The Expensive Startup Mistake We’d Love To Save You From Making

Well, we’ve officially made our first really big, expensive mistake as entrepreneurs.

Source

And yes, it sucked just as much as it sounds like it would – but we’re bouncing back.

It all started with the web design of our new start up, DreamChamps.

As coding is not a skill either of us personally posses, we hired the best dang web team in all of Chicago – Polymathic. (Editor’s Note: Seriously, they’re awesome and did not cause our problem in the least. If you need any web assistance, you really should call them!)

After many brainstorming sessions between our teams, we settled on an incredible concept that would expose and connect entry-level job seekers to extraordinary companies through video. The basic premise involved monthly “contests” that would narrow down potential candidates through social voting.

Feeling good, we OK’d Polymathic to move full speed ahead with designing the site.

The problem?

We never took the concept to our clients – the businesses who’d be hiring these potential candidates – before we built the site.

Fast forward a month. While our web team feverishly worked to build an incredible site for us, we started visiting businesses for the first time – and were surprised by the feedback we began to get.

Companies were intrigued by the idea of video based hiring, but lamented that they couldn’t use our system for multiple reasons, some of which included:

• an inability to hire strictly by video resumes. Legally, it would be seen as discrimination if that was the only means by which a candidate could apply for a specific job.
• the fact that one final candidate wasn’t enough. Many companies lamented that they would like to find ten or more potential candidates a month, not just one.
• the different hiring systems already in place at companies. Since the organizations we approached already hire based on cultural fit, many have built a unique hiring process that they would want to put candidates through before they would hire them.

So what did we learn? A lot, actually. But above all else, we learned how to make our idea work for our clients.

Rather than our site being the actual vessel through which incredible companies hire for culture, it needs to be a tool that in-house hiring teams can use to quickly and uniquely find candidates that best fit into the family they’ve already formed.

Luckily, it’s a better model not just for the companies, but also for our job seekers!

Of course, this realization came only two days before Polymathic announced the completion of our site. A beautiful, well-functioning final product – but one we couldn’t use based on the changes we now needed to make to our model.

If you’ve ever poured your heart and soul into a project, only to have the client come back and say the idea has shifted upon completion, you know how they felt. We’d been there before, which made it incredibly hard for us to break the news to them. In the end, it was like pulling off a band-aid – it stung a bit, but now we’re better than ever and back on track.  Polymathic is re-working the site to fit our updated model and it’s better than ever!

If we had it to do over again, we would have gotten the client feedback way earlier in the process – before we built the site. It would have saved us and our web team a big headache.

In the end, we chalk this up to an expensive lesson learned – one we hope you’ve learned from too!

Tomorrow, Friday July 1st, we’re launching a new landing page video that better explains our new DreamChamps model. We hope you’ll swing by and take a peek! You can also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for career inspiration and information on the best companies to work for!

Dream Bigger,