Where Are All The Internet Sales Guys? (CarWoo YC S09)
carwoo.com
carwoo.com
(1) Comments were disabled in the original post (for reference, see original post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945582.) Disabling comments for job posts is not ideal in an open community. My hypothesis is that it hurts more than benefits YC companies. Pile on the fact that you're trying to hire for a non-traditional role.
(2) You're trying to hire for your core value-add. This is what founders should be owning. If your founding team can't do this, look to add a co-founder, not an employee. If your founder's aren't looking to get your customer base to a critical mass, and thus make the marketplace more favorable to both customers and dealers, what are they doing?
(3) A dangerous attitude. Your voice in both these posts lacks empathy. Your original post is highly presumptuous. Your follow-on blog post doesn't clarify things much further, and fails to provide concrete motivation/reasonings to apply.
I hope these criticisms help.
We're looking for someone who can help us drive a lot of traffic right now and in ways that aren't necessarily traditional.
I see what you mean now, you want to find somebody who can drive traffic, but most people who apply for jobs after grepping for marketing don't have the tech/dev skills that you are looking for.
Hard role to fill - are the founders doing this work atm?
Somebody mentioned this down below, but you should setup an affiliate network. There are tons of affiliate marketers out there who do nothing all day but drive traffic. I am surprised that they haven't already approached you - every startup I have launched we have received emails from potential affiliates/online marketing partners after being featured in blogs etc. These guys (there is an entire community out there) are always actively looking for new sites to promote to their networks (usually websites and mailing lists)
Checkout Commission Junction (cj.com) and hang out on the boards that these guys do, like Sitepoint and Webmasterworld/online_marketing
However, Carwoo is a marketplace (for buying and selling cars), which differentiates it from other consumer-facing web startups. A web-based marketplace is scalable only if it reaches a critical mass. Without a critical mass, it will stagnate or worse, become irrelevant. As such, any service that creates a new marketplace needs to think of initial customer acquisition as a core value-add. Because, without the critical mass, it is not going too far.
Further, getting to a critical mass is the biggest thing that will differentiate CarWoo from any competitor, as making a functional clone of CarWoo (the web site) is arguably trivial.
People are motivated by more than just money too. They want to work on interesting projects with interesting people. They want to grow professionally and expand their skill-set. They want to feel important and be recognized for their work. And they want lots of other things too. You need to speak to as many of those wants as you can.
First, we've (the founders) have been doing all of the customer acquisition work since day one... but the realities of the demands that are splitting up our focus are that none of us have the time that this role requires to focus on this properly. We know and understand where our customers are, how to reach them, etc... but customer acquisition isn't a set it and forget it problem. It requires constant attention, tweaking, optimizing and experimenting. We certainly won't be just handing this off to someone, but we're at a point where someone has to dedicate their full time and attention to the job.
100% agree that comments being disabled on job posts is limiting. That's why I decided to do the blog post... to get some feedback from the HN community on this type of role. Hopefully this is something we can talk pg into changing :)
The original job post I put up was actually intended to be presumptuous, I wanted to see if anyone would self select into responding with the vague details I put up there. Honestly I didn't know how to build this job post because it's not a traditional role, although from the community of founders I spend time with, it's an increasingly in-demand type of position. It's not 100% marketing and not 100% technical... The Airbnb job post focuses a lot more on the technical side of things and knowing that HN is a more technical crowd I wasn't sure how to position the marketing side of things.
I'm going to re-do the job post after hearing all the great feedback both on our blog and on HN. The typical stuff about why someone should apply will be included...
Thanks everyone.
I think your response here helps develop the position more clearly. Nevertheless, I think you bring out a good point yourself, "HN is a more technical crowd", and as such, another reason for a poor response to the opening maybe a poor fit for this community. You may need to locate a better channel to acquire your acquirer.
The people who are good at driving traffic are driven, entrepreneurial, and have the hacker mindset. Of course they would prefer working for themselves without an upper bound on their earning potential.
The fact is that, if you're good at driving traffic, there are still tremendous opportunities for you out there, and you can earn much, much more than any salary could pay.
