When starting TalentRamp, it became pretty clear quickly that people liked our idea.
The idea was for an Upwork-style freelance marketplace built exclusively for college students to gain real world experience.
"This is a fantastic idea! There's a lot of companies that would benefit from something like this." It's something we heard over and over again.
It was intoxicating!
So what did we do about it?
We built an actual, functioning online marketplace! check
We started sending the link to our marketplace to college professors! check
We created Terms and Conditions and a Privacy Policy! check
We incorporated TalentRamp, LLC! check
We met with a few dozen more startups! check
Man, it was hard work but we were "in business"! ... Right?
Well...
We... never got a single paying customer...
How did that feel?
Awful.
We had poored our hearts and souls into this project, and not a single person that we talked to was willing to use our platform to hire college students for project-based work.
All of the times people told us we had a great idea were nothing more than...
... False signals
They are pretty hard to decipher... until you take a step back. When you're married to an idea, deviating even slightly feels like you have to get divorced from it, which seems like a drastic step. In reality, every startup has to pivot at least slightly in order to find product-market fit.
Praise
Praise is the enemy of cash. Said another way, don't settle for "this is SUPER cool"... If you're not getting "I'm ready to move forward. Can you send me a checkout link right now?" from at least one out of about a dozen interactions, then it's time to move on.
Usage
Believe it or not usage can be a false signal of PMF. Every time a professor or career center admin would forward our emails to their students we would get TONS of student sign ups. Holy smokes, it was awesome! Some of these students were pretty brilliant and we could tell right off the bat.
But ultimately, because it was a marketplace, which requires two sides to tango, it was a totally false signal that what we were doing was adding any value at all.
We had great interest... from people who would never pay us a dime.
Referrals
We had people heap oodles of good vibes on us and then introduce us to another poor soul, unready to hear our pitch. We thought "Jeez, we're really doing something here! People like TalentRamp so much that they're telling others about it!"
But what we failed to realize was that those original referrers weren't buying. So again, the referrals, while helpful, didn't get us to a place where we had any cash coming in.
The only thing that matters
Customers willing to pay you money.
There is an infinite number of videos describing the feeling of finding PMF.
This is the best one. Watch the whole thing, I promise you won't regret it:
The basic gist: PMF feels like the product gets pulled out of you. You do something, and then people will not stop asking you for more of it.
Some of my favorite quotes:
"We were writing a lot of code. We had no customers. That was the wrong order to go about this."
"Before you find PMF you shouldn't do any sales or marketing or anything like that. You should just be talking to customers."
"Build, launch and iterate on several different ideas... then something magical happens. It really does feel magical."
"Everything suddenly gets easier. Not easy... but easi-er. It stops feeling like two steps forward, one step back. You can really start to make big strides."
"Complete strangers start reaching out to you asking to buy your product. People start reaching out wanting to come work for you."
So applying this to TalentRamp, we were not reacting fast enough to the fact that customers were not paying us. We were writing a lot of proverbial code when we had no customers, just like Peter Reinhardt from Segment (before they found PMF). Wrong order.
Here's what we should have done:
1 - Listened twice as much as we spoke
There's a reason we were born with two ears and one mouth. We need to listen twice as much as we speak.
We should have spoken to as many startups as possible first and figured out how we could accomplish our mission of giving college students real world experience.
It seems a bit counter-intuitive... right? We don't even have an offer for these people. We don't have anything of value, and we're asking people to give up their time for us.
Well the more we talked to people the more we figured out that they needed help with social media. Hmmm... Okay!
That leads us to lesson #2:
2 - Stopped hearing what we wanted to hear, and started hearing what was actually being said
People wanted help with social media. We heard it from about 30% of the people that we spoke with.
That was honestly more of a signal than any praise than we had received, and we should have ran with it.
We should have started to push to get in touch with Marketing students who had social media experience. Or perhaps we should have pivoted from a marketplace to a full-blown agency, simply hiring college students ourselves, and serving our clients.
Why didn't we just do that?
3 - Ignored founder-product fit
One could argue we should have just started a social media marketing agency. Why not? People were asking for it. College students live on social media.
Well Jeff had previously worked at a product design agency and drew a hard line on agency work. Clients are picky! They can dictate a lot.
As a result you can lose control of your vision for the company and product in favor of short term revenue by saying yes to things you may not want to. That’s not something we were willing to compromise at that time.
If we were more pragmatic in our approach, we could have and should have gone the agency route, but we maintained a strong perspective on what exactly we wanted TalentRamp to be.
Sometimes PMF asks us to face really hard questions, and this was one of them.
If you ask seed stage venture investors, they'll tell you that the first idea a great founder has is almost never the one they end up with. They invest anyway. I'll probably write a blog post about this in the future, but will leave it here for now.
4 - Thought about the money
I think we had this idea that monetization coming last meant we shouldn't really focus on it until we have PMF. The fact is, we should have been thinking about monetization the whole time. We ended up with an job board specifically for internships at venture-backed startups.
Why couldn't we monetize it?
Traditional job board monetization looks like sponsorships and featured job ads. The problem with targetting college students for these roles is that interns are not super valuable (in the immediate term). Compare this with a job board like remoteok.com, which does about $40k/month in revenue.
People pay $300/listing to post on that site because they are attempting to hire senior-level talent, probably overseas, for a lower salary than they'd pay someone onsite in a big city. Paying $300 to get in front of senior-level candidates is super super cheap.
Internship programs, by contrast, likely cost money for the company to run. These programs barely break even, unless these interns convert into full-time long term employees. Pretty hard to square that circle.
Knowing that we wanted to serve college students and provide them with real world experience, we really needed to think hard about what business model would allow us to generate revenue from day one. The agency model likely would have. The marketplace model or job board model clearly did not.
5 - Asked ourselves "why?" more often
We had a really solid north star: We were on a mission to give college students real world experience in a world where a college education is becoming less applicable, less valuable and less real than what the world offers once one enters the workforce.
We had a really solid "why" for our north star, but didn't really have any answers for why we made our subsequent decisions.
Here are some questions I wish we would have asked:
Why a marketplace, when marketplaces are so hard to build and fail at a higher rate than the average company, are usually winner-take-all, and require immense amounts of cash to grow?
Why tech startups? Why did we want to specifically go after tech startups as our potential customers when founders, department heads, etc have very very little extra time to work with inexperienced talent?
Why build an MVP when we didn't know if it would actually get used? Why not just start with a spreadsheet?
We probably would have come up with other conclusions that may have led down a path toward PMF. The problem is we fell prey to the false signals.
Onward
Wow... did I really just type that? jesus...
The TalentRamp Marketplace was a complete and utter failure. And I learned an immense amount from it. Every loss is a step closer to the big win.
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