
Show HN: One stop platform to grow your career - Acoto
https://www.theacoto.com/
======
abraae
I have a strong revulsion towards platforms that attempt to extract money from
job seekers. It always feels just so unsavoury, so scammy.

Most employers would never dream of charging candidates to apply for jobs
(it's downright illegal in many places).

Job boards don't charge candidates. The employers pay instead.

Sites like this seem... close to crossing that line.

> No more hassle in contacting unknown people asking for advice or referral.
> Ask them directly whenever you need them.

To me, this is a bad dynamic. Paying to get access to people who might be able
to offer advice.. sure, that's OK if it's done well.

But paying to get access to people who might refer me to the company for a job
- I would question what any upstanding company would think if they knew that
their employees were taking part in something like that.

My advice for Acoto would be to stay the heck away from any "pay for referral"
business.

~~~
Acoto
First, of all let me clear few things regarding what you said about us. You
could have understood it more correctly by asking but you decided to judge it.
Nevermind let me clear those things as follows:

1\. First of all, it is not a job portal and we are not asking money to
provide jobs to people.

2\. All the content made by professionals is free of cost.

3\. Now let us come to the referral part where you misunderstood us as to what
we meant to say. We never said you will be paying to get referrals from
experts. The user is paying only for two things on our platform and that is:
One on one consultation or interview preparation and rest everything is free.
Now a user has a chance to get a referral from two places and that is if
during interview preparation an expert feels he is up to the mark or if the
user has score good amount of points on our platform we might refer him to our
partner companies.

Should have at least checked the prototype gif before commenting what you
interpreted.

Do let me know how can I change the text so that no one else misunderstands
this again.

Have a good day!

~~~
codingdave
If your site was misunderstood, you should take that as valid feedback that
you did not communicate your product effectively. Clarifying it for us is a
great response, but acting like someone was not justified in critiquing it in
the first place is simply a false expectation on your part. If you post on HN,
you will get critique.

~~~
Acoto
Got it. No issues!

------
jasode
To copy & paste a previous comment I made about the concept of _" constrained
supply"_: When discussing "platform economics", economists often like to
identify the "constrained supply" because that dictates where to prioritize
efforts. In Uber, the constrained supply is _the drivers_ , not the
passengers. In dating apps, the constrained supply is _women_ , not men. In a
Q&A website, the constrained supply is _the expert answerers_ and not the
question askers. (This matches our intuition that generating new questions is
"easy" and a larger population can ask them but answering questions is "hard"
and therefore it's a smaller population that can do it.)

For Acoto, the constrained supply is the "expert mentor". So it's logical to
want to know about the benefits for the mentors... but when I try click on the
link to in the landing page:

 _> Want to register as an expert? There are numerous benefits of partnering
with us. Click here"_

It's just a sign up page asking for mobile phone and email address. No
benefits specified. Being opaque about this is not a good look.

~~~
Acoto
Hey! Thanks for asking. As we are in early-stage we are reaching out to
experts directly and we are not expecting them to come to us directly through
our website. Using this we do have many professionals from top firms.

As we continue further we will change the website and list down the benefits
mentor will get in our platform. We added that link just to make sure if by
any luck a mentor lands on our page he/she can contact us. It is mainly for
users.

Do let me know what you think now :)

~~~
jasode
_>. Using this we do have many professionals from top firms. [...] if by any
luck a mentor lands on our page he/she can contact us. It is mainly for
users._

That's fine if Acoto's main web landing page is tailored for the job seeker
audience but it's still important for the candidates to know what the
(financial) _incentives_ are for the mentors.

Being secretive instead of transparent about _how you plan to attract and
reward mentors_ and how you _make money_ is a negative signal to users to not
trust the website. You can state the mentors' benefits in a blog post and/or a
deep link sub-page on your website. Users will want to know _" what's in it
for the mentors?"_.

~~~
Acoto
Sure I would keep that in mind. Thanks for the feedback. Apart from that how
do you feel about our idea and also about the English text as other comments
are mentioning that the text looks fishy or a type of scam?

