Watch Vanhacks success story videos

[grumo]

@shervine I've been watching several success story interviews from VanHacks. I recommend you watch a few here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOOi3wECsg-YdRYNle__pvwrzcJg67144

@grumo takeaways:

• Their model is hard to beat. They offer up to 4 hours a week of live interview prep over Skype for only $65 a month!
• They focus on the main weakness from students abroad = English speaking
• The $65/month also includes revision of Resume, Cover Letter, LinkedIn Profile & Personal Portfolio
• They actively find and connect candidates to job openings
• They have an active 10k+ member Slack community that provides support to all candidates
• Vanhacks CEO speaks fluent Portuguese which gives him a tremendous advantage to attract top Brazilian talent (country where most qualified coders seem to come from)
• They travel to job fairs across the world to find the best talent
• They run their own hackathon (Thinkific has hired 4 coders from VanHacks via their Hackathon)
• They don't have a job placement guarantee as there is too much uncertainty as to how long it takes to get interviewed, work permits, etc.
• Their main business is their subscription model. They only need 100 subscribers to be making $6K+ a month. According to Alberto Cardinally their free Slack community has over 10K users, assuming a conservative 2% CTR they are making well over $10K/mo just in monthly fees not counting placement fees (they claim to have place about 120 people so around $200K in job referrals)
• CONCLUSION: if I was a foreigner looking for a tech job in Canada I would choose Vanhacks over Mench in a heartbeat. It's cheaper, they get more coaching, a huge community, tons of English prep, direct connections to local startups. Not mentioning that they already have a success track record and reputation it would take at least 2 years to replicate.
• POSSIBLE SOLUTION:
• consider offering a similar monthly subscription service
• consider pivoting to a different niche
• Need to think more about possible solutions. Thoughts?

[shervine]

@grumo Sent you a voice note on this

[grumo]

@shervine I deleted by mistake a draft message I was writing prior to sending you the voice message this morning. It contained an itemized list of the concerns I explained on the voice message. Basically, the need to focus on promoting a single core product (coaching marketplace) vs an single inventory item in the marketplace (job placement bootcamp). Also my frustration of still not having a sustainable business model and almost no income after 14+ months on this project. I feel time is running out, and with the current approach, I don't see us making money in a long time since we're building yet another sales funnel from scratch. As much as I enjoyed working with you in this awesome project, I'm sure you also share my frustration! - Anyway, let's chat more tomorrow. Cheers.

[shervine]

@grumo Your concerns make sense. I also share your concern on lack of revenue and personally feel the need to get there asap. I also understand that building a startup is hard and requires risk, sometimes a lot of risks to cross the sustainability line that it would pay for itself.

I think the best approach would be to discuss ways that we can hit an immediate cashflow and If we both believed in the new cash-making plan we can put a time limit on achieving the cashflow.

We can talk more about this today 🙌​