
Where Are All The Internet Sales Guys? (CarWoo YC S09) - tommy_mcclung
http://carwoo.com/blog/where-are-all-the-internet-sales-guys/
======
jayp
Many reasons you got only luke warm response:

(1) Comments were disabled in the original post (for reference, see original
post here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945582.>) Disabling comments
for job posts is not ideal in an open community. My hypothesis is that it
hurts more than benefits YC companies. Pile on the fact that you're trying to
hire for a non-traditional role.

(2) You're trying to hire for your core value-add. This is what founders
should be owning. If your founding team can't do this, look to add a co-
founder, not an employee. If your founder's aren't looking to get your
customer base to a critical mass, and thus make the marketplace more favorable
to both customers and dealers, what are they doing?

(3) A dangerous attitude. Your voice in both these posts lacks empathy. Your
original post is highly presumptuous. Your follow-on blog post doesn't clarify
things much further, and fails to provide concrete motivation/reasonings to
apply.

I hope these criticisms help.

~~~
tommy_mcclung
Thanks for all the great feedback. Let me comment on why I posted this.

First, we've (the founders) have been doing all of the customer acquisition
work since day one... but the realities of the demands that are splitting up
our focus are that none of us have the time that this role requires to focus
on this properly. We know and understand where our customers are, how to reach
them, etc... but customer acquisition isn't a set it and forget it problem. It
requires constant attention, tweaking, optimizing and experimenting. We
certainly won't be just handing this off to someone, but we're at a point
where someone has to dedicate their full time and attention to the job.

100% agree that comments being disabled on job posts is limiting. That's why I
decided to do the blog post... to get some feedback from the HN community on
this type of role. Hopefully this is something we can talk pg into changing :)

The original job post I put up was actually intended to be presumptuous, I
wanted to see if anyone would self select into responding with the vague
details I put up there. Honestly I didn't know how to build this job post
because it's not a traditional role, although from the community of founders I
spend time with, it's an increasingly in-demand type of position. It's not
100% marketing and not 100% technical... The Airbnb job post focuses a lot
more on the technical side of things and knowing that HN is a more technical
crowd I wasn't sure how to position the marketing side of things.

I'm going to re-do the job post after hearing all the great feedback both on
our blog and on HN. The typical stuff about why someone should apply will be
included...

Thanks everyone.

~~~
jayp
I am glad you found the comments helpful.

I think your response here helps develop the position more clearly.
Nevertheless, I think you bring out a good point yourself, "HN is a more
technical crowd", and as such, another reason for a poor response to the
opening maybe a poor fit for this community. You may need to locate a better
channel to acquire your acquirer.

------
il
It's called affiliate marketing, and thousands of people do exactly this for a
living full time. All of the affiliate marketers who are any good work for
themselves driving traffic to others for commission on every lead or sale, or
creating their own products.

The people who are good at driving traffic are driven, entrepreneurial, and
have the hacker mindset. Of course they would prefer working for themselves
without an upper bound on their earning potential.

The fact is that, if you're good at driving traffic, there are still
tremendous opportunities for you out there, and you can earn much, much more
than any salary could pay.

I actually emailed you with some advice about hiring someone like this based
on my experience in the industry, I'll repost it here:

 _Ranking experience by preference, I would most prefer a candidate with
affiliate marketing experience, next someone who managed SEM/media buys for a
large performance advertiser, and finally someone with agency experience. Stay
away from people who have only done branding, they will eat your money. Also,
I know you're looking for a hacker, but I think the most important factor in
running internet marketing campaigns is knowing how to sell. Identifying your
target market and what their pain points, wants, and desires are is paramount.
Optimizing, split testing, etc is important but secondary compared to
marketing fundamentals. Finally, watch out for "social media experts". Value
applicants based on how many conversions they can bring, and how much they can
spend effectively, not on how much they can engage in conversations. Until you
can pay your vendors in Twitter followers, all that matters is getting quality
traffic and sales._

I think the fundamental issue is that you're framing this as a job for
hackers. For whatever reason, most hackers have a distaste for marketing, and
would probably be loath to apply for a marketing-type job. They would rather
be building things and not worrying about things like positioning or
segmentation.

~~~
jkuria
You could not have said it any better. I've spent the last year learning this
skill and it is a lot harder than one would generally think. It isn't
something that you can just do as an afterthought after you are done hacking
for the day. There is no reason why someone who is really good at it would
work for anyone else.

There are plenty of so called "internet marketing gurus" (the Frank Kern's and
Mike Filsaime's) who teach it but most of them are no good. They have only
ever sold internet marketing informational products to other aspiring internet
marketers. If a potential hire has only sold internet marketing products this
is an immediate 'no hire'.

Good luck finding this person!

