🔥 Can You Help Validate Careers Product and Business Model?
Hi everyone, I'm Nicola.
I've been a long-time lurker on IndieHackers and finally decided to share my project with the community.
I work as a Director for a huge technology company and I really love my job. Good part of my life is dedicated to it, but being in such a leadership role doesn't leave much space for some good hands on work. That's why in 2023 I decided to use my weekends and spare time to build something. My objective is to transform this in a second income, then who knows.
Introducing Careers.ai
Careers is a GPT-3 AI Hiring Assistant that helps HR managers streamline the hiring process. Just fill in the role you're looking to fill, and Careers will generate a position profile, interview questions, and challenges, that can be exported in txt, csv, and pdf formats.
While Careers is still in its validation phase and it's close to a POC, I'm seeking feedback and suggestions from the IndieHackers community.
In the coming weeks and months, I plan to add:
- payments
- a public job board
- employee registration
- profile matching
- automatic publishing on LinkedIn
- improved employer dashboard
- more...
I'd like to receive direct and honest feedback on:
- the idea and product
- as well as advice and ideas on the business model
Right now I'm giving 10k AI tokens for free (to interact with GPT) and I'm considering a subscription-based model or token packages, but I'm open to any other suggestion. If you need more tokens to try the product, feel free to contact me and I will be happy to top-up your account.
Thanks in advance for your help and I look forward to your constructive feedback!
PS: just in case, since I don't have much time to promote this project, I could be also interested in partnering with a growth hacker with some proved track record. So if you like the project, feel free to contact me and we'll talk about that!
Hi Nicola, The idea seems interesting, my feedback will be
1- you need to decide who is your main customers, I mean, I wouldn't think that for example, hiring managers at Twitter would be the best customer for you, BUT, maybe hiring managers at smaller companies that don't have enough resources to invest in the hiring process, would be very interested, but you need to validate that. How? maybe talk to them directly, ask them questions about what do they hate the most about the hiring process and observe their response, then try to offer some kind of trial.
another way is that you might take a ready job post, that is not perfect, optimize it through your tool, write all the challenges and the addons you offer, send that optimized version to the recruiter, and offer them to update it for free if they like it, and if they like it, they might come back to use your tool and then talk about it publicly
2- for the business model, I would think that job-based pricing price would be more suitable, since the subscription-based it is based on time, then it wouldn't make much sense, but initially, you should make sure first that who is your customer, then you will figure out automatically how to charge them
my advice is that ship quickly and aims at v0, not v1.
I am a tech product manager, so please feel free to ask me if you have more questions I will love to help.
First of all thank you for the great feedback!
Ideally my customer can be both a company (hiring managers) or a job seeker. I think talking to them directly is a good idea. Regarding the idea to take a job post that is not perfect and optimize it, well, we are probably not ready yet. But that's something we could eventually do in the future.
what I was thinking is two kind of revenue streams. The first from the companies, based on AI tokens or job posting on our future board. The second from job seekers, since the idea is to ship tools also for them (CV creation, cover letter creation, profile matching, etc).
I 100% agree on shipping fast and that's why it's already live and every week I add something. And some ppl are already trying it. I just need to understand better how to implement the first iteration of business model. Thanks again for the feedback, appreciated!
can you explain more what you mean by "implement the first iteration of business model?" I can help more if I understand it better
Sure. Atm the only things that Careers can do are:
All these operations cost OpenAI tokens and to start I give you 10k tokens for free.
So if I want to introduce a business model now (what I call the first iteration) it should be probably based on AI tokens...which tbh I'm not sure it would be too effective.
So the idea is to add more tools for companies creating their profiles, open to job seekers and create tools for them to create their profiles (cv, cover letters, etc) add a job board where companies/job seekers can match. Once I will have all of this, I will be probably able to create a recurring subscription or something similar.
Aha, now I get you. you are basically talking about the pricing model, in this case, first of all, I would highly suggest you listen to this podcast episode of Lenny's with a genius pricing manager https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvQadImf568
2- in my opinion, any pricing based on AI tokens, won't be effective, it will cause confusion and confusion will not help conversion. If hiring managers have no idea how they will be charged and what the token means, then they probably not going to pay.
Hence, If I were you, I would try to find an extremely easy-to-understand, non-scalable, fixed price that any hiring manager can quickly evaluate and make decisions based on it.
That is definitely not an easy task, I would highly suggest talking to your customers and asking them how they prefer to pay, and what would be convenient, and then evaluating their feedback and making a decision.
A good hint is to look at other tools that a group of users uses and see how they do pricing, probably that is how you should be as well.
Also, it is important to mention that deciding your pricing model is more of a journey rather than a decision, and it takes talking to users and sometimes losing some users before knowing the best model.
Finally, ino, initially you shouldn't care much about pricing, especially if you are giving 10K for free. If I were you and I have that leverage, I would invest these tokens in getting as many hiring managers to test/try my tool for free, and give me a ton of feedback, and based on that, I would start deciding how things should go. In ur current stage, you need validation on the product first THEN , pricing. I wish all the success to you Nicola.
Really thank you for all your feefback @belalamin, in reality is what I did until now (not caring much about pricing) and probably is what I will continue to do. Now I just need to find ppl to talk with and validate my project better. Also thank you for your wishes!