
We bootstrapped an interview prep business to $35,000/month - hustld
https://hustld.com/interview/ace-your-tech-interview
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JMTQp8lwXL
While I would be personally enthralled to be operating a $35k/mo business, I
can only wonder if having software engineering candidates optimize for solving
leetcode style problems is a meaningful differentiator for employers, or a
good enough proxy for identifying candidates who will succeed in a new role.
Tech jobs are too lucrative for our criteria to simply be an open corpus of
~700 memorizable problem/solution pairs. It's going to eventually become
ineffective. People will memorize and then flunk on the job.

What the industry is missing is a focus on the human element, which is
woefully under-assessed for. Being a good teammate and knowing how to
communicate with non-immediate team stakeholders (Product Folks / UX / Quality
/ Management etc) is crucial.

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qihqi
There is this trend of coding questions getting harder. Around '12 2-sum was a
question that is on-site worthy, now being the first of leetcode people
expects dynamic-programming type problems in on-sites.

One theory is that the employers (especially big companies) just want the top
X% of candidate by some arbitrary metric, and assume that top X% has to be
capable enough to pick up new skills as needed. As people practice more, the
questions get harder.

Then of course we'd mostly likely to never use the knowledge tested in
interviews in real life. But hey, the goal is not to test knowledge, but to
differentiate the top X from a pool of a thousand.

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JMTQp8lwXL
> But hey, the goal is not to test knowledge, but to differentiate the top X
> from a pool of a thousand.

The top X leetcoders. Not the top X most impactful contributors to a company.
There could be some overlap, but not complete.

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sorenn111
I'm often amazed at how competitive these jobs at top companies are to the
point where very profitable niche businesses can build up for prep.

I guess it really shouldn't be a surprise give the industry of standardized
test prep, but still surprising to me.

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wufufufu
To $35,000/mth profit? Revenue? Liabilities?

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sheeshkebab
>Founders: 2 >Employees: 30+ contractors

Revenue (I think?)... although with that head count I wonder what are
liabilities for this biz

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weaksauce
napkin guess... i assume the contractors are mainly for the 1:1 interviews...
there are about 80-125 of them per month based off that revenue and i assume
that some that buy the course don't do the one on one interview. the
interviewers are probably paid something like 100 bucks an interview if i had
to guess(I am not part of their site just basing it off their pricing)

so anywhere from 27000-22500 after contractor fees but then you have hosting
and other fees to contend with.

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1123581321
Nice work. I was doing this on Fiverr several years ago, mostly for Filipino
customers. It was a lot of fun but the revenue was obviously quite a bit less.