~~~
coffee
"There is no reason why someone who is really good at it would work for anyone
else."

That's really just a false statement, in my opinion. That's like stating why
would any good programmer ever work for anyone else?

Honestly, there are a ton of reasons.

For example, a programmer may wish to work at Facebook so their code is put in
front of 500 million users. If they hack something on their own, that's likely
not going to be the case.

If a marketer wants to test his/her conversion theories against a large volume
of traffic, they either need to spend LARGE amounts of their own money for
paid traffic, or build up a large audience of their own. Again, an unlikely
scenario.

Whether you're a marketer, or a programmer, or whatever else, working at a
company/startup can provide you with opportunities that do not exist on your
own.

Those are some of the prime reasons people work for others, no matter their
trade...

~~~
il
And there is the distinction. Spending large amounts of their own money to get
massive traffic is EXACTLY what good marketers do. They can get the exposure a
company like Facebook gives developers. A great marketer can build something
in a week that can make him hundreds of thousands of dollars. The best hacker,
unless he has marketing support can not. This is not to say hackers are less
valuable than marketers, nothing is further from the truth. But, in some
cases, top marketers can create a lot more value for themselves more quickly
than top hackers.

~~~
zackattack
I would say that hackers are a lot less valuable than marketers. Of course at
the top levels you're measuring apples and oranges but if you need someone to
create a product and you're willing to pay $150/hr you can probably hire a
good hacker. If you need someone to create a marketing strategy you may have
to pay $500/hr.

------
AmericanOP
As an internet sales guy, I would preface this by saying most startups should
put more of their marketing budget into improving the product experience. I
don't think you're communicating your benefits to me the right way in your
tagline, your CG video feels like a commercial and shouldn't dominate your
splash page (splash tutorial videos are a cop-out and turn off users), I
wasn't nearly invested in your site to go through the email signup barrier,
and your car selection process isn't fun and provides very little feedback
(almost useless if I don't know exactly what I want). Your pricing model turns
me off- the only real difference I can see from the descriptors is that you
contact 1-3 more dealers. Maybe have one option be fixed pris and the other a
% of the savings on MSRP?

Second, I take Bart to work every day. I was pissed I got a yellow envelope on
my car on labor day (free parking day), pissed when I complained to Bart
employees about getting a parking ticket and they had no idea what I was
talking about, and pissed when I finally opened the envelope and saw "This is
a PR stunt by CarWoo, let us find your next car and we'll pay your next
parking ticket." Now, because I'm in the industry and know who you are I had a
laugh about it, and because I'm in PR I get it, but you caused me too much
inconvenience for me to "like" the brand, and you failed to communicate your
benefits so I didn't even bother going to your site even though I am currently
in the market for a car. Okay, I "get" the internet, hopefully you got some
buzz, but is this what you mean by hack-centric marketing? Was it so
successful you want to hire someone to do this ad infinitum?

I don't really think PR is something you can usefully hack as an outsider,
especially if your market positioning and messaging is weak. The reason why
you can't find an Internet Sales Guy like you can a Technical Product Building
Guy is because you're really talking about successfully coordinating your
channel strategy, marketing strategy, PR strategy, SEM/SEO, everything that
goes into customer acquisition. You need to be doing these things better, but
you're not going to find someone to magically do it for you unless your paying
for experts.

~~~
tommy_mcclung
Apologize about the parking ticket thing. We actually did NOT do that PR stunt
in a large scale. A couple people tested it at the train station and we had
several complaints so we decided not to go through with it. Sorry for the
inconvenience and that you were parked at that train station that day. My
takeaway from the test is exactly what you said, it wasn't good for our brand
and I told the team not to move forward with it in a large scale. Crazy
because we only handed out a handful of those... small world. Send me an email
and if you're really looking for a car, I'll comp your CarWoo! fee if you're
willing to give us a second look. tommy@carwoo.com

------
patio11
Rand at SEOMoz wants to hire this guy. Every startup in the Valley wants to
hire this guy. Many traditional software companies _desperately_ want to hire
this guy. I get an email at least once a week asking for an introduction to
this guy.

I know this guy.

He's self-taught, freakishly intelligent, and has long-since learned that he
can either come in at nine, put up with rules which stifle his effectiveness,
and make pennies of the value he drives, or he can run his own business,
answer for his results only, and earn appreciable percentages of the value he
drives. And he drives a lot of value indeed. ($200k is too low.)

If you want to work with this guy, you want him as a cofounder. Fair warning:
so does everybody else, and he's kind of "meh" on the idea.

Of interest to everybody else: _you want to be this guy_. It is a body of
skill which can be learned, and it will only take a few years and a lot of
experimentation. And after you do that, the world is your oyster.

