Conference Presentation, Keynote
Kathryn Minshew at Startup School NY 2014
- Early-stage growth is expected to appear flat, with user bases potentially stabilizing around 3,000 monthly visitors for eight to nine months, reflecting a "suck to suck less" evolution rather than immediate success.
- The founder anticipated starting with career content to solve the marketplace cold-start problem before introducing job listings, expecting this strategy to attract a wider audience than city-specific postings and generate viral sharing via pre-written social tools.
- Initial investor skepticism is predicted due to the "unsexy" nature of career content in 2011 and persistent stereotypes regarding women's career longevity after age 30, with 148 rejections expected before a definitive acceptance from Y Combinator.
- Product development strategy involves rejecting multi-feature mockups in favor of a single, stripped-down version to test demand, with an aggressive timeline to redesign profiles, secure five companies, and launch on TechCrunch within 14 days.
- Traffic growth is projected to expand from approximately 100,000 monthly visitors at launch to about 1.5 million, driven by early testers who, despite finding the design "ugly" and hard to use, validated the platform's ability to reveal company culture.
- Funding and compensation challenges include the necessity of honoring verbal agreements on pay dates (e.g., extending from November 1st to mid-December) to build reputation, as well as recruiting team members when cash is limited by leveraging non-monetary motivators like skill acquisition or public speaking opportunities.
- Customer acquisition and deal-making rely on direct, persistent outreach, such as contacting 600-700 groups individually rather than general share requests, and understanding that partnerships often require multiple attempts with different contacts to succeed.
- Core team formation requires identifying individuals who share organizational values to prevent failure, with recruiting tactics including "lurking" on technical forums for founders with failing startups and converting audience members into hires within one to six months.
- Market realities are characterized by the absence of a "field of dreams" effect, where product quality alone does not guarantee users; instead, success depends on finding a core user base capable of becoming evangelists to distinguish viable startups from failing ones.
- Long-term risks involve the difficulty of building teams without significant cash reserves and the psychological pressure of comparing startup struggles to industry "highlight reels," emphasizing the need to test ideas with strangers rather than polishing them in isolation.