I haven’t made as much progress as I would have liked to over the past few months. My wife reminds me that I’m usually pretty hard on myself — a much-needed reminder that I truly appreciate ♥️. We did move into a new place (within Brooklyn) which has been time-consuming. Still, I know I’ve been hesitating to take steps towards any one particular business idea since I decided to pivot Rubric a couple of months ago.
The hesitation comes from the classic fear of failure. As I come up with ideas, I also think about the many ways they could fail. The obvious and most likely one is that the business doesn’t make money. The less obvious and more important one that I think about is that the business ends up being not one that I’m excited about. But, as I write this out, I know that I’m getting ahead of myself and falling into the trap of another way to fail — not launching.
Recently, I was watching an episode of “Ted Lasso” (a great show btw) that delivered a timely lesson in a memorable fashion. Coach Lasso asks a player, Sam, to forget about his mistake and move forward. “Be a goldfish”, he says. Why? Goldfish are the happiest animals on the planet because they have a ten-second memory.
There are lessons that I’m taking away from the first version of Rubric such as picking an established yet growing market, looking to sell to early adopters, and more. But, in terms of worrying about failure, I’ve just gotta be a goldfish.
Diverse.fyi updates
✨ What’s new: 3 things
1️⃣ I’ve added the cost to post a job at each of these job boards directly on diverse.fyi. Finding the cost across various websites was a pain point that we’d heard:
I think it would help companies if you posted costs [for these job boards] as well. I found that annoying to find.
- Engineering Manager @ Netflix
2️⃣ I’ve also added some social proof to increase confidence in each community:
3️⃣ Finally, there’s a new area to the site at /learn where I’m aggregating the best resources related to building inclusive workplaces:
📊 Analytics: A bit of traffic, consistently
At least a few users are visiting, searching, and clicking through to communities every day without any effort on my part! That’s pretty exciting. This week, I’ll be sharing diverse.fyi in more places like ProductHunt and HackerNews to increase awareness.
Ultimately, I’ll be happy if this website becomes a go-to resource whenever managers and recruiters are looking for ways to find more diverse candidates to hire.
A new idea in the early stages
Almost all of the communities listed on diverse.fyi run a job board. Job boards enable community leaders to connect their members with opportunities while also providing a revenue stream to support their efforts. More than a few of the job boards bring in substantial revenue ($200K+ annually) as more companies look for ways to source diverse talent.
While some have built their own job board using no/low-code tools, others pay for job board software — a small but established market. There is also a new and fast-growing player called Pallet with $7 million in funding.
So far, I’ve spoken to a few people who run job boards to learn about underserved pain points. Two have surfaced:
Marketing: Growing a job board requires growing an audience and a customer base of companies at the same time. This is really hard.
Format: Newsletters, forums, and chat software like Slack are where communities live. Summarizing long job posts to a form factor that fits the community is a bit hard and a bit time-consuming.
So, how might we better enable community organizers to run a successful job board? That’s an area I’m exploring right now.
More on that soon. Thanks for reading!