~~~
tibbon
Hmm, really? This position basically describes me, and I've been debating
lately how I can best pitch myself to a company as I continue to move through
my career. Although like you mentioned, I'd most like to be a co-founder with
a company when I make my next move.

I can get around in Rails but I'm strongest with just pure Ruby at the moment
(and a bit of C, Java, PHP, etc). I understand social networks and I've done
quite a bit of published research on that front. I understand customer needs
and how to reach them. Analytics, datamining and split testing are fun. I like
beautiful code, user accessibility, and feel that good SEO is a natural result
from good coding practices and practical sense. I know how to structure
advertising campaigns and what works and what doesn't. I understand how to
shape a product and make decisions for building a strong infrastructure. The
key is having a good product with a clear message. User data privacy is
important to me. I look good in a suit, and VCs seem to like me. I can learn
anything needed, and I'll love doing it. I don't mind working long hard hours
and enjoy being challenged to the degree that I get bored easily if not
challenged. I'm good with people and can lead a team effectively. I've got
experience from working with a handful of companies now. I'm young and have
few prior commitments, enabling frequent traveling when needed. I thrive off
networking and knowing everyone in the room. I like taking risk. I have solid
references.

About the only thing holding me back a little bit is that I've recently moved
to Columbus, Ohio and I'm committed to being here for the next few years while
my girlfriend finishes her PhD. At the same time, I've worked remotely for
several companies and it rarely poses an issue.

Yet, I see many startups looking for a CTO or lead programmer who is the kung
fu master of the code. I can understand any code you show me, but I'm more of
a hybrid of marketing, business and development than just a pure developer.

------
joshklein
No one with the actual skills you're interested in would be interested in the
job you've described. We business hackers want to be involved in customer
development, product-market fit, and shaping strategy for going to market.

Anyone interested in a job specifically defined as "driving a lot of traffic
right now" is going to be an affiliate marketing / black hat seo / marketing
douche who will not add value to your business.

This is like a "business guy" founder posting a job to HN asking a programmer
to implement his tech spec. I think when you post a job to HN for business
folks, you need to demonstrate a little more respect for what a talented
candidate could bring to your company.

OR... you're looking in the wrong place; go post in an affiliate marketing
forum.

~~~
il
_Anyone interested in a job specifically defined as "driving a lot of traffic
right now" is going to be an affiliate marketing / black hat seo / marketing
douche who will not add value to your business._

Now that's just mean.

It's very possible to drive lots of traffic without being a "strategist" or
vague business guy. Strategy should be the founders' job, they may very well
be looking for someone to take care of the nuts and bolts of optimizing
campaigns.

~~~
joshklein
I'm not saying anyone who is able to drive a lot of traffic is one of those
[negative things]. I'm saying anyone interested in a job post to do that task
for a startup with an unmentioned level - implied to be very low - of
influence on strategy (not to mention compensation or equity) probably is.

I would be skeptical of anyone, "user acquisition hacker" or otherwise, who is
confident in their ability to drive traffic of "folks who want cars" in a
profitable way. That's too broad for anyone without a fortune 500 budget to
remotely consider; the first task of this marketing hire should be to redefine
and narrow the audience this product targets, and consider whether or not that
user actually wants the thing CarWoo is delivering.

Smart marketers don't want traffic, they want profits. In hiring a marketer to
deliver traffic, they're missing the forrest for the trees.

------
nhashem
To use a baseball analogy, you're looking for a catcher that hits .300 and 30
HR. Catcher is one of the most defensively demanding positions in baseball.
Finding a player with all those defensive tools AND that can hit at an All-
Star level is incredibly rare, which is why players like Joe Mauer easily get
$100MM contracts.

But as other people indicated, you don't need Joe Mauer on your team. You
really just need to him to show up for a few weeks, teach you some basics and
give you some tips, and you can do the actual heavy lifting yourself. 20% of
this stuff is figuring out concepts like how you would build an effective SEM
bidding system and determine whether it's working, the 80% is actually
executing (ie. figuring out the bidding algorithm).

