the gig board / and job boards

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 05 Oct 2006 02:49:00 GMT

in the recurring theme of job board discussions I seem to be having I thought I would continue it a tiny bit.

37 signals just announced a generic job board called gigs (note to jason: the page it points to isn’t the one I’m thinking you wanted it to point to ;-)

If you want to post on 37signal’s job board it is $250 for 30 days. gigs is $100 for 3 weeks. This should tell you something about the competitive nature of generic job boards, and the lack of competitive advantage 37signals brings to this arena.

While I wish them all the success in the world, I don’t think they are offering anything new or exciting in this field. I can’t actually see the site, as it isn’t up, so I could completely wrong about it.. but any innovation they bring on the site will be easily copied by their competitors anyway.

I still think the only way to do a truly awesome job board is to make it social and network based.

The best jobs are usually offered to friends/people in your network of known associates.. a job board should reflect this fact if they want to separate themselves from the pack.

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why is google partnering?

Posted by Ian Holsman Fri, 15 Sep 2006 07:27:00 GMT

in Valleywag they ask google is partnering, and believe it’s all to do with hurting microsoft.

BS. It’s about lack of future growth (and revenue) in search .. their main revenue generating area.

so.. google’s strategy (as I see it) is simple

get more people and businesses online.

While ALL the large businesses are on line, the SMB area is severely underrepresented. and that means they aren’t advertising online either. So by partnering with intuit (and giving each intuit user a $50 adsearch credit) they are opening up a whole new segment..

This will be of benefit to everyone who feeds off the internet. .. these SMB businesses will need the services of IT Professionals..

People who use adsense on their sites will love more people competing for visibility on their sites as well.

The one question i’m not sure about it the splogs. I’m not sure if increasing the minimum bid they have to have will bid higher for their ads (but in converse the ads they show on their sites will also be higher).

So if I had a 1-200k or so to invest, I would be investing in services which can help these SMB businesses succeed.. as there will soon be a whole lot of demand for them.

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What job boards need

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 07 Sep 2006 05:23:00 GMT

as a followup to me saga about job boards I’ve got a brilliant addition that they should add (and I plan to add to gypsyjobs ).

user-feedback and reputation.

for longer term jobs and contracts this kind of thing isn’t as important, but for short term work I think it’s critical.. especially if you don’t have a signed contract, or lawyers to enforce it.

I think opening it up would provide a way to signal to potential employees (and employers) that the pairing will work out.

The hard part about all this I think is

1. anonymous cranks… just posting endorsements to fluff up a company or person, or to tear them down, without having actually worked for them

2. he-said she-said type arguments which come about when a pairing ends on less than friendly terms. personally I think these should be exposed so that potential employees know what they are getting in to.

so.. the plan is to allow feedback to be displayed at the option of the company/employee (you would be able leave feedback but only they would be able to see it if it is turned off). I’m also curious about how this kind of thing relates to defamation laws. .. anyone know about this?

Even if they don’t have any feedback, allowing feedback to be left would be saying something I think.

Why am I doing this now?

well.. I just started working for a local startup (not mentioned on the blog at all) yesterday when a previous employee mailed me (and the founder) about lack of payment.

and.. to make matters worse another short-term contract is about a week behind in their final payment as well.

That being said.. I’ve had 4 other short term jobs over the last couple of months where I have been paid in full, and have had a great time doing the work.

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Job Boards -- What can they do

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 29 Aug 2006 03:46:00 GMT

as a follow up to my dissing of job boards

I thought I would put a few notes on what I think they could do to actually ‘add+capture value’ for themselves.

the first thing you need to do in these kind of situations is look how they can differentiate themselves for each other and from other potential new entrants.

so what could makes CrunchBoard different than jobs.gigaom.com ?

well.. lets go through what isn’t different:

  • technology.. both do the job well enough so that this isn’t an issue
  • the jobs themselves, although crunchboard seems more ‘businessey’ than gigaom’s currenty, this isn’t the intention by the looks of the categories they have on the site.

so far.. nothing even which sets them apart from monster (besides a better look and navigation)

ok.. so lets analyze who these people (Michael Arrington and Om Malik) are, crunchboard gives a hint on their site.
It’s the electronic version of the ultimate insider’s network.

These guys are insiders. They know people, they have access to information that us mere mortals merely dream about.. cool parties.. the VC groupies, and more importantly access to the senior officials in most of the startups and VC firms.

