Wed, 11/06/2008 - 19:47 — peterv

Update 2008-06-21:
I just posted my ideas for the 2.0 version of allejobsinLeuven, which are seriously based on the experiences from version 1.0 and the many nice feedbacks I got on this message, both in public and in private. So, this is churning, churning, churning : killing one idea and let it be the start of the next idea, hopefully better than version 1.0!
End of update

Let me start with a quote from How To Kill An Idea on FastCompany:

"... the success rate of innovation is not going to be 100 percent. If it’s 100 percent, you’re taking no risks."

Last year, I decided to take the risk, not run this as an after-hours project, but go full-force into trying to set-up the site based on the simple idea of a "telephone directory" for jobs in a certain region and then building additional services on top of that.

I still believe it has value to job seekers to have a clean, complete, searchable, tagged list of all jobs (and employers) in a certain region available. And on top of this platform, employers can build their brand and differentiate, preferably based on user generated content that gives far more credibility to the words than a classic marketing campaign where the quality of the campaign depends mostly on the creativity of the designers (and hence the amount of money spent on the campaign).

But since the launch (around Feb 2008), I miss the "traction" in the project. I see very little feedback from users, no consistent growth of the amounts of visitors (typically 40 to 100 unique visits/day, mostly on Monday morning) and also very few hard results from the few employers that paid symbolic amounts for sponsoring (they do get some hits on their job pages, but no real candidates explicitly referring to the job site). Update 12 June 2008: exactly today, I got feedback from a sponsor that he got a first serious candidate applying for a job based on the site. If you know the price/performance ratio's that are paid on other media to even get a few serious applications for an open position in IT, this sponsor surely got value for his money.

Because of this lack of "traction" I now decided to put the allejobsinleuven.be experiment on-hold. For now, the site will show a static list of employers in the Leuven region, but that is far less interesting than seeing the fully updated list of all jobs in the region.

The problem was certainly not technical. Ruby on Rails fulfilled on all it's promises. With a little help from specialists at start-up, it allowed me to quickly build the first prototype application. The application was stable and I did not hit any bugs or security risks in the Rails platform (of course the application has known and unknown bugs, but these are in my application, not in Rails). Hosting was also very easy on a Virtual Private Server at Openminds.

The problem was also not really on the financial side. I could have poured more money into the project (or asked others to invest their money), but I never wrote a full financial plan because I missed the "traction" and didn't want to spoil other people's money in a project where I was not longer 100% convinced myself.

My current view is that for some reason, up to now, I missed the "killer app" that would make users come back again and again, tell about it to their friends and even talk about it to their current or new employers.

As for myself, I am looking for a new project from August 2008. So, if you believe I could be useful on your project as a freelancer, drop me a line. As it looks now, I will be quite busy for a while, but you're still welcome to call me of course.

Anyway, I surely enjoyed the experiment and learned a lot.

Last but not least, many thanks for the help I did get from quite some friends.