Show HN: One stop platform to grow your career | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: One stop platform to grow your career

theacoto.com

6 pointsAcoto16 comments

I have a strong revulsion towards platforms that attempt to extract money from job seekers. It always feels just so unsavoury, so scammy.

Most employers would never dream of charging candidates to apply for jobs (it's downright illegal in many places).

Job boards don't charge candidates. The employers pay instead.

Sites like this seem... close to crossing that line.

> No more hassle in contacting unknown people asking for advice or referral. Ask them directly whenever you need them.

To me, this is a bad dynamic. Paying to get access to people who might be able to offer advice.. sure, that's OK if it's done well.

But paying to get access to people who might refer me to the company for a job - I would question what any upstanding company would think if they knew that their employees were taking part in something like that.

My advice for Acoto would be to stay the heck away from any "pay for referral" business.

The text reads like a phishing scam in places too. Strange word choices, slightly off grammar and missing punctuation.

May I know why you are saying this?

Do let me know the changes I can make so that it doesn't sound like that. Also do refer to my reply to another comment if you too have misunderstood what our startup is doing.

I believe their point is that it doesn't look like the text was written by a native English speaker -- there are spelling and grammatical errors.

For a business, having spelling or grammatical errors is sometimes seen as an early indicator that the business is a scam. There are a variety of reasons for this and it's not necessarily fair.

The practical fix in your case, which I'd strongly recommend if you can, would be to find someone to review the text and fix all grammar, spelling, and formatting issues.

edit:

Also, some of your phrasings could be a turn-off because they hint at information instead of revealing it. (They "play coy.") This behavior is associated with people over-selling, exaggerating, or hiding things.

Examples include:

"Acoto has everything and for everyone."

"We have limited spots and many excited users so don't get left behind."

People have seen excited sentences like this so many times, we're immune to them. In fact they often have the opposite effect. Instead of using excited copy, it's better to focus on your great idea and users will get excited all by themselves.

Got your point. Though I used grammarly app to fix the grammar and it is showing perfectly fine still I would try to fix that. Also did you liked the idea and implementation? Thanks for helping me out.

I don't know. I suppose the simplest thing way to put it is that I don't know who is the target audience.

My feeling is that the people who could use this are, basically, people who are trying to get their first job as a software developer. They don't have connections in the industry, and they're focused on interview prep.

But is that person really going to sign up for what sounds like fairly expensive one-on-one tutoring sessions? Many people in the industry will answer questions for free, if you just send them an email.

On the other hand, is this service for pros who want long-term career growth? If so, you can charge more but you need a much stronger selling point (e.g. mentors who are known experts that people will sign up for your service to talk to.)

Anyway, in either case I'm outside of the target audience because I'm not interested in mentorship as a service, I prefer to build friendships, mentors, and role models in "real life."

edit: removed unnecessary comment

Thanks for such feedback will look into it. Regarding mentorships we have asked many people regarding the problem they face and the they said is getting relevant advice from relevant people. Linkedin messaging has now become of no use. Thus, we built an ecosystem where you can engage and network with your peers. Practice interview and get actionable feedback and that too we track through points. If somehow you can undertand the gist of the platform. The one on one mentoring session is not at all expensive it is very much affordable according to our Indian standard. Also Yes, long term friendship and networking is the best way and that is why built acoto community. Anyway it was nice having conversation with you. Good luck mate.

First, of all let me clear few things regarding what you said about us. You could have understood it more correctly by asking but you decided to judge it. Nevermind let me clear those things as follows:

1. First of all, it is not a job portal and we are not asking money to provide jobs to people.

2. All the content made by professionals is free of cost.

3. Now let us come to the referral part where you misunderstood us as to what we meant to say. We never said you will be paying to get referrals from experts. The user is paying only for two things on our platform and that is: One on one consultation or interview preparation and rest everything is free. Now a user has a chance to get a referral from two places and that is if during interview preparation an expert feels he is up to the mark or if the user has score good amount of points on our platform we might refer him to our partner companies.

Should have at least checked the prototype gif before commenting what you interpreted.

Do let me know how can I change the text so that no one else misunderstands this again.

Have a good day!

If your site was misunderstood, you should take that as valid feedback that you did not communicate your product effectively. Clarifying it for us is a great response, but acting like someone was not justified in critiquing it in the first place is simply a false expectation on your part. If you post on HN, you will get critique.

Got it. No issues!

"not a job portal" and yet, "Apply directly through our app to different career options."

This is ask HN wherein you show off your website with the expectation that HN users will offer feedback. Some would call this judgment. So what did you think ask HN was?

He misunderstood our whole platform as job portal and said that we are charging money from the user to get a job which was not right so I gave clarification regarding that. As to why I said he is judging because his tone of replying was quite offending (that's how I felt) maybe the English could have been wrong on the website and as a result, you could have taken it as wrong as it is not my first language. If you feel like I have cleared your doubts can you give some other feedback as well it would be helpful?

Thanks :)

To copy & paste a previous comment I made about the concept of "constrained supply": When discussing "platform economics", economists often like to identify the "constrained supply" because that dictates where to prioritize efforts. In Uber, the constrained supply is the drivers, not the passengers. In dating apps, the constrained supply is women, not men. In a Q&A website, the constrained supply is the expert answerers and not the question askers. (This matches our intuition that generating new questions is "easy" and a larger population can ask them but answering questions is "hard" and therefore it's a smaller population that can do it.)

For Acoto, the constrained supply is the "expert mentor". So it's logical to want to know about the benefits for the mentors... but when I try click on the link to in the landing page:

>Want to register as an expert? There are numerous benefits of partnering with us. Click here"

It's just a sign up page asking for mobile phone and email address. No benefits specified. Being opaque about this is not a good look.

Hey! Thanks for asking. As we are in early-stage we are reaching out to experts directly and we are not expecting them to come to us directly through our website. Using this we do have many professionals from top firms.

As we continue further we will change the website and list down the benefits mentor will get in our platform. We added that link just to make sure if by any luck a mentor lands on our page he/she can contact us. It is mainly for users.

Do let me know what you think now :)

>. Using this we do have many professionals from top firms. [...] if by any luck a mentor lands on our page he/she can contact us. It is mainly for users.

That's fine if Acoto's main web landing page is tailored for the job seeker audience but it's still important for the candidates to know what the (financial) incentives are for the mentors.

Being secretive instead of transparent about how you plan to attract and reward mentors and how you make money is a negative signal to users to not trust the website. You can state the mentors' benefits in a blog post and/or a deep link sub-page on your website. Users will want to know "what's in it for the mentors?".

Sure I would keep that in mind. Thanks for the feedback. Apart from that how do you feel about our idea and also about the English text as other comments are mentioning that the text looks fishy or a type of scam?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com