In assessing the opportunity for providing recruiting services for the RE/PdM industry we learned that there were many potential micro-niches out there. Our insights into the industry made us realize that certain technical industries had an imbalance between the supply and demand for talented people. To be successful in delivering recruiting services, we quickly recognized that we needed to know who the talented people are and how to engage them. The best way to do this was to have the people come to you. Easier said than done!
In assessing how to do this, we came to understand the problems in the job board industry and the power of online communities, particularly when you are dealing with micro-niches. Hence, the concept of nextupcareers.com as a destination rather than a service was born. NextUp is designed to be a career site and job board that promoted community and knowledge sharing rather than focusing on the purely transactional functions of a job board.
When we began to determine the feasibility of creating a site of this type we immediately recognized that we didn’t know a whole hell of a lot about building websites and web-based applications. We know lots of people in the web building space, but we knew that even if we could articulate what we wanted and build a requirements document, we wouldn’t be capable of managing the process and ensuring we were doing the right things and making the best decisions.
As we came to the conclusion that we really didn’t have a clue about building what we wanted to build, we could have made two choices. We could have tried to educate ourselves or we could embrace the reality that we didn’t know and hire someone smarter than us to figure it out and manage the process for us. Both options have considerable risk to them and both are going to have a trial and error learning process.
This was a very critical decision for us, as much of the investment we were going to make was going to be into this site. As a bootstrap start up, our funds are limited; it would have been easy to try to figure it out on our own. Fortunately, we decided on option #2; we were better off finding someone who can help us learn what we didn’t know.
As some of the other lessons learned will demonstrate, this was a critical decision for us and ultimately a smart decision although there were some expensive mistakes made going this way as well. However, by and large we found that by understanding and appreciating what we didn’t know, we were able to minimize some potentially sizable mistakes.