I actually emailed you with some advice about hiring someone like this based on my experience in the industry, I'll repost it here:
Ranking experience by preference, I would most prefer a candidate with affiliate marketing experience, next someone who managed SEM/media buys for a large performance advertiser, and finally someone with agency experience. Stay away from people who have only done branding, they will eat your money. Also, I know you're looking for a hacker, but I think the most important factor in running internet marketing campaigns is knowing how to sell. Identifying your target market and what their pain points, wants, and desires are is paramount. Optimizing, split testing, etc is important but secondary compared to marketing fundamentals. Finally, watch out for "social media experts". Value applicants based on how many conversions they can bring, and how much they can spend effectively, not on how much they can engage in conversations. Until you can pay your vendors in Twitter followers, all that matters is getting quality traffic and sales.
I think the fundamental issue is that you're framing this as a job for hackers. For whatever reason, most hackers have a distaste for marketing, and would probably be loath to apply for a marketing-type job. They would rather be building things and not worrying about things like positioning or segmentation.
There are plenty of so called "internet marketing gurus" (the Frank Kern's and Mike Filsaime's) who teach it but most of them are no good. They have only ever sold internet marketing informational products to other aspiring internet marketers. If a potential hire has only sold internet marketing products this is an immediate 'no hire'.
Good luck finding this person!
That's really just a false statement, in my opinion. That's like stating why would any good programmer ever work for anyone else?
Honestly, there are a ton of reasons.
For example, a programmer may wish to work at Facebook so their code is put in front of 500 million users. If they hack something on their own, that's likely not going to be the case.
If a marketer wants to test his/her conversion theories against a large volume of traffic, they either need to spend LARGE amounts of their own money for paid traffic, or build up a large audience of their own. Again, an unlikely scenario.
Whether you're a marketer, or a programmer, or whatever else, working at a company/startup can provide you with opportunities that do not exist on your own.
Those are some of the prime reasons people work for others, no matter their trade...
Second, I take Bart to work every day. I was pissed I got a yellow envelope on my car on labor day (free parking day), pissed when I complained to Bart employees about getting a parking ticket and they had no idea what I was talking about, and pissed when I finally opened the envelope and saw "This is a PR stunt by CarWoo, let us find your next car and we'll pay your next parking ticket." Now, because I'm in the industry and know who you are I had a laugh about it, and because I'm in PR I get it, but you caused me too much inconvenience for me to "like" the brand, and you failed to communicate your benefits so I didn't even bother going to your site even though I am currently in the market for a car. Okay, I "get" the internet, hopefully you got some buzz, but is this what you mean by hack-centric marketing? Was it so successful you want to hire someone to do this ad infinitum?
I don't really think PR is something you can usefully hack as an outsider, especially if your market positioning and messaging is weak. The reason why you can't find an Internet Sales Guy like you can a Technical Product Building Guy is because you're really talking about successfully coordinating your channel strategy, marketing strategy, PR strategy, SEM/SEO, everything that goes into customer acquisition. You need to be doing these things better, but you're not going to find someone to magically do it for you unless your paying for experts.
I know this guy.
He's self-taught, freakishly intelligent, and has long-since learned that he can either come in at nine, put up with rules which stifle his effectiveness, and make pennies of the value he drives, or he can run his own business, answer for his results only, and earn appreciable percentages of the value he drives. And he drives a lot of value indeed. ($200k is too low.)
If you want to work with this guy, you want him as a cofounder. Fair warning: so does everybody else, and he's kind of "meh" on the idea.
Of interest to everybody else: you want to be this guy. It is a body of skill which can be learned, and it will only take a few years and a lot of experimentation. And after you do that, the world is your oyster.