These guys live on whispers, and rumors.. they need to make their job boards more like that.

They need to remodel their “job” businesses like that of a typical recruitment agency, not a job board. They know when people are ‘looking’, they know the people in the ‘biz’ inside out. A job board is for when you have no knowledge of the people.. a mass market sledgehammer so to speak.

So instead of making their network contacts post jobs on a board, they should thinking of who in their extended network could fill that position. Use those networks..keep the secrecy that startups love.. thats their competitive advantage. They know the right people.

I know it isn’t web 2.0, and it doesn’t require a web site, just a couple of HR recruitment specialists to do the interviewing/weeding… but on the flip side they could then charge 10-20% of the salary (thats the going rate I believe) which is much more than $200/post.

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Job Boards and Strategy

Posted by Ian Holsman Sun, 27 Aug 2006 03:41:00 GMT

Mike Arrington’s Crunchjobs is doomed to failure due to it’s own success, and although it’s winning praise as being really good .. it isn’t going to last.

why?

It doesn’t have any secret sauce, and network effects it depends on can’t happen, and as it gets more successful others will come in and compete.

In b-school we learn that any idea needs some kind of protection so competitors can’t imitate it. This can be in the form of patents, hard to reverse engineer processes, lower costs, or even exclusive deals with key-suppliers.

1. Any patents to be gotten for a job listing board have been done. There is nothing revolutionary about putting a job listing onto a search service.

2. It takes about 1-2 weeks to create a job board.. scalability may be an issue later on when you get 300-400,000 views a day.. but this is not a new problem to solve.

3. Lower costs is important. can you run a job site for less than anyone else? this is important when competition forces you to drive your prices down, and you have to live on razor thin margins. Having extremely low costs can deter others from entering the market, as they won’t be able to make their cost of capital on the deal. (profit isn’t enough.. you have to be making more profit on the money than you would in a alternative investment.. say sticking it in a bank)

4. Sweetheart deals with Key suppliers. This is a key factor. It isn’t the same as network effects (which I’ll go into later). Take 37Signals for example.. they are ‘the’ people to go to for RoR. so when they open a RoR job board you know that most people will use that. They supply the framework, and as such can use that position to give their job board an unfair advantage over other potential Rails job boards (unfair in the business sense… every business aims to get a unfair advantage over their competitors). So I’m thinking 37Signals’s job board can survive just on this, and can continue to charge whatever it likes..

The other thing b-schools teach you about is network effects. The more people who use a service, the more others will use it. Digg and eBay are examples of this. Are job boards an example of this? you bet. they used to be perfect examples of this. Job suppliers would try and find the one with the most reach and advertise on this.. we see it in most markets.

but in the web2.0 version of job boards this isn’t the case.

1. There is no network effect yet.. none have been around for long enough. all of them are busy convincing people to list with them.

2. No Unique audience. While one might be slightly more popular than the other, most of the ‘key influencers’ they target read both. With RSS-readers it is simple to subscribe to their feeds and even see them listed side by side. RSS is their enemy in this case. The cost of subscribing to a new job-posting feed is about zero for most people. I can easily scan through 10 job feeds.

3. Aggregators are making the source irrelevant.. Indeed.com and EdgeIO. A job supplier could even submit their RSS feed directly to these companies if they choose, bypassing the middleman.

So .. why I think CrunchJobs and GigaJobs are not going to last.
  • Both serve exactly the same business savy audience.
  • Both are perfect imitators of each other. There is no differentiation to speak of
  • Neither have a network effect
  • None have any real influence with the job suppliers which could serve to limit the influence of their competitors * Even if they do merge, there is nothing stopping a 3rd entrant in the market. Any web2.0 blog with more than 10,000 regular visitors a day could open a board.

So.. my recommendation is for them to differentiate, and get something which others can’t copy easily.

FWIW GypsyJobs which is a job board dedicated to Django positions is no different than the boards I’m describing. Which is why it doesn’t charge a fee to list.

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What is the ASF's competitive advantage?

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 30 May 2006 14:21:00 GMT

competitive advantage is a term often bandied about by wonks, but people usually misuse the term. In order to be defined as a ‘competitive advantage’ it has to be:

1. competitive. it has to be a skill that is critical to the success of your business. (two questions to ask, and a ‘YES’ in either is what you are after:

  • does it ‘add’ value to your offering. (do the customer value it more)
  • and can you ‘capture’ that. (get that extra value into your hands, and not other peoples)

2. An advantage. it has to be hard to duplicate by other groups outside of your organization. either for a period of time, or ideally forever.

