

Ask YC: What do you think about Startuply? - LukeG

Our new site for startup jobs launched on TC early this morning, and we'd love to hear what you think. Play around with it, and you can easily reach us through the feedback box on the left side of the site (thanks to the Anyvite guys).
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swombat
As I go along...

1) First thing I care about is localising the jobs to my area. I live in
London, and most jobs on this site are irrelevant. I was only able to localise
to London from the "Startup Companies" tab.

2) Only one job in London, but oh well, I guess it's still a new site.
Surprised not to see Songkick on there, considering a) they're YC-funded, b)
they're looking for rails hackers atm.

3) Clicking on the map brought me to the company description (I suppose
because i had to browse by company to drill down to London), and i had to find
a link on the right hand side to figure out what the job was. If there's only
one job opening, it should really be displayed too, surely?

4) Interestingly, I clicked on the "Head of engineering" job for Covestor, and
was surprised to find that although the company is in NY, the job is in
central London... Why wasn't it on the map?

I think it would really help your traction with international users to: 1)
Make it easy to drill down by geography.

2) Allow jobs to be attached to locations, not just companies

3) Make a guess at determining the visitor's country (very easy with libraries
like GeoIP) and automatically drill down to their country by default.

Hope this helps.

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ideas101
i think they should do something like Eluta ( <http://www.eluta.ca/> ) -- very
simple and straightforward job search with location..

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swombat
I disagree. I think with a market like start-up jobs, browsing is more
important than searching. If I was looking for a new job in a start-up, I'd
probably approach companies because they seem interesting and say they have
openings, not because they have a job that matches some keywords.

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agotterer
Some things I would revisit or work on...

1) Searching by location. Its nice to be able to do it in the search box, but
I think job seekers are trained to look for an explicit location search area.

2) Put the post date on the listing page. Its nice to know when the listings
start to get stale.

2a) Sort by listing date or range.

3) The company profile page should have the listings in the main column. More
prominent there, as compared to the side bar which has "not as important"
information. (This is a job site, get them right to it!)

4) Love the apply functionaity! No silly sign up and nonsense. I would make
the cover letter input box into a text area, or make it expandable. Its hard
to proof read a lot of content in an input box.

Overall everything looks great! My least favorite thing about job sites are
all the postings by recruiting agencies. On that note you BAN them!

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Harkins
You're getting a lot of comments about how it needs to be easier to search by
location, and I admit I was going to post one, too. Thinking about it, though,
it's a mistake. Searching by location is the kind of searching you do on
regular job sites, where the goal is to convenitenly get out of your current
lousy job and into a less bad one.

If startups are about passion and commitment, why even list location? Founders
need that kind of dedication, but I guess that's a pretty small market so you
may also need to help companies find early employees. Hm.

Maybe the whole concept of a job listing is the problem here. It's not a job,
right, it's a startup? How do you present startups that makes them different
than any other workplace? Instead of jobs, you could just list companies. Pull
in news items from their blog, use daylife.com to pull in stories about them.
Maybe I'm just retartgeting visualcv.com for companies.

I'd like to see a site that sells me on how great it is to work at a company I
can be passionate about, and I fill in my interests to find a company that
could be a calling for me. Right now Startuply just another job site that
happens to have the word "startups" at the top.

Also, your favicon looks a like the Firefox error icon at a

~~~
LukeG
We're with you on this - the startup itself is tremendously important.

All the startups on Startuply have company profiles, where they can talk about
their mission, team, work environment, etc., upload pictures of their office,
import company and team blog feeds, and more.

Think we're headed in the right direction?

~~~
Harkins
I spent a few more minutes poking around and saw the company profiles I missed
before (oops). But I still don't see anything that differentiates from other
job sites except that you (deliberately) have fewer jobs listed.

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aschobel
The back/forward buttons don't work with pagination on Safari 3.1.2

Interesting, you don't see too many folks on ASP.NET

What made you choose that platform?

    
    
      curl -I http://www.startuply.com/
      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:57:46 GMT
      Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
      X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
      X-Powered-By: PleskWin
      X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
      Set-Cookie: ASP.NET_SessionId=xxxxxxxxx; path=/; HttpOnly
      Cache-Control: private
      Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
      Content-Length: 72915

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mpc
I would like hear this too. I used to be a huge fan of this asp.net....not so
much anymore for a number of reasons

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vecter
I'm using that now. I'm interested to hear why you became disenchanted with
it.

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axod
It does slightly worry me that the bubble is growing and getting frothier.
When you start seeing companies starting up to serve companies starting up,
you have to wonder. Is there _that_ large a market for such a niche? Do
monster etc do such a bad job?

The site itself looks cool though. Although I don't understand the business
model. Recruiters and job sites etc would expect a large commission on each
successful pairing, but I can't see anything like that on startuply.

