

Ask HN: review our startup - jobbountyhunter.com - andrewstuart

Any feedback valued on our new startup.<p>We have been racing at least one, if not two, YC companies.  Believe me you don't want to be racing against a bunch of YC hackers - it's nerve racking.  We've recently come out of stealth mode.  The back story is here: http://www.jobbountyhunter.com/blog.20090115.html<p>Job Bounty Hunter is a network of blogs and websites that syndicate, publish and promote job advertisements to their audience via widgets.  Recruiters and employers place a cash bounty on every job advertisement. The bounty goes to the site that the refers the winning job seeker.<p>www.jobbountyhunter.com
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motoko
<http://www.jobbountyhunter.com/howItWorks.html> This should be HTML text...
and lose the chintzy stock photos.

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thinkzig
Congratulations on your launch. The concept sounds like a good one. Here are a
few comments...

1.) Tighten up your USP on the home page - It's not obvious what you're doing
at first glance of the home page. The big blue block of text in the middle is
too wordy and hard to read. Try to distill what you're doing down to a pithy
tagline.

2.) Emphasize benefits more on home page - I like how you've split up the home
page to cater to your two audiences, publishers and recruiters, but the text
underneath seems to be more of a feature list or a "how it works" list than a
benefits list.

Try to focus more on the "What's in it for me?" question your core audience is
asking. "Get access to the smartest and most engaged people" is probably the
only sentence there that really speaks to that question.

3.) Emphasize sign-up more - My guess is that your main goal right now is to
get account sign-ups. The hand pointing to the button is clever, but I think
you could do more to make this stand out. Also the big green "place a job now"
image under the recruiter section seems like it would be a button, but it's
not. I'd turn it into one.

4.) Building trust - I think my first question as a blogger/publisher would be
"What keeps JBH.com and the recruiter honest? How will I really know that my
referral was the winner or not?" I'm not sure how you overcome this, but that
was my first question/objection and I didn't really see anything on the "how
it works" page that helped allay that fear.

Overall I think this is a good concept and I wish you well. It's a tough
market right now but there's no time to start like the present, right?
Hopefully we all have nowhere to go but up from here.

Best of luck to you.

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andrewstuart
That's valuable feedback thanks.

It's great to get an external opinion.

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smysore
the site looks great! i think the hardest part will be to convince bloggers
that jobbountyhunter widgets will make more money than the ads they may
already be showing and that any money they do make will be rewarded enough to
justify cluttering their site more than necessary...

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andrewstuart
Thanks for the feedback! Hopefully a substantial pot of bounty cash will
accumulate, making it more appealing to bloggers and web publishers.

AS

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sdfx
"how it works" is a bit convoluted. Perhaps distinguish between advertiser,
publisher and job seeker and explain how your service helps them. The design
in general is not as clean as it could be, and the font-sizes on the first
page seems random. Maybe you could emphasize important parts and leave out
less important ones.

The links in your widgets seem to be broken "post a job" and the image-link
end up on the start page, not shure this is intentional.

Apart from design, I think the idea is neat. I am not shure how your payout
compares to regular advertisement, but the posibility of a large profit might
convince a lot of people to put your widgets on their page.

~~~
andrewstuart
Great feedback thank you!

AS

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PoweredByWill
The front page was very busy in my opinion for a stealth-mode startup. Keep it
REAL simple and lead people to more information.

Also the color, layout and stock photos on the 'how it works' page made me
think of one of those pyramid scheme sites.

What is the validation model for the Job Seeker eclipsing 3 months?

Widgets look good.

~~~
andrewstuart
Thanks for the feedback - its a big help.

Can you clarify what you are asking here ""What is the validation model for
the Job Seeker eclipsing 3 months?"" - I'll try to answer.

Thanks

AS

