Hey folks!
I’m back with a new format and a timer running as I write this in order to timebox myself. Here goes:
What I did in the past 3 weeks
Acquired my first paying customer! 🎉 🎉 🎉
After sending out the last issue and announcing CalmCode, a founder friend reached out and hired me to help them interview and hire a development agency to build their startup’s MVP. I helped them determine their technical needs, source agencies, build an interview rubric with associated questions, ran technical interviews, and ultimately advised them on making a hiring decision in 2 weeks.
Completed 6 product demos for CalmCode.
As a reminder, CalmCode is a technical assessment platform for companies to run more practical and less stressful technical interviews.
I finished building an MVP and began to demo to prospective customers from my network. As of now, companies can:
Send a custom-made, take-home assessment via email
Have candidates receive and complete the assessment
Pay candidates for their time
From the demos, there were two main takeaways. Prospective customers:
want to see examples of assessments in order to evaluate why these assessments are better.
are willing to try the product if it helps bring in more candidates (i.e. sourcing)
Built an adjacent product, CalmHire.
Some hiring managers and recruiters were willing to try a new form of technical interviews if it meant that they could get more candidates to interview. My hypothesis (and strong belief) with CalmCode is that companies that invest in a more practical and inclusive interview process will hire more, better, and diverse developers.
To test this hypothesis, I built CalmHire (calmhire.com) — a job board for developers to find companies with more practical and less stressful hiring processes.
1 thing that I could do better
Set goals to maintain focus
One of the struggles I faced was evaluating and prioritizing the hundreds of things I could be doing at any given day or moment. It was exhausting and paralyzing at times. I know setting goals will help and I’ll be doing that at the same cadence as this newsletter. As of now, I’ve set goals for the rest of the year and worked backward towards smaller goals that I can achieve every 2 weeks (at the same cadence as this newsletter).
What’s the plan for the next 2 weeks
🥅 Validate candidate interest in companies with better technical interviews
🥅 Get 10 quality leads for a CalmCode pilot
🥅 Acquire 1 customer to take part in a paid pilot
Thanks for reading and see ya in two weeks!
A friend of mine is hiring…
Boost is an all-in-one fundraising platform for schools. Founded back in 2017, it’s helped schools across the US raise millions of dollars.
And they’re hiring their first software engineer (other than the founder). You’d be joining a small, remote-first team with an opportunity to have a large impact while serving educators.
Let me know if you’d be interested in, at least, an introduction to the founder.