Cocktail Napkin to Startup (DIY Part Three)
June 19, 2006
It began with a call from a guy looking to raise money for his Ajax-driven job listing site. He was a nice enough fellow, but I was unable to concentrate on what he was saying. I recall something about a revolution, the best, superior, and earth shattering. Other than that my mind was wandering. I was reading a post about Keith’s startup, Edgeio - the idea that you should keep your data (in Edgeio’s case: listings for items you want to sell) on your site (blog).
In Part Two I explained the problem Architel had with Monster.com and other job listing sites. While sitting on the phone I wrote “Resumes, on the edge” on a piece of graph paper. Using Edgeio’s concept of ‘data at the edge’, the problem that Architel faced and the time the guy on the phone gave me, I started fleshing out an idea. The call ended and I put the paper on a huge stack and moved on to real business. I did not think about it again for a week until one of our programmers came in my office and said, “we need to create a Web 2.0 style job listing site.” Groan! NO WAY! was my immediate response, but then I found the paper with four simple words, “resumes on the edge” and showed it to the programmer. He had no idea what I was talking about and eventually left my office. I put the paper down and went back to work.
Two weeks later Brian and I were having lunch and the concept of Microformats came up. The idea behind Microformats is to provide structure to common data sets like contact information, calendar events and so on. The concept is powerful, but there is a huge “chicken and the egg” problem. To convince people to start marking up their data using Microformats is hard because there is no immediate payoff. He recalled seeing a format called hResume and I explained the “resumes on the edge” concept. By the end of the meal I had sketched a simple business model on a cocktail napkin (Brian snapped a photo - actual napkin and photo below).
Part One: Got a great idea? Join the Napkin Club.
Part Two: Cocktail Napkin to Startup (DIY Part Two).
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The problem with this idea is that it is a new behavior for people to learn. What would be a much better product, in my opinion, is a web crawler that searches around the web and finds resumes.
This would not be (that) hard to do, while resumes are spread all over the web they are quite easy to recognize.
This way you could quickly build the largest searchable database of resumes, it would be great for hiring.
Hmm… The problem is that people don’t post their resumes regularly. The idea is to allow people who have their own publishing platform (i.e. a blog) have a foolproof way of expressing their resumes using semantic markup. Combine this with a URI ping and you have something interesting.