I will start.
What's going right:
- Developers are starting to sign up, and actually get onboarded into the app, at a fairly rapid clip. I'm seeing a few new people sign up, list their keywords, and join us in Slack.. all without any manual contact. The automation is working. And even better, all of the signups are from organic traffic: I'm not doing any paid spend on acquisition at the moment.
What's going wrong:
- All those developers who are signing up organically? None of them are converting organically. Nobody has (without my urging) gone into their wallet, dug up their credit card, and forked over cold hard cash.
I've noticed that anyone whom I've personally found a job for has ended up subscribing, but that brings me to my next point...
- I haven't found a scalable, predictable channel (paid, organic, whatever) for finding original people who want to post programming projects. i.e., bringing hiring managers onto the platform. I've been cleaning up the landing page, and we have gotten a few signups! But no steady, predictable volume. Definitely open to suggestions! Here is the landing page.. https://codefor.cash/delegate
Another one of my woes:
- I connected a developer to a hiring manager. Everyone was happy. I checked 3 of the developer's references with phone calls – amazing feedback. I even met the developer in person and had a great experience. Developer was hired. Developer delivered an amazing scope of work that demonstrated thoughtfulness about the project and empathy with the business case as well as experience with building software. Then.... developer stops responding to emails promptly, hasn't delivered any work product, and overall has committed an offense of near-ghosting. Still in the process of resolving this.. last I heard, developer offered a refund.
You know how rubber duck debugging (where you talk a problem aloud to your computer) can help you get through a programming problem?
I guess that technique can help with sales/marketing bottlenecks as well. I just had the idea to advertise codefor.cash/delegate to people who follow engineering managers on Twitter. Let's see how this performs