(value is not necessarily cash, by value here I define it as happiness to the ASF members)

The experts (i.e.. the academics ) state that any organization usually has one or two of them tops, and that there are two main different types of competitive advantage:

  • structural based, where the industry it is in gives it a natural advantage via owning a key resource, or the network effects surrounding it make it hard to displace (like myspace or linkedin for example.. while there are competitors out there they find it hard to make a dent, or how Walmart opens a large store in a town which is only capable of supporting one store of that type in it’s area)
  • capabilities based, where a org is just better at doing something than someone else. This can also be seen when their internal processes are just so integrated together that it makes it next to impossible for another company to duplicate successfully (southwest airlines is the perfect example here, lots of other airlines try to copy parts of it’s process, but fail as the can’t copy ALL of it)

so.. back to the title of the post. What does the ASF do which is better than any other group.

I’m going to have a stab at some which I hear often. not all of them are competitive advantages by themselves, as others can duplicate them, but the combination is the hard thing to duplicate. (ie the combination is the competitive advantage, not any one of them)

  • industry acceptance. both by the orgs who use our product, but also by the orgs who let their staff contribute back. Getting a lawyer from IBM or Sun to allow this is no easy task, those CCLA’s we hold are valuable.
  • smart and engaged people. we’re not the only group with smart people, the trick is how to keep the ones we have engaged, and how to cross-polinate these people from different backgrounds into other ASF projects.
  • diversity. while it’s like herding cats sometimes, the diversity brings unique insights and strengths to bear on given issues. The diversity also comes from our members being part of other open source communities.
  • communities – these are our recruiting and sales/marketing pools so to speak. we actively recruit our users to become members. Unlike a traditional job interview we deal with known resources. We know who we are going into bed with so to speak, as do our customers.
  • partnerships – The ASF is only a small cog in the entire open source world. Members in the ASF also participate in other open source organizations.

The aim of the ASF (as I see it) is NOT to be the biggest open source org, or to have the most members/projects under it’s belt.

Officially it is to provide organizational, legal, and financial support to the projects under it’s umbrella. but I see it more as a way for the members to enjoy themselves doing what they love doing.

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Eating other people's lunches

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:43:00 GMT

source: The Friction Free Economy

There are four basic strategies to fight a dominant market leader.

Brute force

Attack the market leader through an aggressive attack on several fronts

  • beat price-learning curve
  • branding
  • tailoring (to the market of one)
  • volume manufacturing
  • execute Davidow’s law (beat them to the market on the next round, and gain the lead when you obselete their product)

Momentum

Find a weak spot, gain a foothold and build takeover momentum

  • joint ventures
  • mergers and acquisitions

Anti-Monopoly

Get third parties to help destroy the leadership position through monopoly

  • target the weak
  • lobby government
  • litigate

Pure Play

Consistent execution of a strategy over a period of time
  • hit shooting range targets
  • introduce chaos into marketplace

From what I can see recently on the net, Google appears to be playing more ‘pure play’ than ‘brute force’ with it’s gmail, gtalk, froogle, and news sites, while murdoch and microsoft are more into ‘momentum’ plays buying established companies with existing market shares.

the other interesting saw in my class yesterday (not from the lecturer, but googling while being bored) was about The New Lanchester Strategy. Which theorizes about how different market share sizes in the overall market affect the market itself.

So according to the new Lanchaster strategy I would think Technorati (which I would estimate would hold 30-40% market share) should merge with a smaller player of slightly smaller size to control 73% of the overall market, in effect controlling it. Making it much harder/expensive for other players to enter.

you can also look at this in the web-mail (and messenger) area, where hotmail & yahoo have an order of magnitude more subscribers than gmail. I would love to see how the new guy on the block plans on breaking that. Right now all of gmail’s new innovations are being implemented in hotmail and in yahoo.. I don’t think that google is going to have a slam dunk in these areas, unless it can provide another compelling reason to switch over.

(oh.. please don’t take me as anti google or anything, it’s just that they have shaken up several markets and I can apply some of the stuff I learn in the books/classes to them)

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