It’s official: Tinyproj is now part of GroupTalent. I couldn’t be more pleased with how things have played out, and I’d like to give some brief thoughts on how and why this all took place.
About a month ago, I wrote an email update to Tinyproj members outlining what’s been going on with the service, the struggle with consistently getting high quality projects, as well as my thoughts on improving the product and bringing in projects more regularly. Around the same time, I started chatting with the guys at GroupTalent; the more we talked, the more I realized that all of the things I’d wanted to do with Tinyproj, they were already doing — and doing extremely well.
Ultimately, my goal in starting Tinyproj was to create a service that connects you with well-paid, quality projects. GroupTalent exists for this very same reason, and that’s why I believe it’s a perfect match for Tinyproj. They’ve got the talent, momentum, and most importantly, the same ideals about respectful, quality work that I do.
One important point to note is that members’ data is not being automatically transferred over or otherwise accessed by GroupTalent, unless the member opts in to the transition; instead, the email contained a signup link that allows Tinyproj users to skip the line over at GroupTalent. It was important to me to do this deal in a way that remained respectful to our users, and it speaks volumes about the GroupTalent team that they are on board with this.
I’m very much looking forward to following their progress, and I encourage you to give GroupTalent a shot if you’re a developer or designer looking for high quality projects to dive in to.
(Source: ianbroyles)
It has begun (Taken with instagram)
That dog is ridiculously cute.
Reblogging for B.
One of the strongest parts of our company culture at Forrst is our transparency and honesty around our thoughts on community, product, and most importantly, our foul-ups. I have always tried to maintain the same level of openness with all of my projects, as I believe it is vital to a product’s success. I wanted to share this email I sent Tinyproj subscribers this morning about the current state of the service. Keep in mind, transparency doesn’t necessarily mean you need to be divulging trade secrets, detailed roadmaps, etc., but it’s paramount to at least be open about messing up, if nothing else. In regards to the email, it went out to about 9,000 people. To my delight, dozens have responded quite positively with great, great feedback about the service and words of encouragement. Now, without further ado, the email:
An important Tinyproj update
Hey {Name} — I’m Kyle, the creator of Tinyproj. I wanted to let you know about a few important things related to the service, and to thank you for giving Tinyproj a shot.
Lack of Saturday emails recently
You may have noticed that the past few Saturdays have either had no project email, or had a project email which only had a few projects in it. First, I’m sorry for the radio silence about that! Since launching in September the amount of quality inbound projects has dipped substantially. Each project is hand-approved based on interestingness and a fair and realistic timeline and budget, so only a small percentage of projects submitted actually make it into the weekly email. Lately, many of the projects submitted have not passed this quality threshold, and because of that, there have been a few weeks where no projects actually made the cut. I have some thoughts around churning up new and interesting inbound projects, and have been working hard on a solution. It thrills me that many of you have not only connected with great projects, but in some cases have even ended up with longer-term engagements through Tinyproj. That’s awesome, and I hope to see that trend continue.
Lack of response from project owners
Another issue I’m keenly aware of is that project owners are overwhelmed with the response to their projects, and therefore are frequently unable to respond to all interested folks in a timely fashion, if at all. I am a huge fan of transparency; having spent many years freelancing myself, I know how frustrating it is to never hear back from a lead. I’m sorry for that, and am working on solving that problem for you.
Confusion about intros
The other major hiccup with the service is that the intro flow is confusing to some. By intro flow, I mean the way we have you get in touch with project owners when you’re interested in working with them. Right now, it involves following a link in the email and then hitting another button which triggers an anonymous email intro. You then (very confusingly) have to reply to that email before you’re actually in touch about the project. It’s not an ideal user experience, and I’m going to make it much easier to get in touch about neat projects.
What’s ahead
I’m devoting some serious time to rethinking the product, including tackling the above-mentioned issues as best I can. I very much believe in the overall model, and I’m confident Tinyproj still has a chance to be a solid player in the talent space. My hope is that thousands of talented designers and developers can find interesting and lucrative projects to work on in their spare time through Tinyproj. I pledge to be more in touch about how things are progressing, and I look forward to your continued support.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns at all, please feel free to reply directly to this email.
