For the past two weeks, I have been heads-down building the MVP for an app I’m calling Rubric and, today, it’s ready to onboard its first users!
If you want to jump to see what it is, you can check out the landing page here and sign up or email me your thoughts.
If you would like to hear more about the problem and my process first, keep reading.
From my experience
I’ve been an interviewer at each company at which I’ve worked; interviewing engineers, PMs, designers, sales, marketing, and other roles.
Preparing for, running, and writing feedback for interviews was challenging and time-consuming. It was even more challenging after I moved from a maker’s schedule to a manager’s, running from meeting to interview to meeting.
Over time, I would find small ways to be more efficient and less subjective by structuring my process more in Google docs, but I always thought it could be better.
Customer research
Over the past few months, I spoke with several managers to understand their main pain points. Hiring senior tech talent, especially diverse senior talent, was the most consistent and painful challenge faced by managers at growing companies of all sizes. Companies are paying (a LOT) for recruiting services and sourcing tools, and there’s a lot of them from which to choose.
Training interviewers was another challenge that surfaced. One manager said,
[Interviewers] know what they’re supposed to be measuring, but how are they doing that and are they taking their own biases into account
But this challenge did not surface as consistently nor poignantly as hiring senior talent. My belief is that improving their interview process is ultimately one of the best ways that managers can address their #1 priority (hiring), while also addressing their #1 constraint (time).
Interviewing also seems like an underserved problem area. While there were many resources, products, and services to help candidates prepare for interviews, there are not as many for interviewers. Greenhouse provides some tools, but managers I spoke to didn’t know if they had access to those tools and also didn’t have time to learn how to use those tools.
Ship value immediately, collect data, and iterate
After researching the problem, the next step was to ship the smallest possible thing to begin to collect data. This could have been anything really. I chose to publish a tweet thread sharing my takeaways from an article about structured interviewing that I found insightful.
Interestingly, I got more than 2X the impressions and 10X the engagement I have gotten on my past threads! This didn’t mean that anyone would pay for my solution but it showed that there was interest from my Twitter audience in content about how to make hiring processes more equitable.
The next step probably should have been to cheaply (particularly in time) validate that interviewers would pay for a tool that saves them time. Some of these ways could have been:
Selling a paid Notion template for interviewers to use
Writing a short, paid e-book with time-saving tips for interviewers
Instead, I chose to build the app. This is a leap, but I have conviction behind the idea. This is something I want to exist in the world.
I was also itching to bring a software product to market. There are a lot of new challenges when shipping software as a solo founder that I may not encounter as part of a team within a larger company. Some examples include choosing a hosting provider, choosing and implementing an analytics platform, and configuring DNS. I got to face these challenges this past week.
Honestly, I may end up regretting not doing the paid Notion template first since building and maintaining software is expensive in both time and money. But, I have learned a lot about building in the past two weeks and I expect to learn a lot from early users of Rubric in the upcoming days and weeks.
Announcing: Rubric
Rubric is a software tool for interviewers. I won’t say more about it here because I’d love for you to check out the landing page (where you can also see a screenshot of V1 of the product). Then, sign up and/or email me back with your thoughts and feedback.
If you’re interested in trying out Rubric for your next interviews and giving me feedback, hit reply and let me know!
Notable new tools
There were several new tools I leveraged to build the MVP. I wanted to mention 3 of them:
Carrd is an easy-to-use single-page site builder that currently powers the Rubric landing page. One of the main benefits of it is also that it’s relatively inexpensive for the Pro plan - just $20 / year! Note: they also have a free tier if you want to try it out.
FeedbackFish is an easy way to collect issues (with screenshots) and ideas directly from customers in your product. I’m trying it out and have already set it up in Rubric.
Plausible is a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. I love that there is a growing market of these options (also see SimpleAnalytics) to make it easy for companies to give their customers privacy as a value proposition.
Fun fact: Is it “a MVP” or “an MVP”?
This was the number 1 result on Google and, funnily enough, it was the website of a teacher-author from TpT named TeachingLittleMiracles :)