Why StartupDigest VIP isn’t just another recruiting service
13/02/2012Life is too short to wake up with regrets.
Love the people who treat you right.
- Bob Marley, Let it
Since we founded StartupDigest, we’ve helped more than 200,000 people around the world get more involved in their local startup communities. Recently, we started a VIP service that helps engineers, designers, and product managers (VIP’s) join funded, growing, and meaningful startups. The most common questions we get are:
- How do both of these products fit together? What do a media company and recruiting company have in common?
- Isn’t StartupDigest VIP just another recruiting service?
To get to the answer, it’s useful to consider what type of person most actively uses StartupDigest newsletters. These people have been, generally, people who are new to the startup world including: people new to their city, people coming out of large companies, recent graduates, and people wanting to switch to more meaningful companies.
Brendan and I discussed this often and wondered what more we can do to help this group of people who wanted to become part of the startup world through joining a startup.
We realized that most existing groups always focused on the people wanting to start startups but no one had ever focused on the people wanting to join startups. We wondered if we could help our members by making joining a startup an accesible and fun experience for any talented person.
Brendan and I shared this belief which became the basis of our VIP service: in general, talented people who want to join startups should always have the opportunity to meet each other and join the best ones. Life is too short to work at a boring company.
As we set out to design a VIP service to help talented people do this, we began by asking – what stops people from doing this today?
The most common obstacles we’ve heard are:
- It’s hard to know which startups are good and which ones aren’t.
- It’s difficult to get in touch with decision-makers at great startups directly. Applying to jobs@ email addresses or cold emailing is possible, but it’s much better to get a personal introduction to the people who lead the company.
- It’s hard to find people who are thinking about joining a startup or who work at interesting startups already.
Next we asked, how could we close these gaps?
To address these gaps we created StartupDigest VIP to allow the best engineers, designers, and product managers who want to join startups to easily meet the decision makers at the best companies through personal introductions.
- We leveraged the StartupDigest network to choose only the best companies
- We personally introduce VIP’s to only the best companies that they are excited about
- We produce events to help current and alumni VIP’s meet each other and make friends with other talented people who are already working at interesting startups.
We decided that we can create a VIP community for the best engineers, designers, and product managers to meet each other and join the best startups. As a result, we could choose the best companies (since hiring the best people is so important), companies would be excited to talk to VIP’s directly without the middle man, and every VIP would be able to meet talented people just like them.
Next we’ll be privately inviting select engineers, designers, and product managers who actively read StartupDigest and have already been through the experience of joining an awesome startup into the VIP community. All of us are excited to meet them.
- Chris
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