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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

It does slightly worry me that the bubble is growing and getting frothier. When you start seeing companies starting up to serve companies starting up, you have to wonder. Is there that large a market for such a niche? Do monster etc do such a bad job?

The site itself looks cool though. Although I don't understand the business model. Recruiters and job sites etc would expect a large commission on each successful pairing, but I can't see anything like that on startuply.

Sorry to be slightly down on it, but I can't quite see how it can grow that big, or make revenue. Are you planning to expand out of the 'startup niche' and take on the big job sites? If so what will you do better than them?

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A site like this will live or die by the community. If Startuply can gather a group of clever hackers around their site, startups would gladly pay to advertise jobs to them. (You can see the site trying to sow the community seeds with their startup news section.)

Hijacking the HN community would be a tremendous step in this direction, which means the YC funding should be a big boost to Startuply.

In a very real way, we built Startuply for you. What do you think? Are these good jobs at cool startups? Can you see yourself as a key part of some of these teams?

My understanding is that the incumbents (i.e. Monster, Dice, Workopolis [in Canada]) have huge reach, but are expensive to post ads to. The signal to noise ratio can be really bad too.

Niche job sites like Startuply and the 37signals job board offer a nice revenue stream that can tie in with a brand or product mix (i.e. "We're a startup, so we post our jobs on Startuply").

The more you take away the hiring process from the company with the open position, the greater a payment you want. Recruiters, in theory, do a large amount of screening and so on for their clients, so they want a big payoff. Most niche sites appear to simply be billboards, so they charge a lot less.

At any given time there are thousands of startups.

Sure, but thousands of startups looking for employees? It just strikes me as a small niche, and one that may be hard to make money at.

Having said that though, I can see it being useful for people like me. There's nothing worse than looking on a standard job site and seeing pages of "corporate type jobs asking for a list of meaningless buzzwords". But I'm a very very small minority :)

Considering that a) recruiting fees can be up to tens of thousands of dollars and b) recruiting the right employees is crucial to a startup's success (much more than a big business), it's a high value niche.

Very true, but does that mean a startup is going to pay startuply a massive fee for finding those crutial employees? Is startuply going to ask for equity? :/

If they people on startuply are measurably and consistently better, wouldn't it be worth paying more for?

Yes, it is a small niche at the moment, but there is no reason that the world economy can't shift to comprise many more startups and fewer crappy desk jobs. Paul Graham has argued eloquently for this (e.g. http://paulgraham.com/boss.html).

1)Monster sucks so hard it is ripe for taking down

2)Our startup is small (15 people at the moment) but we are funded, we go through a lot of people for short contractual stuff so and we always have job listings. In the past we put the listings on our own site and hoped for the best, but this will get people that might not otherwise hear of us.

1) Yes!! We think so too. 2) Post your jobs on Startuply! We're happy to help - you can reach out at support AT startuply DOT com.

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