Hi HN! Touvlo is a platform where you can delegate your technical interviewing for hardware engineers to us, so that you can focus on building your product instead.<p>Our interviews test real-world engineering skills, largely via a collaborative CAD session through our in-browser platform. You can think of it as a pair-coding session between the interviewer and the interviewee, but for hardware. Interviews are conducted by real hardware engineers with industry experience (currently my co-founder, Danae). After each interview, you get a detailed score card, as well as full, timestamped recording of the interview.<p>There's no pricing page yet, but we charge 220$ per interview, with discounts for monthly packages for 10 interviews or more.<p>If you're a hardware/robotics startup, give us a try: we can help you hire better and save you time. Drop us an email (founders@touvlo.co), or sign up for a demo interview on <a href="https://touvlo.co" rel="nofollow">https://touvlo.co</a>. We offer a money-back guarantee and a free trial for our next few customers.<p>We're also applying to YC – we went from an idea to a product with users in 2 months.<p>We would highly appreciate any feedback.
Do you say “hardware” to mean “mechanical engineering”? That’s kind of what it seems like from your description and screenshots. It’s probably worth making this a bit more descriptive - to some people “hardware” means PCBs and electronics. (I’m one of them!)<p>It’s an interesting idea and I like that you’ve stood up something minimal to test your product offering quickly.<p>What’s your elevator pitch for your value proposition?<p>How do you plan to scale this business beyond you and your co founder?
Interesting. What kind of customers do you serve? (Non-hardware companies that just want to spin a product but no idea how? Companies that need lots of hardware engineers but don't want to interrupt their current ones to interview?)<p>How are they thinking of hardware engineers? (Like an interchangeable commodity or one that can get a letter grade? Very transactional, maybe a gig?)<p>Will your customers do substantial additional interviewing after passing your technical interview, for qualities you don't or can't evaluate but companies should? Could your service be mainly a screening, before a company invests more significantly in interviewing with technical and other team members?<p>What is your answer to "Why did I spend 4 years in engineering school, and build my professional track record, yet have to keep doing these negging tests? Does this company not employ anyone who can get a sense of a fellow engineer's skill and professionalism just by talking with them? Did they read my resume? And now they're not even administering the test themselves?"<p>Can a particular job-seeker interview with you once, and get their report card sent to many employers over time? Who pays for each instance, and do they pay less if it's reused?
This is an interesting idea, the one challenge is this is really only a small part of the interview. This covers the CAD skills part, but where is the industry specific knowledge part, communication skills, presentation skills. I can't emphasize enough a "hardware" engineer that has 10 years of experience designing surgical robotics and one that has spent 10 years designing catheters or sunglasses may be wildly different in their suitability for a given role. Both use Solidworks, onshape, etc to design hardware, but these things are not the same. How do you address this challenge?
It looks like they are simulating a solid modeling program, one that looks vaguely like SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor/Fusion, but with a worse user interface.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://touvlo.co/images/feature-three.png" rel="nofollow">https://touvlo.co/images/feature-three.png</a>
Just a small piece of feedback, it looks like there's a small typo on the last paragraph of the page:<p>> Interviews can be scheduled (and rescheduled) interviews around the clock, 7 days a week.<p>I believe the second `interviews` should be omitted.
Huh, that's an interesting idea. But as an engineer at a small automation integrator, who never has time between busy projects for important-but-not-urgent tasks like interviewing new hires, it seems I should be in your target market, but I can't imagine delegating a critical decision like this to a third party.<p>Who is your ideal customer? I'm imagining either a nontechnical solo founder (with a really good, high value idea that he'll explain after you sign an NDA) looking to hire a first engineer/technical cofounder to actually build it...and all the problems that come from that. Or I'm imagining a big corp with an HR department that's at odds with the engineering department, always denying their hand-picked candidates and sending them unqualified candidates, but I'm fortunate to have never experienced that kind of environment.<p>Maybe we're not in your target market in that we expect to need to do training, and don't expect our best long-term candidates to be able to hit the ground running at full speed. We've hired senior engineers with zero experience in our Autodesk Inventor CAD suite, as well as fresh grads with little experience whatsoever? Our "HR Department" is really just two people (our CEO and accountant), so there's no "must know how to lay out a robot cell" to validate in an assessment.<p>Or maybe we're not in your target market because already have an engineering department with something like a century of combined experience who are totally capable of sorting out a good candidate from someone blowing BS.<p>Or maybe we're not in your target market because we are just an ordinary small business, we have negligible turnover (it's been 6 years since someone moved to a different company), and only moderate growth rates (only hired 3 engineers in the past 6 years), it's just not that big of a time sink. I suppose a hardware startup with meteoric growth rates would need to spend a lot more time hiring engineers.<p>One question: You write "We can use any CAD software you prefer." Any? Really? Seems you need a short list here. If you're providing the license, having seats of Inventor, Solidworks, Catia, Creo, NX, Fusion, etc. on hand for occasional interviews sounds really expensive. And an experienced designer who can effectively every one of those is really rare and also expensive. I would call Altium/Cadence/Kicad "hardware design CAD packages", but those are completely different skillsets and I wouldn't expect a typical ME to know how to use them well.