Sorry to be slightly down on it, but I can't quite see how it can grow that
big, or make revenue. Are you planning to expand out of the 'startup niche'
and take on the big job sites? If so what will you do better than them?

~~~
maryrosecook
A site like this will live or die by the community. If Startuply can gather a
group of clever hackers around their site, startups would gladly pay to
advertise jobs to them. (You can see the site trying to sow the community
seeds with their startup news section.)

Hijacking the HN community would be a tremendous step in this direction, which
means the YC funding should be a big boost to Startuply.

~~~
LukeG
In a very real way, we built Startuply for you. What do you think? Are these
good jobs at cool startups? Can you see yourself as a key part of some of
these teams?

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ks
The page is about 1200px wide. That's a bit too much for me. I'd have browse
with the window maximized to see the whole page...

Perhaps you could put the search box and the browse filters on top of the page
and use a vertical layout?

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ks
You should also consider adding a filter for "fulltime yes/no" and
"telecommute yes/no".

~~~
LukeG
Advanced search is coming soon (as in 1-3 days)!

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comatose_kid
Hi, this idea definitely fills an important need. There are a few things that
could improve the execution:

1) I should tell the site where I am searching for jobs only once. After that,
it should use this as a default.

2) There is room for innovation on the _contents_ for each job listing. For
instance, it would be cool if a listing included a profile of a really smart
engineer who currently works for the company. Smart people attract other smart
people, etc. How about space for a video 'tour' of the company?

3) The location based search should be smart enough to give job postings
outside an area if none come up (eg, searching for ruby in Los Gatos gives
nothing, but the search could be widened to a 20 mile radius automatically for
instance).

4) A site like this would be awesome if it could figure out my tastes in jobs
(based on feedback I provide for each listing I read), and use this to bring
new listings to my attention.

5) One general problem is I feel that I still have to go to 3 different job
boards to be up to date on the more interesting opportunities. How can
Startuply help?

One final note: It seems that you don't have listings from recruiters. This is
a good thing.

~~~
LukeG
Yep, recruiters aren't allowed to post on Startuply - we keep a pretty close
eye on who's posting. Part of the idea here is that we want to be a
(asymptotically approaching complete) directory of startup jobs. That way, you
wouldn't have to go to 3 job boards...unless you want to work for American
Express.

Advanced search - including customizable location radii - are coming in the
next few days!

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pm
Minor notes:

1) On the About page, under the For Job Seekers heading, the "perfect startup"
link is 404ing.

2) There still seems to be references to Jowba hanging about.

3) The Startup Companies list is excellent, but there may be an issue with
gaming due to alphabetical listing. The culprit I refer to is BusyEvent, or
!BusyEvent! as their listing would have you believe.

Hope that helps.

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tweety
It would be nice to have European startup community represented more there -
or perhaps brand another site to serve folks with EU-wide working capability.

Easier said than done perhaps, given the cultural and linguistic diversity but
as a soon-to-be jobhopper towards Central Europe with natural affinity towards
startups, this sort of thing would be sweet.

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gherlein
What's your thought that this appears to infringe on US patent 5978768?
[http://www.google.com/patents?id=hJgYAAAAEBAJ&dq=job+des...](http://www.google.com/patents?id=hJgYAAAAEBAJ&dq=job+description+seeker+listing+database+search&as_psrg=1)

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demandred
no space for a 'stealth' startup without entering in dummy info.

~~~
timr
The hiring strategy for a "stealth" startup is to already have a good team
(and maybe to hire from their friends). Why should any good candidate take an
interest in working for you, based on a website blurb, if you're not willing
to share basic information on what you're doing?

~~~
pg
They could describe something about it, without disclosing everything.

~~~
LukeG
There are quite a few companies in "stealth mode" on Startuply. Generally, I
think, providing a company name and some details about your team and office
won't threaten your venture too much.

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dshah
By the way, I think Startuply should have a company profile on Startuply. Even
if you're not hiring, it's probably a good idea to get a profile posted.

Good luck to the Startuply folks from a fellow startup fanatic.

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hbien
I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet, but the 4th and 5th column are
overlapping each other in Safari (my browser's width is about 1000 px wide).

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dshah
This is the first YC startup I've seen a while that seems to have picked
ASP.NET as the development platform.

Not a criticism (I did this too at one point, but have since switched), just
an observation.

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truebosko
I like your search. Very fast, and I can type locations which is nice, because
for a second there when I first hit your site I was about to ask "So...how do
I find jobs in my town?"

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mojonixon
Doesn't work for me (ff3, ubuntu). The next page and page numbers don't do
anything. I have to hit reload, and then it moves to the next page. Very
strange.

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cammil
Sorry... I'm new to this... where is your site!?

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Beka
H I

I've just saw horizontal scroll...

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Giorgi
actual url would help much, oh well I will google it

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PStamatiou
i cant find any jobs in atlanta ;-/

