ConnectSlice

An online marketplace site where job seekers can pay to have 1-1 sessions with employees working at their favorite/top companies.

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Inspiration

Our inspiration for this idea came as we were job seekers ourselves once. Nhat and I both struggled to find jobs in the space after graduating. With a lack of strong connections at Fortune 100 companies and a shortage of responses when we cold-called or reached out to people on LinkedIn, we wanted to create a better process for professionals/job seekers to interact with one another and have immediate connections. We thought, what could be the best way to always have an employee willing and able to talk to a job seeker every time a session was asked by a job seeker? And this is how the idea of ConnectSlice was born.

What it does

It's an online marketplace site where job seekers can buy 1/1 sessions and speak to current/former employees working at their favorite companies. This platform allows seekers to gain valuable insights and connections with employees, employees list hourly rates that job seekers pay allowing employees to earn a little bit extra on the side, and employers can also receive top talent in their recruiting pipeline if an employee chooses to evaluate and refer a candidate helping the employer reduce their recruiting costs.

How we built it

We started with a simple survey to test the idea and earn early signs of validation. We created a simple 14 question survey depicting the details of our business and wondering if people would pay to use such a product if it existed. We released the survey on social media groups (FB, reddit, etc) and received 200+ positive responses of potential customers saying that they would use a product like this if it did exist. After that, Nhat and I engineered a simple site using ClickFunnels with a payment processor integrated (Stripe) and posted statuses on FB in job seeking groups about our product and the value prop it holds. After 3 days of doing this, we landed our first customer who paid $30 to book a 1/1 session with a former SDE at Google. We've continued to grow and Nhat and I have engineering a second version of ConnectSlice with improved and enhanced features.

Challenges we ran into

A few challenges we ran into was trying to decrease our customer acquisition costs. It took a considerable amount of time for Nhat and I to educate the general consumer about our product and the benefits it brought. Nhat and I cannot be there every time to explain our product and the unique value proposition it can bring to our customer so this was a big challenge we faced. We tried to combat this by implementing stronger FAQ's, blog posts, and more PMV's (Process Visual Maps) to shed more education and light on our product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since coming up with our idea, we've made several accomplishments

  1. Built an MVP and have 1.3K users
  2. Have 16 paid customers
  3. Already generating revenue
  4. Accepted into a start-up accelerator program and raised venture capital. (Contingent on finding a CTO/developer which is Nhat Trinh)

What we learned

Since Bitcoin and the lightning network is a bit newer to us, we had to learn more about the crypto-currency payment methods and which coins the cyrpto market is most popular with. Nhat and I had to gain a deeper understanding of hashing and the security that the ledger presented if we implemented crypto payments with ConnectSlice. This was something new yet very exciting for us!

What's next for ConnectSlice

As we just surpassed the 1K mark in users, we hope to successfully close our pre-seed round with the accelerator program mentioned above. This lightning challenge also presented a great opportunity for us to showcase our product to the judges who can challenge us on some aspects of our business model allowing Nhat and I to rethink or re-define our approach with ConnectSlice.

Built With

  • react-node.js-mongodb-firebase
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