TLDR; Find a contractor, pay him enough per hour to make it worth his while,
profit.

------
petercooper
_I have a theory that most people that fit the requirements of a “Customer
Acquisition Hacker” are likely trying to use this skill to their own advantage
and not selling it to a company as an employee._

I totally agree. The talents mentioned in the article are right down my alley,
but I've been busy using those skills to get more subscribers and traffic to
my _own_ gigs. This is true for others I know who have similar skillsets (Amy
Hoy stands out as a prolific example here, to me).

Doing these things full-time for other people would negate most of the reasons
I do them already - like extremely flexible hours, the ability to work on
exactly what I want, etc. Not only that, but it's taken >10 years of hard slog
to feel confident about my abilities. It would take a significant increase in
other forms of compensation (money, prestige, etc.) for me to do this full-
time for someone else. (All that said, if a reputable company has $150k base
plus options to invest, I'm listening ;-))

------
rwhitman
I just got off a gig working for someone who is like the king of customer
acquisition. _Very_ successful at it. Very difficult to work with. And this
guy is only in his job because he was acquired in a buyout of his startup.

From what I've gathered, if you want someone in this role they need to get
paid a _LOT_ of money. If they are good they could end up making more in
commission than all your engineers' salaries combined so you need to be
prepared for that...

------
rarrrrrr
They are busy making money! My conclusion was that it was easier to become
such a person, rather than try to find and hire one. Or, better yet, change
the product to better fit with the market, making the entire process easier.

~~~
gaustin
I'm working to become one such person at the moment. It would be awesome to be
able to do so while working somewhere like AirBnB or CarWoo.

By the time I'm an expert at this, I might be making enough money that working
for others isn't really what I want to do.

Anyway, I wish them success finding the right person.

------
vaksel
your problem was picking the wrong title for the position...noone knows what
you mean by a user acquisition hacker. Should have called it VP of Business
Development or VP of Marketing.

It really sounds like a position for a business guy, not a hacker guy. The
fact that you require hacking skills probably turned away anyone who could do
what you actually needed.

~~~
krschultz
Absolutely true. I know this becuase my girlfriend just went through a long
search for a marketing position relatively similar to this one. Never once did
we think of putting the word "hacker" in her title even though she will end up
doing a lot of web development work.

The ad might mean something to them, but it really means nothing to the people
looking for jobs outside of those that read HN a lot and/or read pg's essays
on redefining the term hacker. That is narrowing your search to a section of
the echo chamber, which is even worse than the echo chamber.

------
aberman
Great post, and so true.

Unfortunately, "user acquisition hackers" are basically priceless. A hacker
that builds great product is hard enough to find, a hacker that BUILDS
TRACTION?! Holy God would that be amazing.

~~~
il
_Unfortunately, "user acquisition hackers" are basically priceless._

That's good to know, and the hundreds of startup people emailing me asking for
advice on getting traffic seem to confirm the incredible demand.

I'm still wondering why more hackers don't go into the traffic generation
space. There are tremendous opportunities for someone who knows how to code to
use automation to scale campaigns and completely dominate a niche.

I can barely throw together a few lines of PHP, and I'm still leaps and bounds
ahead of most of the marketers I'm competing against.

~~~
jordanlev
Can you please extrapolate on this? Perhaps this is part of the problem (I'm a
programmer) -- someone comes to you and says "I need a website that provides
information about my business" or "I need people to be able to chat with each
other" or "make it so people can buy stuff from the site" -- and it's very
clear what needs to happen (usually a database schema starts forming in my
head as the client is talking). However, the "problem space" of traffic
generation is not very concrete in my mind. I understand individual aspects of
it, but not really able to grasp it as a whole. Perhaps this lack of "overall
understanding the system" is what keeps hackers away from these kinds of jobs?

~~~
il
Driving traffic is so very different from building software, because you can
do everything right, follow all best practices and rules, build an awesome
campaign, and still fail because your competitors are doing it 10% better.

In some ways, different traffic sources are like programming languages. They
each have different methods, rules, and tricks, and being a good marketer
means being familiar enough with them to figure out the right tools for the
job.A lot of that knowledge comes from testing and experience.

You know that you wouldn't build a chat website in BASIC and I know that I
wouldn't send international RON traffic to a dating site.

It all boils down to arbitraging traffic and finding and exploiting
inefficiencies in the market- you have to answer the fundamental question of
"where is the amount and quality of traffic I want priced lower than it would
be in a perfect market?"

Obviously, if you can build technology to answer this question in a scalable
way, as I and others are trying to do, you can do very well in the space.

There's a reason enterprise-class PPC bid management tools sell for thousands
of dollars a month(and 5% of spend).

