Comment by jayp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jayp | Hacker News Reader

Many reasons you got only luke warm response:

(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.

Thanks for all the great feedback. Let me comment on why I posted this.

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 am glad you found the comments helpful.

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.

Also, related to the third point, try spending less time talking about what you want from an applicant and spend more time talking about what they want from you. In general this will attract more (and more good) applicants, but it's especially important in this case because, as you and others have said, your ideal applicant has many other options. They don't need to work for your company, so you have to make them want to.

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.

An excellent critique of the problem. Additionally, when hiring for a sales position, it's good to indicate if this is a salaried position, or base + commission. The heavy hitters will need the latter to make it worth their while.

And they should just use a normal job title, like 'VP of Biz Dev'

We have a VP Biz Dev, which is a totally different role. He's responsible for creating a pipeline of deals with big companies like KBB, AutoTrader, Cars.com, etc. It's a process that moves incredibly slowly.

We're looking for someone who can help us drive a lot of traffic right now and in ways that aren't necessarily traditional.

One more detailed note - you guys are using retargeting without a frequency cap. I went to your site from a link on HN and have seen tons of ads for you guys on doubleclick even though I am not in the market for a car. Adding a frequency cap on that will help out big time on your CTR and return on those campaigns.

That's a good point, thank you.

VP of Marketing?

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

Virtually every consumer-facing web startup needs new users. Getting them isn't a core value-add, or at least, it shouldn't be.

Sure, every startup needs users.

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.

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