Today was my last day of the innaugural Techstars Workforce Development Accelerator. It was the greatest entrepreneurial learning experience of my life. But, in this post, I’m not going to talk about that. I’m going to bring you back in time to September 17, 2020.
I’ve been jotting down startup ideas as they come to me for years. Most, if not all of them, are terrible. I thought it would be fun to share some of them, in case they are helpful to someone brainstorming:
Back in February of 2019, we had just started piloting our mock interviewing tool with a handful of career readiness programs. We had very few users, and I personally knew every person that was rolling out Talk Hiring in their organization.
I recently discovered Kevin Kwok’s Blog. I especially enjoyed his posts about the product loops in Figma and Superhuman. I was talking to Matt Ayers this week, and he helped me realize that I’m building a product loop, but this one is around customer feedback.
“Do they see the benefit?” is what my business coach always asks me when we’re going down the list of where prospects are in the sales process. It’s all about structuring a sales process that helps the customer see that the benefits far outweigh the costs. Pricing less than customer value is a good thing! My customers are nonprofit job training programs and public schools, so I have an especially uphill battle.
I was reading Clair Minson’s article on how workforce development needs a reckoning. I’ve felt many of the same feelings.
Over the past two years, I’ve tried some relatively unconventional strategies to user test Talk Hiring. I’m proud to have worked on a product that is so easy to use that people who claim to be “bad at computers” can still use it.
Talk Hiring sells its mock interviewing tool primarily to nonprofit job training programs, and more recently, high schools. There are playbooks online on how to price online educational tools for schools, but not as much for nonprofits. I’ve spent many days squirming around, trying to figure out the optimal strategy for pricing the tool, and I thought that walking you through my pricing evolution may be helpful.
We launched our mock interviewing tool in late January of 2019. This initial product was pretty basic, but we had honest interest from a handful of job training programs. We ended up running about 10 free pilots over the course of 4-5 months. Transitioning from free pilots to a paid product was messy and awkward.
Talk Hiring (talkhiring.com) is an automated mock interviewing tool. To date (May 2020), we’ve conducted over 3,000 automated mock interviews with job training programs, high schools, and colleges. I’m the Founder/CEO and have been working on this business full-time since August 2018.