Our new site for startup jobs launched on TC early this morning, and we'd love to hear what you think. Play around with it, and you can easily reach us through the feedback box on the left side of the site (thanks to the Anyvite guys).
As I go along...<p>1) First thing I care about is localising the jobs to my area. I live in London, and most jobs on this site are irrelevant. I was only able to localise to London from the "Startup Companies" tab.<p>2) Only one job in London, but oh well, I guess it's still a new site. Surprised not to see Songkick on there, considering a) they're YC-funded, b) they're looking for rails hackers atm.<p>3) Clicking on the map brought me to the company description (I suppose because i had to browse by company to drill down to London), and i had to find a link on the right hand side to figure out what the job was. If there's only one job opening, it should really be displayed too, surely?<p>4) Interestingly, I clicked on the "Head of engineering" job for Covestor, and was surprised to find that although the company is in NY, the job is in central London... Why wasn't it on the map?<p>I think it would really help your traction with international users to:
1) Make it easy to drill down by geography.<p>2) Allow jobs to be attached to locations, not just companies<p>3) Make a guess at determining the visitor's country (very easy with libraries like GeoIP) and automatically drill down to their country by default.<p>Hope this helps.
Some things I would revisit or work on...<p>1) Searching by location. Its nice to be able to do it in the search box, but I think job seekers are trained to look for an explicit location search area.<p>2) Put the post date on the listing page. Its nice to know when the listings start to get stale.<p>2a) Sort by listing date or range.<p>3) The company profile page should have the listings in the main column. More prominent there, as compared to the side bar which has "not as important" information. (This is a job site, get them right to it!)<p>4) Love the apply functionaity! No silly sign up and nonsense. I would make the cover letter input box into a text area, or make it expandable. Its hard to proof read a lot of content in an input box.<p>Overall everything looks great! My least favorite thing about job sites are all the postings by recruiting agencies. On that note you BAN them!
You're getting a lot of comments about how it needs to be easier to search by location, and I admit I was going to post one, too. Thinking about it, though, it's a mistake. Searching by location is the kind of searching you do on regular job sites, where the goal is to convenitenly get out of your current lousy job and into a less bad one.<p>If startups are about passion and commitment, why even list location? Founders need that kind of dedication, but I guess that's a pretty small market so you may also need to help companies find early employees. Hm.<p>Maybe the whole concept of a job listing is the problem here. It's not a job, right, it's a startup? How do you present startups that makes them different than any other workplace? Instead of jobs, you could just list companies. Pull in news items from their blog, use daylife.com to pull in stories about them. Maybe I'm just retartgeting visualcv.com for companies.<p>I'd like to see a site that sells me on how great it is to work at a company I can be passionate about, and I fill in my interests to find a company that could be a calling for me. Right now Startuply just another job site that happens to have the word "startups" at the top.<p>Also, your favicon looks a like the Firefox error icon at a
The back/forward buttons don't work with pagination on Safari 3.1.2<p>Interesting, you don't see too many folks on ASP.NET<p>What made you choose that platform?<p><pre><code> curl -I http://www.startuply.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:57:46 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-Powered-By: PleskWin
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Set-Cookie: ASP.NET_SessionId=xxxxxxxxx; path=/; HttpOnly
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 72915</code></pre>
It does slightly worry me that the bubble is growing and getting frothier. When you start seeing companies starting up to serve companies starting up, you have to wonder. Is there <i>that</i> large a market for such a niche? Do monster etc do such a bad job?<p>The site itself looks cool though. Although I don't understand the business model. Recruiters and job sites etc would expect a large commission on each successful pairing, but I can't see anything like that on startuply.<p>Sorry to be slightly down on it, but I can't quite see how it can grow that big, or make revenue. Are you planning to expand out of the 'startup niche' and take on the big job sites? If so what will you do better than them?
The page is about 1200px wide. That's a bit too much for me. I'd have browse with the window maximized to see the whole page...<p>Perhaps you could put the search box and the browse filters on top of the page and use a vertical layout?
Hi, this idea definitely fills an important need. There are a few things that could improve the execution:<p>1) I should tell the site where I am searching for jobs only once. After that, it should use this as a default.<p>2) There is room for innovation on the <i>contents</i> for each job listing. For instance, it would be cool if a listing included a profile of a really smart engineer who currently works for the company. Smart people attract other smart people, etc. How about space for a video 'tour' of the company?<p>3) The location based search should be smart enough to give job postings outside an area if none come up (eg, searching for ruby in Los Gatos gives nothing, but the search could be widened to a 20 mile radius automatically for instance).<p>4) A site like this would be awesome if it could figure out my tastes in jobs (based on feedback I provide for each listing I read), and use this to bring new listings to my attention.<p>5) One general problem is I feel that I still have to go to 3 different job boards to be up to date on the more interesting opportunities. How can Startuply help?<p>One final note: It seems that you don't have listings from recruiters. This is a good thing.
Minor notes:<p>1) On the About page, under the For Job Seekers heading, the "perfect startup" link is 404ing.<p>2) There still seems to be references to Jowba hanging about.<p>3) The Startup Companies list is excellent, but there may be an issue with gaming due to alphabetical listing. The culprit I refer to is BusyEvent, or !BusyEvent! as their listing would have you believe.<p>Hope that helps.
It would be nice to have European startup community represented more there - or perhaps brand another site to serve folks with EU-wide working capability.<p>Easier said than done perhaps, given the cultural and linguistic diversity but as a soon-to-be jobhopper towards Central Europe with natural affinity towards startups, this sort of thing would be sweet.
What's your thought that this appears to infringe on US patent 5978768?
<a href="http://www.google.com/patents?id=hJgYAAAAEBAJ&dq=job+description+seeker+listing+database+search&as_psrg=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents?id=hJgYAAAAEBAJ&dq=job+des...</a>
By the way, I think Startuply should have a company profile on Startuply. Even if you're not hiring, it's probably a good idea to get a profile posted.<p>Good luck to the Startuply folks from a fellow startup fanatic.
I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet, but the 4th and 5th column are overlapping each other in Safari (my browser's width is about 1000 px wide).
This is the first YC startup I've seen a while that seems to have picked ASP.NET as the development platform.<p>Not a criticism (I did this too at one point, but have since switched), just an observation.
I like your search. Very fast, and I can type locations which is nice, because for a second there when I first hit your site I was about to ask "So...how do I find jobs in my town?"
Doesn't work for me (ff3, ubuntu). The next page and page numbers don't do anything. I have to hit reload, and then it moves to the next page. Very strange.