I can get around in Rails but I'm strongest with just pure Ruby at the moment (and a bit of C, Java, PHP, etc). I understand social networks and I've done quite a bit of published research on that front. I understand customer needs and how to reach them. Analytics, datamining and split testing are fun. I like beautiful code, user accessibility, and feel that good SEO is a natural result from good coding practices and practical sense. I know how to structure advertising campaigns and what works and what doesn't. I understand how to shape a product and make decisions for building a strong infrastructure. The key is having a good product with a clear message. User data privacy is important to me. I look good in a suit, and VCs seem to like me. I can learn anything needed, and I'll love doing it. I don't mind working long hard hours and enjoy being challenged to the degree that I get bored easily if not challenged. I'm good with people and can lead a team effectively. I've got experience from working with a handful of companies now. I'm young and have few prior commitments, enabling frequent traveling when needed. I thrive off networking and knowing everyone in the room. I like taking risk. I have solid references.
About the only thing holding me back a little bit is that I've recently moved to Columbus, Ohio and I'm committed to being here for the next few years while my girlfriend finishes her PhD. At the same time, I've worked remotely for several companies and it rarely poses an issue.
Yet, I see many startups looking for a CTO or lead programmer who is the kung fu master of the code. I can understand any code you show me, but I'm more of a hybrid of marketing, business and development than just a pure developer.
Anyone interested in a job specifically defined as "driving a lot of traffic right now" is going to be an affiliate marketing / black hat seo / marketing douche who will not add value to your business.
This is like a "business guy" founder posting a job to HN asking a programmer to implement his tech spec. I think when you post a job to HN for business folks, you need to demonstrate a little more respect for what a talented candidate could bring to your company.
OR... you're looking in the wrong place; go post in an affiliate marketing forum.
Now that's just mean.
It's very possible to drive lots of traffic without being a "strategist" or vague business guy. Strategy should be the founders' job, they may very well be looking for someone to take care of the nuts and bolts of optimizing campaigns.
I would be skeptical of anyone, "user acquisition hacker" or otherwise, who is confident in their ability to drive traffic of "folks who want cars" in a profitable way. That's too broad for anyone without a fortune 500 budget to remotely consider; the first task of this marketing hire should be to redefine and narrow the audience this product targets, and consider whether or not that user actually wants the thing CarWoo is delivering.
Smart marketers don't want traffic, they want profits. In hiring a marketer to deliver traffic, they're missing the forrest for the trees.
But as other people indicated, you don't need Joe Mauer on your team. You really just need to him to show up for a few weeks, teach you some basics and give you some tips, and you can do the actual heavy lifting yourself. 20% of this stuff is figuring out concepts like how you would build an effective SEM bidding system and determine whether it's working, the 80% is actually executing (ie. figuring out the bidding algorithm).
TLDR; Find a contractor, pay him enough per hour to make it worth his while, profit.
I totally agree. The talents mentioned in the article are right down my alley, but I've been busy using those skills to get more subscribers and traffic to my own gigs. This is true for others I know who have similar skillsets (Amy Hoy stands out as a prolific example here, to me).
Doing these things full-time for other people would negate most of the reasons I do them already - like extremely flexible hours, the ability to work on exactly what I want, etc. Not only that, but it's taken >10 years of hard slog to feel confident about my abilities. It would take a significant increase in other forms of compensation (money, prestige, etc.) for me to do this full-time for someone else. (All that said, if a reputable company has $150k base plus options to invest, I'm listening ;-))
From what I've gathered, if you want someone in this role they need to get paid a LOT of money. If they are good they could end up making more in commission than all your engineers' salaries combined so you need to be prepared for that...
By the time I'm an expert at this, I might be making enough money that working for others isn't really what I want to do.
Anyway, I wish them success finding the right person.
It really sounds like a position for a business guy, not a hacker guy. The fact that you require hacking skills probably turned away anyone who could do what you actually needed.
The ad might mean something to them, but it really means nothing to the people looking for jobs outside of those that read HN a lot and/or read pg's essays on redefining the term hacker. That is narrowing your search to a section of the echo chamber, which is even worse than the echo chamber.
Unfortunately, "user acquisition hackers" are basically priceless. A hacker that builds great product is hard enough to find, a hacker that BUILDS TRACTION?! Holy God would that be amazing.