Cheers,
Kyle
These are just a few observations about email, office, and intro etiquette/culture that I have been meaning to get down for a bit. These are my own views on the matter, and I’m sure they come off as somewhat staunch, but it’s necessary for me to adhere to them as much as possible, if for no other reason than Forrst keeps me plenty busy and I’d like to make the best use of my time each day.
Sending emails like “Did you get my email?” — Yes, I probably did. Or maybe not. But, it’s probably not worth sending additional emails about it, since that will only add to the backlog. Pud has some good thoughts on this.
If I’m wearing headphones, I’m usually heads-down working through a problem in code, or otherwise in the zone on email, company financials, etc. and it’s not okay to interrupt me (unless we have something scheduled, since I probably just lost track of time.) Send me an email or catch me when I’m not in the zone.
Intro emails — I love talking to people about what they’re working on and I want to make the best use of everyone’s time. Email intros that lack any kind of context or other “intros for the sake of it” I’ll probably put on the back burner. If there’s not a clear ask, it’s really hard for me to make it a priority. I’m all for meeting folks, but I’m personally not into meeting people with no context or purpose behind it.
“Let’s jump on a quick call” — I like to work as asynchronously as possible. I have found that surprisingly few things that are pitched as a “quick call” actually end up needing to have that call at all, and can be handled just as effectively via email. This holds especially true for cold emails from vendors. I have tried to get into the habit of asking for a list of questions I can answer and send back; so far, so good.
It’s not my intention to paint a picture of myself as some downer that doesn’t want to talk to you or have any human interaction; quite the opposite: I’d like to have more meaningful interactions with those I meet/work around/am introduced to, make the best possible use of my time and theirs, and ensure maximum focus during the workday.
Woah.
Screenshots of the app coming next.
(Warning! Late night/random thoughts so apologies for any incoherence.)
The developer/designer hiring space is getting more crowded by the second. (Or maybe it always was?) Tons of job boards — GitHub Jobs, StackOverflow Careers, Authentic Jobs, 37signals — (and Forrst’s, too), plus services taking a more hands-on approach (Whitetruffle, Hackruiter), not to mention the hybrid/curated stuff like Tinyproj (disclaimer: I made it), Grouptalent, etc., plus professional networks like Path.to, Zerply, or LinkedIn. I think this is a great thing — IMO it’s never been a better time to be a “ninja rockstar guru best-of-breed”* developer or designer. Tons of smart people are trying to solve the holy grail of finding and hiring great developer and designer talent and this is taking a variety of forms. For instance, it will be interesting to watch the progress of the high-touch services (and I have no doubt they’ll do very well).
I think one of the more tricky/fascinating problems to think about is the idea of “one reputation to rule them all”. (Like Klout, but for you as a programmer/engineer/designer/whatever but actually meaningful). Posting “fatigue” is coming (if it hasn’t already). So, what will make your service one of the few any given job is listed on? In order of importance: results, results, results, painless for the company to use (e.g. deliver talent to them, but, don’t try to replace their vetting process fully), quality talent eager to work on meaningful problems, makes sense pricing-wise (save that $20k for a rainy day).
On the talent side, I think status needs to get more attention; applicants should be able to get instant feedback: application unread/read/replied to/ignored for [reason]. Make it effortless to get inbound jobs/gigs. Avoid the traditional recruiter problem and share jobs that are truly relevant to people, not just a spray-and-pray, buzzword bingo fiasco.
Ultimately, though, the concept of aggregating reputation across services is quite interesting to me. In a way, Forrst is just a reputation layer. Purely in the context of hiring, so are Stack, Dribbble, GitHub, and any other place we devs and designers are sharing/interacting. What if the reputation layer were interchangeable? Every interaction, positive or otherwise, affected this reputation score. The score could be used as one of many signals to surface great talent (and in fact, I don’t think reputation could/should be the most important factor — rather, looking at interests, cultural desires, etc. of a candidate should far outrank some arbitrary scoring system). However, in terms of the hiring space, the services that win out will be the ones which figure out how to curate a network of great people looking for work in a way that doesn’t rely on any one provider of reputation (this is one of the things I’m thinking about in relation to Forrst).
