Show HN: We used investor tools to find the best startups to work at | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We used investor tools to find the best startups to work at

joinmaasive.com

29 pointsdvykhopen58 comments

hey y'all -- can you please tell us if our job search tool sucks? :D

we built it using an investor platform called Harmonic.ai to gather startup data, then contextualize it so that job seekers could find out about the most exciting startups hiring first (like if they just raised, growing headcount fast, have an ex-unicorn founder, etc). pretty sure we're the first platform doing anything like this.

anyway, let me know what you think. really excited to launch this thing soon! getting feedback from the hn community first is really fun :)

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You lure me in to answer job related questions and then you force me to leave my name, email,... to see my matches. I know it's a common tactic but it sure is an annoying one. It's a job search tool, unless I apply for a job there is no need for that info.

yeah, totally understand. i don't think this is the best and final form of onboarding, but we decided to use this approach to 1) do a better job matching 2) eliminate irrelevant jobs.

there are lots of job boards out there with tons of jobs. even if we have thousands of roles on the platform, we want you to see only ones that were made to feel like they're perfectly suited to you.

the implementation of what you're asking for sounds like Indeed or LI, which imo, surface pretty subpar jobs and none that are that relevant for me.

The questions are fine, though some of the skillsets could be refined. The problem is that you require potential job seekers to give up personal information to even see any of the positions that match. At least give a sample of results before requiring a signup. A serious job seeker is going to go elsewhere before signing up for an unknown.

this flow resulted in my immediate departure

I agree with the other comments. I went through the entire form and got to the place where you had to enter personally identifying information and nope-d out. Judging from past comments on this site, I'd wager you're losing a lot of valuable would-be users with this onboarding flow. I like the design, I like the little questionnaire, but all of that doesn't matter if you betray my trust as a user with a dark pattern like that.

agreed, changing that now.

That's when you give em the name "a" and a temporary email address. Gives them one more chance to prove themselves, and if not, they get left with garbage in their database.

I prefer butty mcbuttface

"Ihopeda Pmgotanicebonusforwastingmytime" is my fake name for things like this.

lmfaoooo yo i'm that pm, the bonus is i get to hear my team say "I told you so!" all week

In contrast to some other posters, I love the design. Vaguely reminded of the Japanese Sonic the Hedgehog box art [1]. I'm all for colorful geometric shapes.

What I don't like is the same thing I see everywhere else. There's this implicit assumption that nearly everything will be on the web. [2] I don't want frontend or backend jobs. I want to move away from the web. I'm tired of the web. I want to do something else.

Like, I get it. That's where ninety-something percent of the jobs are. But I would love if, as an industry, we took a step back from that.

[1] http://www.boxequalsart.com/sonic-1-md-jp-big.jpg

[2] With token acknowledgement of games and embedded

Thank you! was the value proposition clear to you or did the design distract a bit?

The value prop is only clear to me from reading your show HN description. The copy on the site itself is the same sort of marketing-speak I see on every other job website. I have to scroll pretty deep to even get a hint of what you've described to us on HN.

yuck. gonna fix that today, thanks

+1 to your landing page design. Very fun and engaging.

Some feedback:

- Onboarding is too long: incentivizes fake sign-ups just to see the jobs

- None of the investors listed seem that impressive, which makes me think this is just limited supply rather than higher-quality supply

- Card design looks like Otta, made me wonder what makes this site unique?

Your site feels like a twist on https://topstartups.io/ except I prefer the open format of being able to see everything. Maybe it's instant gratification

- actively working on "top investors" and filtering by that as well (we prioritize tier 1, they just get lost in the fray) - onboarding -- looking at our data, surprised that a lot of people didn't fake it, just dropped off at the create acct page - working on updated jobs page + home page refreshes

haven't seen topstartups! looks great. we kill it on curation + matching. Curation: lot of dead startups from tier 1 investors. instead, we look holistically at growth rate, funding, major hires, benefits, etc to recommend great co's. no one else can do that. matching: instant gratification is nice, but when you're actually looking/applying, you don't need quantity.

We've banned this account for spamming HN and ignoring our request to stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31443956

HN is a site for curious conversation, not link promotion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Platform definitly looks cool, if I was in the mood for hunting for those kinds of jobs.

But a bit off-topic, anyone know any platforms that are doing the opposite? Meaning, I'd like to avoid companies who just raised more money (or have VC investments at all actually), avoid companies that are growing the headcount crazy fast and so on.

Is there anything that is like the opposite of Maasive?

honestly, we can probably create a category of something like, "steady growth, incredible culture" -- would that be interesting to you?

we could filter on co's who had steady growth for >2 years, potentially profitable, over 15 people, and good benefits packages. any other filters?

How about 'startups profitably growing through valuable tech/product/impact without selling increasing ownership % to ammoral speculators and probably diluting employees to zero with layoffs one bad fiscal quarter away'?

More seriously, firms who can check profitable , small fund raises relative to revenue, etc

(On which note, we are hiring ;-) )

hiring where?

Probably graphistry.com, as it's linked in their profile. Which themselves have four outside investors (Bloomberg Beta, In-Q-Tel, Nvidia Corporation, Greylock Partners) so not sure why they are in this sub-thread when I specifically talked about jobs at non-VC funded company.

We haven't taken VC $ since our initial deep tech buildout years (more public pieces includes what became nvidia rapids.ai, apache arrow[js], ..). The VC funding and later sheer effort (and supporting customers) enabled us to keep going while the market caught up.

The result is we still have all our board seats, at most only talk to our customer's capital teams, and customer revenue is covering 100% of our bills + growth (+ profit). And personally, it's such a shift that 2am thoughts are more about customer success & growth vs financiers & payroll & CAC accounting mindtricks.