That's good to know, and the hundreds of startup people emailing me asking for advice on getting traffic seem to confirm the incredible demand.
I'm still wondering why more hackers don't go into the traffic generation space. There are tremendous opportunities for someone who knows how to code to use automation to scale campaigns and completely dominate a niche.
I can barely throw together a few lines of PHP, and I'm still leaps and bounds ahead of most of the marketers I'm competing against.
I lean towards building apps, but that's mostly my developer bias showing.
Do you have any advice (off channel, even)? Are there any resources you can recommend?
In some ways, different traffic sources are like programming languages. They each have different methods, rules, and tricks, and being a good marketer means being familiar enough with them to figure out the right tools for the job.A lot of that knowledge comes from testing and experience.
You know that you wouldn't build a chat website in BASIC and I know that I wouldn't send international RON traffic to a dating site.
It all boils down to arbitraging traffic and finding and exploiting inefficiencies in the market- you have to answer the fundamental question of "where is the amount and quality of traffic I want priced lower than it would be in a perfect market?"
Obviously, if you can build technology to answer this question in a scalable way, as I and others are trying to do, you can do very well in the space.
There's a reason enterprise-class PPC bid management tools sell for thousands of dollars a month(and 5% of spend).
I spend a fair amount of my time doing this - but really another side of this is analytics and testing / experimentation systems. It isn't all about the campaigns.
I should also mention that my current role wasn't the result of a post but just something everyone agreed I should do.
However I bet there are a ton of brilliant young hackers who could learn to do this and would see it as a sharp career move. Perhaps going after someone like this would make more sense?
As you probably know, there is a massive talent shortage at the cutting edge of digital marketing and driving traffic. There are tons of people in digital marketing but the vast majority of them are thinking about old ideas and the way things have been done in the past; all approaches that are contrary to any cutting edge startup.
So it kind of turns out that there are a ton of old ideas to growing traffic and rarely an original approach. This makes finding people a nightmare since with large or med budgets, millions of people have experience spending millions of dollars but only a handful have had any success designing high traffic customer acquisition programs at low to no cost.
I would guess a large part of this is due to the fact that everything is so new and experimental. Minting social media traffic into conversions & sales can be quite expensive and profitable on a case by case basis. Buying search keywords can work (it worked for Mint) but take an aggressive customer acquisition model at cost. Even targeted ad exchanges & DSPs bring guaranteed visibility but a certain gamble in overhead costs & trades. Affiliate programs have been around for years but it doesn't work across all verticals (tough to sell physical things, easy to get new sign ups). SEOs are barely worth mentioning since so much of it is now obvious.
In the big ad agency world, there are a lot of these older ideas being thrown around constantly but it's very seldom we or anyone sees a new or original theory to drive traffic to a particular project or new site. We're faced with the same problem startups are faced and it seems evident that the problem will continue. Ideas that generate incredible amounts of traffic (the Old Spice campaign) seem improbable before campaigns begin and blatantly obvious in retrospect. Additionally, past ideas to drive traffic applied to current projects have no guarantee that they will wildly inspire traffic in the future. It's quite rare to find an individual that has mastered the understanding of a few Internet ecosystems (like how travel websites churn traffic or eyeballs for moons at online retail) and simultaneously understand emerging marketing tactics to grow reach.
Hackers are in a weirdly challenging position because designing business systems often seems foreign to cutting brilliant code. Startups like Gilt & Groupon have no special approach to code but brilliant business systems and incredible customer growth curves since they inspire customers to share experiences for the sake of their own benefit. There is probably a lot more that could be said about these biz guys who can design brilliant customer acquisition systems but I would bet you probably find them in three categories: 1. they've already built something brilliant that they have a few VCs on speed dial for their next big idea, 2. they're brewing something already as an entrepreneur and lack desire for a job or 3. they're ignorant of their own brilliance and need a Steve Jobs to John Sculley speech to hop on board.
Last prediction: as the number of startup engineers & Y-comb type teams proliferate this talent shortage will get crazy. Perhaps PG will start asking for Google News links for "system to your advantage" examples.