grouptalent.com
Its an interesting take on what tends to happen 'naturally' a lot (which is folks find a manager they like and follow them from place to place). But as T_S_ here points out there is a whole new spin on negotiations.
They acquire a startup for its employees :)
An excerpt "It was widely reported that FriendFeed was bought for about $47 million, or about $4 million for each employee, though some money went to its outside investors."
Reinventing old institutions with cooler names is one of the primary outputs of Silicon Valley.
In fairness, sometimes really subtle changes can make a difference. Let's watch.
It seems really good for teams, you get to pick your co-workers (at least some of them) and you can negotiate larger compensation packages as a group.
If the whole team does decide to move on, it's likely that the set of circumstances that would push a "packaged team" like this away would probably cause mass attrition with normal employees as well. Just today a friend of mine told me the 2 layers of management between him and the CEO quit on the same day, and he's feeling like he wants to quit now as well. So goes the pack.
The story goes that there were internal battles..
And past just doing group projects, this could turn into a linkedin for developers, where you could inquire about dev X from people who have worked with him.
* The team URL is bland. We are grouptalent.com/teams/61, but can't we be grouptalent.com/teams/hackthology instead?
* It wasn't clear what the "submit for approval" button was for, so one of my team members pressed it before he should have while we were entering data.
* Entering education is a bit cumbersome. My team is made of EE and CS students from CWRU in the BS, MS, and PhD programs, so our education section looks pretty weird.
* I agree and we will most certainly add this feature.
* Currently we manually approve all teams and companies. After you submit you can still edit your team so no worries. We will think about the flow.
* Profiles are something we are going to be constantly iterating on and we'll think of something to make situations like that smoother.
And, when having to chose between high competence meeting minimal expectations on team spirit/communication/people skills versus the other way round, ALWAYS choose the former.
The big challenge with any outsourcing platform is to retain recurring revenue from existing customers - because the problem is that once two parties connect with each other and do a successful project, they can just as easily contact each other direct thereafter; without any need for the middle-man.
And a little more input on your revenue model: I think you want to go subscription, but make it long term to justify a relatively high initial price point (since you have to maximize that initial transaction due to the little problem we discussed above). Might be best to just make all plans 1 year. It simplifies things; and then you've got a decent probability your customers will renew again year after year.
Overall I love this idea and wish you great success! Keep it up.
No patent? ;-)
I tried to fill out a team profile but had problems. Now keep getting "We're sorry, but something went wrong." when I try to login. I guess I'll try again later when the Hacker News rush has passed.