Enlyte
A Computer Science and Tech only Hackernews
Last month I had a chat Michael Seibel, it was at an office hours (Small YC events held by partners to give advice to startups in different cities).
Gave me some solid advice in the few minutes we had.
It boiled down to:
"Simplify the app"
So I did, I spend the next month cutting 80% of the app and making the overall UI/UX cleaner.
Now there is only one community, focusing on Computer Science and Tech, in addition to being mobile friendly now.
As my focus shifted from development to marketing, I've learned that SEO shouldn't be overlooked and that it's one of the most important things to drive traffic and growth. So ironically, I'm back to development and optimizing for SEO.
Finally added the Job Posting feature to Enlyte.
How Job Postings work:
- Target a Community to Post in
- Job Post will propagate to parent communities
So by targeting more specialized communities your job posting will reach more communities and users. (ex. Full-Stack Developer will propagate to Web Development and Computer Science).
Right now Job Postings are Free! So feel free to list any positions that are available in your company.
Feature creep has been a real problem during development. I've finally decided to pull back and only work on the core product, which is the community feature of the app.
Some things I've decided to do:
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Cut out the landing page and bring new users directly to the home feed, this hopefully will reduce first time visitors bouncing.
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Focus less on development and more on marketing
The great thing about being a technical founder is that if something fails, I can quickly iterate the product to reflect user feedback.
I am a full-stack web developer, so I was able to build out the product myself. That being said, there is more than just coding when it comes to building a product.
There is UI/UX design, which has proved to eat a lot of my time, at least 30% of development time was used to design the user interface, and it still has much to improve on.
There is product design, what features to add, and which ones to cut out. Feature creep was a real issue during development.
It took around 5 months to build out the first version of the app that I was comfortable shipping.
There are plenty of websites that offer career information on the web, however they all suffer from a similar problem.
You need to know what term/job title, you are looking for to get information about it.
What I've found is that people may know what they generally want. But unfortunately the world is not a general place, it's a highly specialized place. For example, a "Software Developer" is an extremely broad title for any person who codes. You can be a web developer, embedded developer, mobile developer, etc, each with their own subset of more specialized job titles.
This is why I decided to build Enlyte's information structure in a tree-like manner, so it is much more intuitive and effective when exploring career paths.
My ultimate life goal is to disrupt the traditional educational system.
However, there lies a problem that needs to be fixed before giving people a better education solution.
People don't know what they want to do in life, especially at an early age.
A high percentage of people today go into college not knowing what they want to do as a career, and since society has painted College-Education as a key to success, they still persist and continue into a college program that they don't truly understand or love. The result is millions of students wasting tens of thousands of dollars, years of their life, and graduating to land a job they don't like, that's not in their field, or no job at all.
The reason why this happens is because people are not educated well enough earlier on in their life. Choosing a career path is no easy task, there are so many variables to consider when choosing, such as average salary, market demand, and lifestyle just to name a few important ones.
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I also love education and hate how much schooling gets in the way with it. It sometimes pains me to think of how much of my life was wasted and how much less I learned due to school while growing up.
I have some ideas about how to start carving real chunks out of the post k-12 system in the US (and by proxy, other regions that respect US credentials), but the effort will take far more resources than I have.
Unfortunately, children's schooling is a much harder target since it's compulsory in nearly every region, it's deeply entrenched politically and there are ferocious regulatory barriers. In many countries, competition such as home schooling isn't legal at all!
However, as universities lose their dominance over adult education, high schools will hopefully become less rigid as well.
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I have dreams of disrupting the educational system too. I'm currently unschooling my 5 kids.
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Nice
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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It's a fantastic payment model, really.
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
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