The other interesting thing to think about is a service where actual work is factored in to a candidate’s rank (much more relevant for freelance gigs since they’re back in the pool in a few weeks/months) — work outcome (e.g. would you work with this company/service provider again?) serves as another meaningful signal around your reputation.
One could even take this a step further and factor in other things like great projects I’ve created myself (and do they create real value?), peer ratings/endorsements, and so forth:
Rep = (sum of all my interactions on relevant sites [github, forrst, dribbble, etc.]) + (net outcome of all projects I've done/positions I've held) + (verified peer ratings) + (what value have I created?) + (scores/results from sites like Codecademy + Treehouse)
Any platform trying to surface talent could feasibly factor in any or all of the above. Ultimately the more context we can provide companies around who’s applying, and conversely, the more targeted we can be about what jobs we’re sending out to talent, the better for everyone.
To sum up, it’s going to be an interesting next few years. More and more companies are looking for great talent, and the hiring space is going to be heating up even more. Whether it’s a straight job board play or a more targeted system, we’ve all got our work cut out for us.
* Okay, just kidding. Those words should be illegal to even think about.
I have been meaning to write a bit about something we rolled out on Forrst a two weeks back — this tiny question bar that lives right under our navigation bar. While seemingly simple on the surface, it was a blast to dream up and build (with some inspiration from Hiten Shah). It helps us solve a very important problem: how do we help users complete their profiles on Forrst without being pushy (e.g. tons of “hey, we have a new setting for you to tweak” emails or similar). To date, around 7,000 users have answered at least one question. The questions right now mostly revolve around whether they’re looking for work, what kind, etc. but thanks to this system, we can easily deploy more questions in just a few minutes.
On the tech side, I wrote a simple system that lets us define questions, complete with conditionals, and map responses to specific database fields (including typecasting and tracking progress — e.g. how far along is User 123?).
The question “definition” for the above image looks like this:
array(
'text' => 'Are you looking for work? Let us know!',
// `users` col this maps to
'field' => 'available_for_work',
'ftype' => 'bool',
'type' => 'buttons',
'inputs' => array('Yes I am' => true, 'Nope' => false),
)
For boolean questions, the first button listed is automatically given a primary color (in this case, “Yes I am”). We could optionally specify conditions that would need to be satisfied before the question was displayed by passing an array of fields and values to check.
On each request, the user is asked the next question in the series. We handle responses with ajax, so they’ll just remain on the page they’re looking at if they answer. This has helped keep our users’ profiles up to date in an unobtrusive way (so we can give them more targeted jobs, for instance) — that’s what we set out to accomplish, and it’s been great to see such positive results thus far.
I’m really, really excited to be writing this post today. Big things are afoot at Forrst, and I’d like to share a few of them with you.
I am pleased to announce that Forrst is part of the latest 500startups Accelerator batch. Dave participated in our seed round in March, and when he asked us to come out to Mountain View this October, it was quite simply an offer we couldn’t refuse. I’ll post more thoughts later on how great 500 has been for us thus far, suffice to say we had a pretty decent month* this month, the partners & founder/mentor network are amazing, and things are only going to get better from here. It’s also great to be around a bunch of companies doing some pretty neat things in the industry. There is something invigorating about sharing an office (and what an office, indeed) with tons of smart folks.
Our goals while we’re out here are simple: kicking ass on product, growing the Forrst community in a meaningful way, and ramping up revenue. On the revenue side, we’re focusing on moving our primary revenue source from an internal one (the community paying for X) to an external one (people paying for access/exposure to the community). The most direct path to that thus far has been the launch of our new jobs platform, which I cover a bit below. All in all, it’s been a fantastic start, and I’m immensely looking forward to the next few months.
