feedback wanted on my Startup Jobs job board
Hi all, I'm Evonne! I've been early at two startups and found it completely transformative for my career and want to to help others get into great startups as well. I find the search for startup jobs to be a lot more opaque and difficult to navigate so I created an MVP startup job site to try to make it easier:
This all started when a rising Stanford C.S. senior asked me "how do I find a job at a startup?" Having been at a VC-backed, early stage startup that was doing everything in our power trying to find amazing engineers like this it completely blew my mind that startups and VCs weren't already knocking down her dorm room door. Further, when I learned that college career centers are inundated servicing BIG companies that are recruiting on campus, I thought there might be a space to make the startup search process easier for students (and possibly later in career professionals alike!).
I created a simple website that allows users to search open roles at startups using pre-defined filters like the company's fundraising stage, industry, team size or the function of the role (e.g. product, eng, finance, etc). Now instead of going to VC portfolio pages or portfolio job boards and cross-checking with various sources to figure out what a company does, how much funding they have, what roles they have open, etc etc - I pulled it together all in one place.
My biggest challenges have been two fold:
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I'm not technical 😫
I'm a PM by background and have always relied on brilliant engineers and designers to bring ideas to life. I am now even all the more awed by (and jealous of! lol) their incredible skills. I borrowed liberally from a bunch of other sites out there rather than reinventing the wheel and hope getting it out in the wild and acting on feedback will lead me toward really making it my own :) -
My own mental roadblocks 😵💫
Everything from this idea is dumb.. to this isn't monetizable .. to I can't fully solve the problem without X Y and Z features which aren't really technically feasible. Then I'd bounce from one business idea to another, having all the same thoughts and critiques and never really putting anything out there. Yet as tech layoffs continue and I keep getting the question about how to find a startup job I kept revisiting this project and I think part of me just likes to be chest deep in startup data day in and day out!
Probably the advice I'd offer other founders (which by the way I have heard again and again and again... but it took me 12+ months to really "hear") is to stop second guessing yourself and just launch and launch and launch. You really never know and you can (if you're like me) talk yourself out of anything which then robs you of the opportunity to learn and progress and get better!
Thanks all for reading and feedback is very much encouraged and will be acted upon!
Just checked the site now, it's very beautiful. What tech stack did you use?
Hi Evonne,
I would recommend the following if not done already.
None of these are done already and very, very much appreciate the input - will look into all of the above today! Thank you!! 🙏
Firstly, well done for wanting to get feedback even though the website is still at its infancy, I think you nailed that part. Design wise, the cards can definitely be improved in different ways, e.g. the link to the company can be the name of the company itself instead of taking more space below. The company image color can span the entire horizontal head of the image etc... But these are minor.
The fundamental question is what differentiates this from other startup-finding websites - I can't post links yet but a simple google search will do, and why you're building it. From your description I get the impression that you want to create a project but not a business. If so, go for it, even just to gain technical skills which will help anyway down the line. For the latter, it's best to lay out a plan and evaluate if it's worth pursuing further since the job-finding space (even startups from what I could see) is already crowded.
thanks so much for the input @ebeans!
appreciate and agree with the design input!
in my mind, what differentiates this site from other startup-finding websites is 1) comprehensiveness in having all VC backed startups and 2) having all of the data you'd need to filter down to the startups you're looking for in one place (i.e. company info, funding info, open role info, etc)
the other sites I've looked at have the following problems IMO:
Wellfound - they only post jobs that they're being paid to post; when I look for startup jobs I tend to want to see all the startups that meet my criteria, and then to network my way in even if there's no job posting; Wellfound shows me only 6 product roles at seed stage companies (there are WAAAY more than that, not to mention other startups that may be a great fit but haven't posted an open role)
Startup.Jobs - I'd really like more filtering capabilities beyond function, location and full time / part time. most people I talk to who are looking for startup jobs have pretty specific criteria, e.g. "business development" or "sales" based in San Francisco or Los Angeles, at a company with between 30-2,000 employees, Series A through Series C funded, in FinTech, remote friendly, etc etc
WorkAtAStartup.com - I think this site is great and gets at the problem I'm trying to solve with all of the filtering options; the only "problem" is it only includes YC companies
What am I missing?? Is better search/filtering and data aggregation enough of a differentiation to move this beyond a project into a business?
I get what you mean, I often go on a website and notice missing things which seem obvious that they should be there, so I understand the motivation.
In this case, you'd need to figure out how that differentiation will lead to monitization, and if it's sufficient, or maybe you have other plans for monetization. I wouldn't rule it out, you don't have to be first, you just have to make it better and this was proven time and time again. Ultimately if it's your passion, give yourself a limited amount of time to get it off the ground and nuke it if it doesn't work out. Fail fast and fail forward.