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Comment by hajrice | Hacker News Reader

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hajrice·

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"Offer me a place at your startup"

I like this better:

"Let me show you how great of a fit I'd be for your team" or something along those lines..

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yeah agreed. right now the tone of your site looks too gimmicky, like you made this JUST so you could land an internship. even if that was your intention, at least hide it better. ideally i think companies are looking for employees who hack on projects for fun, NOT with the explicit goal of padding their resume or impressing anyone in particular.

best of luck to you, though!

Thanks for the feedback - I changed the text. I guess I'm not the guy to ask for copywriting :).

I would speculate that the tone might be in part due to cultural background as well - as Wikipedia says, "The Finnish language has no simple equivalent to the English 'please'." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_grammar

As for the background story, I did start this project for fun (it was an old hackathon idea) but kicked it into higher gear due to this opportunity coming up.

Thanks!

cool, best of luck to you! perhaps another idea is to explain this background info on your site in some tasteful way. that way, potential employers will see that you're an earnest hacker with a real interest in this stuff (and you might not have a native english speaker's grasp of tone and word usage), as opposed to someone making a one-off gimmick.

For what it's worth, I think "Offer me a place at your startup" is better English, being more clear and less wordy that hajrice's alternative. Rare is the English speaker outside the US or UK who will award you points for speaking in a roundabout manner, and I believe "fit" and "team" are Americanisms.

That's not to say that Silicon Valleyspeak is not the practical choice for this particular situation. But I'd rather not see that become the standard for how native speakers speak.

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