We also officially launched our jobs platform around a week ago. (PS - We can help you hire.) While it’s just the tip of the iceberg, I’m eager to continue iterating on what we’ve got planned, and the response so far has been simply fantastic. There are already a ton of rad companies like Meetup, Tumblr, LaunchRock, Storenvy, AppFog, blip.tv, A9.com, Visual.ly, Assistly, and more participating, and many are already having success connecting with great developers and designers from Forrst.
While it may look like “just another job board” on the surface, a Forrst account is needed to apply, and because of that we’re able to provide much more context around who’s applying, including a sampling of their public content, Forrst reputation, photo, and so forth. To date, most of the listings have been for fulltime positions, but we’re also playing around with an experiment called Tinyproj that aims to connect our users with great freelance work. I expect big things to happen on both of these fronts. Everything we do has to answer a basic question: “is this great for the community?”. We can answer a resounding “yes” here (who doesn’t love getting paid to work on awesome stuff?), and it feels good to be able to focus on helping our community in even more ways.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the overall vision for Forrst. It’s become increasingly clear that we’re in a really great spot to become the place where up and coming (and presently un/under-known) talent is discovered and hired. We’ve made a big push over the last six months to focus on high quality, thoughtful feedback around development and design projects, and there are some more fundamental product changes in store (all good things, I promise!) that should help to further focus the community around this vision.
There’s something incredibly powerful about being able to learn about how someone works, not just what they can produce. It’s also amazing to watch talented folks paying it forward and helping nurture budding talent; we were all starting out once, and I believe this is one of the best parts about the Forrst community.
So, over the next couple months we’ll be rolling out product updates that aim to make Forrst much simpler, faster, and focused — all keeping in mind the vision we’ve got for what the community can become (and quite frankly, already is in many ways!).
Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the people — our team, friends, colleagues, investors, mentors, and advisors — who’ve believed in and helped grow and build Forrst over the two years that we’ve been around (they know who they are), and I’m honored to have so many people rooting for us.
By the way, that “decent month” I mentioned earlier? We are profitable.
Onward!
Kyle Bragger, Founder
Pretty darn excited about this.
About two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor, who I’d gone to see the day before because I’d been feeling worn out and was losing weight, and wasn’t sure why.
He was brief: “Amit, you’ve got Acute Leukemia. You need to enter treatment right away.”
I was terrified. I packed a backpack full of clothes, went to the hospital as he’d instructed, and had transfusions through the night to allow me to take a flight home at 7am the next day. I Googled acute leukemia as I lay in my hospital bed, learning that If it hadn’t been caught, it would have died within weeks.
—
I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. As Jay and Tony describe below, minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.
A few ways to help:
- If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.
- If you’re in NYC, you can go to this event my friends are putting on.
- If you know any South Asians, please point ‘em to the links above. Thank you.
My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite photography site Photojojo. A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Amit is one of the nicest, most genuine, most creative people you could ever meet. Prior to founding the awesome Photojojo, he also co-founded Jelly in 2006 in NYC, a coworking community, that’s now spread to 60 cities across the world and helped spark the coworking revolution. It looks like Amit will need a bone marrow transplant quite soon. We can help him with that.
Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.
This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.
How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.
Tests are easy– a simple swab of the cheek. If you’re a match, the donation involves an outpatient procedure. It’s not fun, but it’s not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.
We are encouraging anyone of South Asian descent to take a test to see if you’re a match.
You can get a free test by mail, or, if you’re in New York, you can join us Friday, October 14th for a special party to rally support.
We’ll have test kits on hand at the party, as well as music, booze, and maybe even a photo booth. It will, for the first time, combine a House 2.0-style party with a New Work City-style party, and if you’ve ever been to either, you know they are always something special.
Please spread the word and please do everything you can to help Amit beat leukemia. He’s a superstar.
Much thanks to Tony and pals for organizing this event, and EVERYONE who’s been tweeting and reblogging.
Please help us get the word out any way you can. My life quite literally depends on it.