Postmortem:
* Our go-to-market was contingency recruiting; we'd get paid for placements. Our CTF and HN calling cards easily got us added to the recruiting funnels of big tech companies (I'm assuming any of you could have done that too; I'm just saying, we never had to cold call). But it didn't change anything about how those companies qualified candidates, so to make that business successful we'd have had to do the same dialing-for-dollars matchmaking work any recruiter does, with comparable results.
* We took things very personally. You build relationships with your earliest users (candidates, in our case). Recruiting funnels at our clients had no such connection. The impedance mismatch was demoralizing; our lived experience was that every time a candidate we presented to a client got rejected, we had ourselves failed (I mean, really, we had!). Similarly, the idea that we were just another hoop that candidates had to hop through (but only the non-name-brand candidates who didn't know how to skip us to get an interview at a client) grated on us.
* A lot of second-system-syndrome on the implementation side; we'd done successful recruiting CTFs before, and set what was in retrospect a completely bizarre goal of outdoing ourselves at that job. That mistake is all me.
* Japan/Chicago remote founding team was very difficult, most especially for Patrick. There are teams that could handle that, but their members are more punctual about routine meetings than I am. Both the US and the Japan side felt checked out to each other. This didn't kill us; other things did, and we could have pushed through this problem. But it made things miserable for everyone. Again: this is all me.
* Erin & I were self-funding the company, which was expensive (just in terms of paying everybody's personal bills). Towards the end, it had become clear that we weren't going to drive 3 FTE worth of revenue on contingency placements in the next 12 months. We could have switched up the business model, driven user growth metrics, and gone out for seed funding, but none of us at that point were convicted enough of the business to stake our reputations on that. For all 3 of us, our time was worth too much. I think we made the right call.
It's been almost a decade since we did this, and those years haven't been especially kind to recruiting startups. There are knobs we could have turned to keep things chugging, and probably chugging comfortably, for many more years. But ultimately, I don't think there were any significant rewards to win by building a tech-company-specific recruiting firm. I think the company was ultimately fated to wind down sooner or later. If you're in that situation, sooner is always the better option! Life is short!
The underlying idea behind Starfighter, about the right way (or, at least, a right-er way) to hire people, has proven out repeatedly since then. We hired resume-blind and with work-sample challenges at Latacora, the next company me and Erin started, and we hire resume-blind and with work-sample challenges at Fly.io. Recruiting this way is a competitive advantage. The degree of advantage varies with the market; when the market is weak you can hire good people with terrible processes. But the advantage is never marginal, because bad hires are expensive, and there's so much hidden talent out there.