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Comment by Fripplebubby | Hacker News Reader

The post gets into _so much_ depth around what the company did that worked and didn't work and why it failed as a business. Your comment is about why you personally, one of >250k people who used the service as a candidate, didn't overwhelmingly approve of the product (and, it sounds like you may have still used it...). Do you really hold your own opinion in such high regard that you think it is more privileged than the opinion of TripleByte's head of product giving a painfully honest post-mortem? Your opinion is your opinion but it is just a piece of all-too-late product feedback - this post has so much more to offer than that, it's really strange to me that you'd lead this with "Triplebyte failed because:", implying that the author is wrong and you're right...

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This is especially true because the (very good) post addresses both points that this commenter raises and _so much_ more. It's really shocking how few people in this comment section seem to have read the (again, very good) OP. It's like I'm on Reddit.

I think post mortems often get into a lot of sidestepping the actual blatant issue and indulge in intellectual complex worldbuilding.

Even though the one by Triplebyte is one of the better ones, what this commenter is saying is more realistic and honest. He is the market after all. Triplebyte's "head of product" has the same value as a random commentor when it comes to the market rejecting them; I don't know why it would be any different.

If passing Triblebyte would mean straight to team match that would be solving the actual problem. Otherwise what he is saying is true: they simply added another layer of friction.

OP chiming in here to say that there's truth to this perspective. It is very easy to miss the forest for the trees in product work.

That being said: the product the top of this thread was talking about did have users and did break even financially, even operating with some pretty major inefficiencies. So while it would be wrong to argue with that poster about what they liked, they are empirically wrong in the claim that no one liked it.

Yes. I’m the target customer for this service. Me. I have had 10+ jobs in Silicon Valley, from YC startups to FAANG. They failed because their core product had no value to its customers above and beyond what currently existed and only created friction. This is the crux of it. If they delivered value that their customers benefited from they would still exist.

I have probably 100 coworkers I could text right now and have lunch with this week. I have hundreds that I’m still friendly with. Zero of them used Triplebyte either because they didn’t hear about them or because of what I mentioned above. Having no customers or no users at the breadth of experience that I or my colleagues have is a true indication of what chances they actually had to succeed, which was nil. Meanwhile EVERY SINGLE ONE of them knows LinkedIn. My last 3 jobs were through LinkedIn. That gap plus lack of benefit for going through Triplebyte is why most would not take it seriously.

250k “users” is a false number in as much as most of them probably didn’t place through Triplebyte. I would love to know how many people actually got jobs through Triplebyte but I would guess much much less than 10,000. That would represent at least 250M in revenue and it could be sustainable at that point. Given the fact it died it must mean it had much less than 10k.

This sounds like you are the exact opposite of the target customer for this service, i.e. a developer lacking connections and struggling to get past resume hell but having all the necessary skills.

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