~~~
jordanlev
Thank you for your reply. I have to say I still understand nothing more about
the problem space than I did before, though :) Any stories or examples you can
share to illustrate exactly what's involved?

------
alain94040
Put a salary figure. Right now, you sound like you want an amazing performer,
but are not willing to pay much (despite the claim of being well funded)

------
coryl
I'm in general agreement with everyone else, internet marketing is incredibly
in demand because unlike all other hires, it directly drives revenues. So not
only do you have to compete against other companies, but lucrative affiliate
marketing pulls in the best.

------
ivankirigin
I think another name for what you're looking for is Growth Hacker
[http://startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-
hacker...](http://startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-hackers/)

I spend a fair amount of my time doing this - but really another side of this
is analytics and testing / experimentation systems. It isn't all about the
campaigns.

I should also mention that my current role wasn't the result of a post but
just something everyone agreed I should do.

------
mikeryan
So this sounds like one of those newer types of positions that will start
becoming more common. However I doubt that a tone of people have actual
experience at this.

However I bet there are a ton of brilliant young hackers who could learn to do
this and would see it as a sharp career move. Perhaps going after someone like
this would make more sense?

------
jscore
So basically you want a guy who knows how to make money to work for you? Am I
missing something?

------
johnnywon
I work at a big ad agency (400+ people) in BOS doing digital marketing and our
team is asked to do exactly what your asking and I can tell you it's really
really tough to find these people to do this sort of work. I mean anyone who
has a site is looking for someone who can conjure up traffic & eyeballs for
cheap, it's the holy grail of all advertising and customer acquisition based
businesses.

As you probably know, there is a massive talent shortage at the cutting edge
of digital marketing and driving traffic. There are tons of people in digital
marketing but the vast majority of them are thinking about old ideas and the
way things have been done in the past; all approaches that are contrary to any
cutting edge startup.

So it kind of turns out that there are a ton of old ideas to growing traffic
and rarely an original approach. This makes finding people a nightmare since
with large or med budgets, millions of people have experience spending
millions of dollars but only a handful have had any success designing high
traffic customer acquisition programs at low to no cost.

I would guess a large part of this is due to the fact that everything is so
new and experimental. Minting social media traffic into conversions & sales
can be quite expensive and profitable on a case by case basis. Buying search
keywords can work (it worked for Mint) but take an aggressive customer
acquisition model at cost. Even targeted ad exchanges & DSPs bring guaranteed
visibility but a certain gamble in overhead costs & trades. Affiliate programs
have been around for years but it doesn't work across all verticals (tough to
sell physical things, easy to get new sign ups). SEOs are barely worth
mentioning since so much of it is now obvious.

In the big ad agency world, there are a lot of these older ideas being thrown
around constantly but it's very seldom we or anyone sees a new or original
theory to drive traffic to a particular project or new site. We're faced with
the same problem startups are faced and it seems evident that the problem will
continue. Ideas that generate incredible amounts of traffic (the Old Spice
campaign) seem improbable before campaigns begin and blatantly obvious in
retrospect. Additionally, past ideas to drive traffic applied to current
projects have no guarantee that they will wildly inspire traffic in the
future. It's quite rare to find an individual that has mastered the
understanding of a few Internet ecosystems (like how travel websites churn
traffic or eyeballs for moons at online retail) and simultaneously understand
emerging marketing tactics to grow reach.

Hackers are in a weirdly challenging position because designing business
systems often seems foreign to cutting brilliant code. Startups like Gilt &
Groupon have no special approach to code but brilliant business systems and
incredible customer growth curves since they inspire customers to share
experiences for the sake of their own benefit. There is probably a lot more
that could be said about these biz guys who can design brilliant customer
acquisition systems but I would bet you probably find them in three
categories: 1. they've already built something brilliant that they have a few
VCs on speed dial for their next big idea, 2. they're brewing something
already as an entrepreneur and lack desire for a job or 3. they're ignorant of
their own brilliance and need a Steve Jobs to John Sculley speech to hop on
board.

Last prediction: as the number of startup engineers & Y-comb type teams
proliferate this talent shortage will get crazy. Perhaps PG will start asking
for Google News links for "system to your advantage" examples.

------
entrepreneurial
I'm right here!

