Thursday, February 16, 2006

Ambition

It's all about Ambition

The real challenge of starting a job board is not the technology behind it, but getting employers to post jobs and job seekers to search it. There is a critical mass that needs to happen on both sides before the job board becomes relevant. In the past I believe that this was accomplished with massive advertising campaigns, Matt and I discussed the idea of running a 30 second commercial during the superbowl but decided to save that for next year and take a more grass roots style approach instead.

Getting employers to post shouldn't be too hard... make it free to post for the first 6 months, when other job boards are charging hundreds of dollars a posting free isn't so bad.

Getting job seekers to use it will be a bit harder (enter the shameless self promotion you are now reading). A good place to start will be by documenting the project in my blog. I figure the worst case scenario is that in the future someone may find a shred of something useful here, while the best case scenario would be that I might be able to generate some *interest*.

I am convinced that if you give 2 good hackers 2 months with nothing else to do and they can build just about anything, we on the other hand have day jobs so this is going to be a tight deadline for us.

That being said, my philosophy on making things happen is this...
1) If you have half a brain.
2) And you are completely honest with yourself and others.
3) And you are not afraid of a little hard work.

Then the only thing stopping you from achieving whatever it is that you set out to do is your own ambition.

The name of the site is going to be JobJitsu.com.
Why did we choose JobJitsu.com?
Simple cause JobNinja was already taken.

Anyway enough Tony Robins speak, tomorrow's entry is all bout tech.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like JobJitsu better, myself.

Steve said...

"""
That being said, my philosophy on making things happen is this...
1) If you have half a brain.
2) And you are completely honest with yourself and others.
3) And you are not afraid of a little hard work.

Then the only thing stopping you from achieving whatever it is that you set out to do is your own ambition.
"""

This is an admirable philosophy. Do you happen to have any supporting evidence for its core assumptions?

cludwin said...

Hi Steve,

Empirical evidence for this philosophy is hard to find. I have worked at two startups for the past 3.5 years and that has been one of my takeaways.

In the past I've seen a months worth work of work done in a week, and the way that usually happens is you get some smart people together, working harder then you think possible, then constantly reevaluate what they are working on.

Much like when in software you refactor your code to make it better, you apply the same concepts to what you are working on and how you are working and look to gain efficiency.

I think there are two ways to gain efficiency, 1) get better at what it is that you are doing and 2) only work on what is important.

By being completely honest w/ yourself and others you hopefully allow yourself to be open to the kind of criticism that prevents you from going down the wrong path for too long.

Sorry for the long winded explanation,
Courtney

Anonymous said...

What up Courtney!

It's James from SMS.ac. I see you and Matt have been busy, and your writing style is as quip as ever! :)

Do me a favor and email me. (ngenuitysolutions@hotmail.com)