awesome if it could figure out my tastes in jobs (based on feedback I provide for each listing I read), and use this to bring new listings to my attention.
5) One general problem is I feel that I still have to go to 3 different job boards to be up to date on the more interesting opportunities. How can Startuply help?
One final note: It seems that you don't have listings from recruiters. This is a good thing.
1) I should tell the site where I am searching for jobs only once. After that, it should use this as a default.
2) There is room for innovation on the contents for each job listing. For instance, it would be cool if a listing included a profile of a really smart engineer who currently works for the company. Smart people attract other smart people, etc. How about space for a video 'tour' of the company?
3) The location based search should be smart enough to give job postings outside an area if none come up (eg, searching for ruby in Los Gatos gives nothing, but the search could be widened to a 20 mile radius automatically for instance).
4) A site like this would be awesome if it could figure out my tastes in jobs (based on feedback I provide for each listing I read), and use this to bring new listings to my attention.
5) One general problem is I feel that I still have to go to 3 different job boards to be up to date on the more interesting opportunities. How can Startuply help?
One final note: It seems that you don't have listings from recruiters. This is a good thing.
Yep, recruiters aren't allowed to post on Startuply - we keep a pretty close eye on who's posting. Part of the idea here is that we want to be a (asymptotically approaching complete) directory of startup jobs. That way, you wouldn't have to go to 3 job boards...unless you want to work for American Express.
Advanced search - including customizable location radii - are coming in the next few days!
Advanced search - including customizable location radii - are coming in the next few days!
Minor notes:
1) On the About page, under the For Job Seekers heading, the "perfect startup" link is 404ing.
2) There still seems to be references to Jowba hanging about.
3) The Startup Companies list is excellent, but there may be an issue with gaming due to alphabetical listing. The culprit I refer to is BusyEvent, or !BusyEvent! as their listing would have you believe.
Hope that helps.
1) On the About page, under the For Job Seekers heading, the "perfect startup" link is 404ing.
2) There still seems to be references to Jowba hanging about.
3) The Startup Companies list is excellent, but there may be an issue with gaming due to alphabetical listing. The culprit I refer to is BusyEvent, or !BusyEvent! as their listing would have you believe.
Hope that helps.
It would be nice to have European startup community represented more there - or perhaps brand another site to serve folks with EU-wide working capability.
Easier said than done perhaps, given the cultural and linguistic diversity but as a soon-to-be jobhopper towards Central Europe with natural affinity towards startups, this sort of thing would be sweet.
Easier said than done perhaps, given the cultural and linguistic diversity but as a soon-to-be jobhopper towards Central Europe with natural affinity towards startups, this sort of thing would be sweet.
What's your thought that this appears to infringe on US patent 5978768?
http://www.google.com/patents?id=hJgYAAAAEBAJ&dq=job+des...
no space for a 'stealth' startup without entering in dummy info.
The hiring strategy for a "stealth" startup is to already have a good team (and maybe to hire from their friends). Why should any good candidate take an interest in working for you, based on a website blurb, if you're not willing to share basic information on what you're doing?
By the way, I think Startuply should have a company profile on Startuply. Even if you're not hiring, it's probably a good idea to get a profile posted.
Good luck to the Startuply folks from a fellow startup fanatic.
Good luck to the Startuply folks from a fellow startup fanatic.
I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet, but the 4th and 5th column are overlapping each other in Safari (my browser's width is about 1000 px wide).
I like your search. Very fast, and I can type locations which is nice, because for a second there when I first hit your site I was about to ask "So...how do I find jobs in my town?"
Doesn't work for me (ff3, ubuntu). The next page and page numbers don't do anything. I have to hit reload, and then it moves to the next page. Very strange.
Sorry... I'm new to this... where is your site!?
H
I
I've just saw horizontal scroll...
I've just saw horizontal scroll...
actual url would help much, oh well I will google it
i cant find any jobs in atlanta ;-/