
 Review my startup - jaredbrown
http://talentopoly.com
======
count
While I do think the design is very well done, I'm not sure I see the benefit
of something like this, vs. Delicious and other social bookmarking things.

Keeping it a gated community is going to make taking off VERY difficult,
unless you have some over-sharing, highly prolific people in out of the gate
(no pun intended).

While there may be groups that do want to keep their sharing semi-private, are
there enough to build a meaningful audience (read: potential advertising
revenue stream) for the service, or will you just charge for it (saw no
mention of this, but may have missed it).

~~~
jaredbrown
I do have a few members who share ~5 links per day on the site including
myself. In a given day the site receives ~20 new links. Most of this is just
now starting to gain momentum as Feb 1st is when the site launched with a new
design and a few new features.

The site has close to 100 return visitors daily and building.

Revenue is not a concern at the moment.

~~~
blhack
>The site has close to 100 return visitors daily and building.

How many of those users actually post content?

~~~
jaredbrown
Around 5% post new content daily. This number is steadily going up. But the
site has only started to gain traction this month. There's a lot of room for
improvement, but I feel like it's off to a good start. ;)

------
kqueue
I noticed that loading the main page results in requesting 19 css files and 8
js files. I suggest combining those to provide a better loading experience.

~~~
jaredbrown
Nice job noticing that. This is a high priority on the roadmap. I have some
cool compressions and reductions planned for the site's assets.

~~~
ZoFreX
Hello again :) I kinda like the site but... I'm not really sure what it's for?
Is this for sharing my CV, getting a new job, sharing links... where does it
fit in between Monster.com and HN/Reddit?

On the front-end optimisation end, that's my "thing" so hit me up if you want
to talk about that!

~~~
jaredbrown
I'd be interested in discussing this more. The quick answer is that it's 1st)
a way to share what you're reading 2nd) a way to find others to work with.

The CV aspect is fairly unique to this sort of site, which is why I think it
gets so much attention in these discussions. But as you can see it is a
smaller aspect to the site compared to posts, questions, and even profiles.

The CV feature is rooted in this desire I had to host my resume, shown in its
original formatting, on a clean, uncluttered page with stats showing me how
many views it gets, by whom, and from where. I can share it with a simple link
to anyone interested in seeing it and actually know with some certainty if
they looked at it.

------
cletus
This looks like a crowdsourced curation of content relevant to a particular
vertical (have I thrown in enough buzzwords?).

That actually seems like a reasonable idea. The problem you may have is that a
site like Stackoverflow could (and IMHO should) copy it and integrate it into
what they have. It actually seems like a good extension for the SO model.

~~~
kongqiu
That first sentence is amazing. Where did you get your MBA? :)

------
jaredbrown
I launched the site in late Oct of last year and it is growing by leaps and
bounds. It's built with Ruby on Rails. My hope is to build a community around
sharing links strictly related to development and design. No general tech news
links or other distractions. I'd love to get some feedback on it from the HN
community.

~~~
bane
I recently(ish) starting to work on web design after years in desktop product
management. A community like this could be terribly helpful.

~~~
jaredbrown
Excellent, be sure to request an invite and I'll make sure you get one.

~~~
bane
Done!

------
jaredbrown
By the way, if you want to read the public posts you can find them at
<http://talentopoly.com/posts>

------
thomasfl
I like the design. The functionality reminds me of hackerbuddy.com.

What are your experience with ruby on rails hosted with heroku?

~~~
jaredbrown
I'll have to check out hackerbuddy.com, hadn't heard of that site before. I've
been a big fan of Heroku so far. There's a reason why others are mimicking
their hosting strategy. That said, it stinks when there's downtime or the grid
slows down for whatever reason. So you are more prone to those sort of
outages. But to get started, it's easy and free. I'd highly recommend it.

------
jaredbrown
Thank you to everyone who has checked out the site. I've gotten to have some
interesting discussions in this comment thread. The HackerNews community has
yet again lived up to my expectations. I'll try to keep the community up to
date on the progress of this startup periodically.

------
JohnTitus
Seems like it's forrst.com + resumes.

~~~
jaredbrown
Forrst is great if you want to see what other designers and developers are
working on. Talentopoly is great if you want to see what they're reading.

I think there's room for both as I am a Forrst member and still found myself
wanting to build something like Talentopoly.

------
jaredbrown
For those interested in keeping up with the posts on Talentopoly you can find
the RSS feed at <http://talentopoly.com/posts/all.rss>

~~~
akkartik
That's quite a torrent. How about best-of-hour and best-of-day feeds? Each
would get just one new post every interval, which makes for predictable volume
in my feedreader.

~~~
jaredbrown
Good idea. I'll see what I can cook up.

------
jaredbrown
We just had our 700th member sign up! <http://talentopoly.com/users/861>

------
jaredbrown
Almost forgot to mention the most important aspect, the site is invite-only.
It's read-only to the public.

~~~
count
This becomes confusing - it seems at first like a social bookmarking site, but
then there's resumes. It's a gated community, but read only to the public.

I'm not sure any of this is BAD, and I may just be stupid, but the 'why the
hell should I care' bit seems to be confusing? Is it a job board, or a
news/content sharing site? Both?

~~~
melissamiranda
Pinterest, Dribbblr, and Quora in the early days were all invite-only and
read-only to the public. I don't think it's confusing at all. However, you
would benefit from exposing some awesome content on the home page to entice
people to request an invite.

~~~
jaredbrown
Great comment. Currently the site exposes the most popular post at the moment
under the section, "What's on Talentopoly" on the landing page.

The next step I planned to take was to expose the Posts tab on the landing
page.

Down the road I expect to make the landing page the popular posts page and the
Request Invite links would take you to what is now the landing page (the
request an invite page).

That's the 3-step process for exposing the posts more and more as I currently
have it planned.

------
Wavesonics
Seems like a really great way to share things your working on and get feed
back.

------
bvi
Looks great. Who did the web design, if I may ask?

~~~
jaredbrown
Thanks! Brian Hoff did the design.

