

Ask HN: Do I need more at bats? - noahc

I’m working on a couple different projects.  It’s taken me about 3 months to say, “If I had to work on everything on this list for the rest of my life I could do it and not want to work on anything else.”  I feel as though I’ve really reached my stride on what matters and what doesn’t.<p>However, my biggest fear is running out of money.  Right now my runway is around a year.  When I run out of money, the game ends.  I can’t play anymore.  I can pick up consulting jobs locally here that involve wordpress + shopping cart implementation.<p>This isn’t my passion though and I’d like to be in a position where I’m learning from others instead of teaching about the internet and why your lumber yard probably doesn’t need to be on twitter and Facebook.<p>What I’m passionate about is marketing, sales, customer support, and business.  I can code in python and it works, but when I put it up on stackoverflow they say I’m doing it all wrong.  I can modify wordpress themes all day long.  So I’m not technologically dumb, but my heros are Seth Godin and Alexis not Jeff Atwood and DHH.<p>I’ve sent three e-mails one to Ben Casnocha, one to SpiderOak and one to videolla.com.  SpiderOak and Videolla.com are from the remotely hiring thread.  I’ve gotten two ‘quite impressive’ e-mails back.  One from Ben and one from Vlad of Videolla.com fame.  I don’t know if they’re being nice or how to take the ‘quite impressive’ comment.<p>I’d happy to forward the e-mails I wrote to anyone that would be willing to look them over and make sure I’m not making some silly or basic mistake.<p>My ideal job would have me working with an underdog company making sure their customers knew we cared about them.  That can come in many forms from awesome documentation, hand written letters, promoting our users on our company blog, recording screen casts on how to do common things, and making sure they get support answered quickly.  Generally, just turn me loose and say, "Make sure every customer has an experience they tell their friends about in a good way"<p>I’d love to work for a company like SpiderOak because it’s a niche underdog with awesome features.  Their company culture seems awesome as well.  I’d probably be happy working for a company that sold niche specialty products as well as long as their goal was to change the world in some way.  That’s what I love about SpiderOak they have a philosophy about storage, encryption, multi-platform, etc that the other companies don’t have.<p>So my question is do I just need more at bats or am I doing something fundamentally wrong?
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klochner
From your description, your ideal position is with a medium-to-large sized b2b
company, that has high-value paying customers to whom you can either sell or
provide post-sales support.

Consumer internet startups are more interested in:

    
    
      - (good) coders
      - raising money
      - inbound marketing (ppc, blogging, seo, tech pr, etc).
    

So if you really want to be at a startup, I suggest you rebrand yourself as an
internet marketing and/or SEO guru. Read Inbound Marketing by @dharmesh and
retool your resume/cover letter.

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noahc
Thanks for the reply. I really appreciate the inbound marketing stuff. I
focused on that sort of thing in the SpiderOak email, and thanks for pointing
out that's where I need to stay focused.

~~~
klochner
and to be fair, you do need more at bats.

Finding a job takes work - even if you're the perfect match and do a perfect
job of presenting your skills, it's not guaranteed that a potential employer
make the right decision.

~~~
noahc
I think too, that I have some job requirements that probably are unique too
like working remote and wanting to work at most 35 hours, but much rather in
the 20 hour range per week.

Maybe a reverse job application is the way to go?

