I’ve decided it’s time to pull the curtain off this start up I’m involved with. I resisted at first, because I did not want people rushing to the site and forming opinions. Here’s why.
The company’s original focus was a tool to support job professionals counsel job seekers. You could say it is a CRM of sorts that allows job professionals to coach and monitor their clients. The tool in its current state is a train the trainer model. In other words, I need to train you how to use it, and then you go use it and bring on your clients. For those in the industry (job professionals) they “get it” pretty fast. However, for those just signing up on their own, they can get lost pretty fast. Further, the method to scale the tool to job professionals was not in place.
I also recognized and my co-founder team agreed, that there is a much bigger market in providing this tool directly to job seekers and allowing them to be self directed – in addition to using a job professional if they wished. So we’ve spent the last six weeks hashing out how to develop a self directed approach to the web tool. That in turn, required an entire review of the business model, revenue streams, go to market strategies, strategic alliance prospects and more. I’m happy to say we’ve got it figured out and are actively developing toward our 2.0 version.
To go down this path, I needed to validate that our target market wanted what we were going to offer. Sure I had a PhD behind the research and development of our product, but classroom sometimes does not meet “market”. So I went out to validate our business model with our two initial customer targets that are designed to pull in large numbers of users and serve as a single point of revenue for acquiring those users. I learned a great deal. I discovered new aspects of competition, potential overlap in some of our service offering, constrained funding and other aspects that may dampen our enthusiasm. However, I also discovered tremendous need and validation that we are on to something of tremendous value to a big market. A perfect storm is brewing and now timing is everything.
We are focused on the college career center and state employment agencies. In both cases, our company is looking to serve the unemployed. Colleges and state agencies represent a very large portion of the unemployed and that is why we selected them as our first primary “go to” markets. Significant events are happening in both.
1. Colleges
A piece of proposed federal legislation called the Gainful Employment Rule. The wiki says, “create career colleges and training programs that better prepare students for gainful employment. In order to determine if programs prepare students for gainful employment, the U.S. Department of Education intends to measure the relationship between the debt students incur and their incomes after completing the program as well as the rate in which program enrollees repay their loans. If a program, graduates a large share of students with high debt-to-income ratios, the program may be ineligible to participate in federal student funding.”
This Rule is impacting for-profit colleges dramatically right now and it is highly influencing every other type of traditional college who fears they may be next.
2. Employment Agencies.
Again legislation has come into play where unemployment benefits have been extended from 26 weeks to 99 weeks. Take into account the number of people now off the unemployment books and who designate themselves as underemployed, you have a very large market of job seekers. Something has to give as it relates to benefits being extended to 99 weeks. States are increasingly looking for solutions to get people back to work and to be placed in the right jobs for them and the employer.
We believe we have a solution that serves both of these target market and the job seekers they support. By going out and listening to our customers we’ve learned a bunch, which has influenced our feature set and development roadmap. We’ve allowed a customer in Canada to use our product in its 1.0 version and they love it! They claim use of our system gets people to work faster than the comparable 18 other similar agencies that do not use our product. Wow – what an endorsement – and that’s just using version 1.0!
So at this point I am comfortable to share the company name and more details. Mind you, we still have to incorporate – plan to do that this week. We are operating under a partnership agreement at the moment. Once we incorporate as a C registered in Delaware we will aggressively go for funding. Why funding? Because we have an opportunity that is perishable. While the competition is focused from the angle of the employer, passive candidates and recruiters (i.e. LinkedIn and others) we are focused on providing the unemployed job seeker with aggregated resources, training and a process that gets them zeroed in on their ideal job and employed faster.
A big part of our solution is helping seekers build their social capital. That involves networking which “Gives & Takes”. As a company we need to practice what we preach and thus the reason for my blogging. Further, I’m open to help any entrepreneurs at any stage of their business with my feedback and experience to help in their efforts. Just send me an email.
Finally, without further adieu our company name is Job Search Board and can be found at www.jobsearchboard.com. It is open for business for job coaches, job recruiters and counselors. We expect the v.2.0 to be on line in about four weeks where individuals can self direct their search using our process.
We spent a great deal of time on legal counsel review, name review, target market, problem identification and validation. Next topics will cover code development, IP protection, operational process development for sales and marketing and probably a hundred other things.
Disclaimer: As always, I apologize for poor grammar. I’m writing fast to get back to page design and wire frames.
Enjoy your journey!
www.jeffweberventures.com