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Comment by userium | Hacker News Reader

Hi Michael and Aaron,

I'm the co-founder of StayInTech.com (https://stayintech.com/), a career website for women in tech.

We built this website for skilled female engineers looking for a new job, but we seem to appeal to a wider audience than we initially planned. We have lots of male users, and also women who are just starting out in tech. Is that a problem, does it matter in the long run? Should we address our target audience more clearly?

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Sounds like you have a great problem. One of the funny things about building products is that you often don't know who your users are going to be until you actually release. This is why we tell companies to launch as fast as possible, and not spend too much time thinking about what might happen before they have any information about how users interact with what they've built.

In your case, your company's goal is to help people get jobs (it seems). As long as you can do that, do it for every user that wants your help. You may have to adapt your messaging to fit the broader base, but that's a good (if hard) thing. If you find that widening your approach hurts your ability to get people jobs, then you'll probably have to change things up.

Thanks Aaron, yes our goal is to 1) help people get jobs and 2) help companies to increase diversity of their workforce.

Another issue is how to retain users. Once a user finds a new job, and is not looking for a new one for a while, how do we keep them coming back to the website? I guess with great career content? Do you have any other ideas on how to keep users coming back?

This is one of the really hard parts about companies focused on hiring - your frequency of use is super low, which makes repeated engagement tough. Content is one way to do it, but this is the kind of thing you'll need to experiment with quite a bit to get right.

One of the cool parts here is that I don't think anyone has really figured this out over the long run, which means there's a massive opportunity up for grabs.

Thanks again Aaron. Here are my last questions. :)

1) What are your biggest worries about companies focused on hiring? What type of problems do you foresee for us in the future?

2) What was your initial reaction when visiting our website? Was there something that annoyed or puzzled you?

This sounds similar to dating sites. A happy user is one who doesn't need you anymore!

The thing is, dating sites solve a known problem that a lot of people have, but by no means does it end there. Relationships are hard and take work, where are the apps that help build strong 1-1 connections?

Same thing for you. Increasing workplace diversity is awesome, but hiring is only a tiny part of that. I'm sure that many of your users face similar challenges being a minority in their work environment. How can you bring them together to solve those problems once they have their job?

Starting a new reply thread because we nested too far.

I think my biggest fear is the exact thing we just talked about: frequency. Creating long term customer engagement is super hard. I think it's also hard for recruiting cos to build distinct and valuable brands as opposed to becoming commoditized resume lead gen.

One question I had on hitting the site was "what is the main purpose here?" It has the feel of a content site, but your goal is to get people hired.

This was very useful, thanks! We will try to improve our message, figure out how to provide more value for our users and recruiters, and in the long run explore how to build a valuable brand.

Many thanks, Aaron!

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