What I would be looking for is closer to "Stable headcount, profitable without venture capital investments and under 30 people in total".

Edit: another thing. If 80% or more of the total headcount all come from some US-based "top university", the company is also probably not interesting for me.

It would be hard to overstate how much I dislike the design, and (more objectively) I think it's working against you.

I know the 90s are cool right now, but "Saved By the Bell intro" theme doesn't confer a lot of confidence in the product.

There's also a lot of low-contrast text (black text on purple background), bizarrely wide fonts, buttons/CTAs that don't look clickable at first glance, cards and pills that do look clickable but aren't, and distracting animations.

I've now spent at least 60 seconds on the page and still haven't actually absorbed any information because it's so busy and distracting. I badly want to close it as soon as I start skimming it.

The design is serving itself (and the designer), not whatever message you are trying to communicate.

Remember that with hipster-y, polarizing designs, you're filtering out some audience. You may hope it's an audience you don't need or don't care about, but sometimes that's not the case, and you'll never know because they'll just look like anonymous bounces.

great point, and i'm starting to agree. we battled with this when implementing this design but after now stress-testing realized it may be a bit too much.

as someone who strives to write concise copy, i find myself dying to just change to a white background with a heading and bullet points sometimes.

will keep in mind as we improve this, thank you!

Honestly I love the “Saved by the Bell” high neon colors. Just tired of the same website templates used by every single startup.

It's a design trend that marketers think appeals to zoomers

I wouldn't be surprised if it does. The issue is whether it simultaneously prevents them from comprehending the marketing message presented.

Totally agree

First impression: a quickly thrown together clone of Otta.

Your site presented me with a few generic role/stack questions, nothing about the nature of the company, business or market I'm interested in.

I answered the questions and signed up with a throw-away address I've since deleted.

The site froze after showing me 4 of the 10 matches. Of those 4, none of them met the minimum salary I specified and one didn't match the region. None were the kind of startup I'd consider working at.

Overall very unimpressed.

My curiosity about this space is the only reason I wouldn't consider this a total waste of time. You've given me another data point but unless you make your matching much better you'll remain in the dozens of no-code "build your own job site" things you can find on youtube. A post or video on how you built this could get you some views but I would never seriously use this for an actual job search.

very honest take and I absolutely see where you're coming from. agree we need to get matching + company info right.

seems like you know a lot about the space, would love to ask you a few questions if you're down -- dan@joinmaasive.com

Like everyone else has said, please show more value before asking us to sign up. +1 to the list of people who quit at the email signup page.

our analytics show a cliff, hard lesson learned

Under "what do you do for work", I found only dev related roles - I am looking for PM roles. Since I didn't find it, I clicked on the link that took me to the typeform page. Here it states that you are looking for "passionate engineers, designers, and PM's" - but I could not find the option to select PM as a role in the previous page - I have now registered but hoping you can let me know if you are able to provide PM related roles.

Loved the UI though - Didn't feel clunky like AngelList and was fast too.

thanks so much!! adding PM roles in the very near future. really want them too since i'm a former pm :)

Great first start! Some feedback, if someone states a salary expectation then I wouldn't suggest 10 matches that are more than 50% lower. Maybe just let them know you don't have a great fit right now.

There is a lot of money to be made here so great idea and keep up the good work!

Thank you so much! Just implemented salary matching and can tell it isn't perfect.

Can't wait to make this better :)

can you please tell us if our job search tool sucks?

Why sure -- because you employed a dark pattern, namely enticing us with a link to "explore jobs" that ended up requiring us to create an account (which as you understand very well is a significant turn-off and cognitive burden to people just casually browsing your site). If you want people to sign up before getting to the "goods" of your site -- just be up front about it, and make it a requirement at the very first step after they click on the link for any of the protected resources.

Until you do -- your tool will continue to truly, irrevocably suck. :D

Why does the UI look like it's advertising cereal to me? I see this design pattern sprouting up frequently, and I hate it. It almost screams "hey! we're trying to be hip! Look at us! Weeeeeeeee!"

lmao we get a lot of love/hate comments on the design, but that's the first time i heard cereal -- thanks i guess? (cuz who doesn't love cereal?!)

After a bunch of data entry...

> Create an account to see your matches

I'm not actively looking for a job so this is annoying and where I stopped. Show me something of value then ask.

in process of removing now! thanks

Your site is 3.1mb, which is way too big. (1.1mb of JS?)

thanks for highlighting -- this happened due to poor webflow implementation. working on getting this down!

It just crashes after finishing onaboarding trying to load with:

TypeError: can't access property "push", Mo['ex-Unicorn Founder'] is undefined

shoot, fixing this now, thanks!

this was an issue with 1 job -- we deleted that specific job and fixed it if you'd like to try again! really sorry about that.

your onboarding flow is really really annoying, asking for too much info before showing anything useful. Well, now you have another "Blah Blah" among your users :)

well, now we know our biggest issue! many repeated comments about this -- thank you :)

just noticed that you seem to be an almost exact clone of otta.com, down to signup flow and showing just 10 results. Are you related?

The matching works well I'll be using this to source jobs in the future especially if I can just get a weekly email.

sweeeeeeet

From the employers pov, how does the algorithm work to find candidates?

If co's want to find candidates, we look for opted-in users who v closely fit their req's and make direct, double-opt-in intros right now. All parties seem to love this method :)

It’s way higher signal to talk to the fund.

agreed, all the engineers we know who got in early to the best co's did just this. not many folks can just go and talk to a partner though (or don't even think of doing so). I think this is the next best thing

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