Shuffling Paper (The RE Blog)

Back at the Beehive bright and early today. We picked up right where we left off, back in the saddle again. The only downside about this place is apparently the A/C is off for the weekend. And there’s a heatwave. If we had known, we would have brought fans.

But that’s a small thing. The benefits of being together in the same place are paying dividends nicely; we are nominally a virtual team, but the ability to get immediate feedback and turnaround is pretty critical. I think we may hop through TeqCorner (or somewhere similar) in the DC area twice a month to see if we can’t keep this momentum going.

After a few hours, Brian Sierakowski dropped by and interviewed me for Prodcast. It’s always good to catch up with friends and this experience demonstrated how out of practice I am with interviews. Not that I said anything wrong, just badly — lots of hemming and hawing as I wandered through my thoughts. For next time, it’s always message, message, message.

We’ve also been busy paring down the feature list. One of our selling points is everything that you need, nothing that you don’t; one of the many reasons why we are targeting the mobile platform is to enforce that sort of constraint. However, it’s made the ‘killing your babies ‘ phase of design come quicker than it might have otherwise. It’s a good thing, but there have been two or three ideas that I just know would be killer features now deferred to the indefinite Phase 2.

On the happier side, the functionality for posting a job through the system is complete and seems to be pretty solid (at least, for the golden path it is). Scott is about halfway through the application process. We’re applying the lessons from the $300M button and trying to simplify the application process as much as possible. The good and bad resulting from our approach means our application process is unlike most of the major systems. I view that as a good thing.

Towards the end of the night, we hit a snag with the best way to address agency recruiters (i.e. firms recruiting on behalf of some other company). Some of the rub comes from security — specifically, what can be shared between the two entities, how should it be shared and delegating permissions; other parts of it comes from billing — how do you bill both the agency and the hiring firm fairly? 16 hours straight at work dulls the mind, so we’re punting on this problem until the morning light.

Tonight was a pretty productive night at the Beehive. The primary goal for the weekend is to have the system to a point where we can post our own two job openings using the system. By the way, we’re hiring for a marketing/biz dev person and a mobile developer (Android & iOS).

First, the trip. For future reference, the DC-Baltimore thruway is a parking lot on Fridays. Scott and I left DC at noon (to skip the weekend traffic) and arrived at 3pm. In this case, it was because a tractor trailer overturned on 95, blocking three lanes of traffic and causing spillover onto every other highway, road and goat path heading north. Heather had it worse, though; she left at 4:30 and got both the wreck traffic and the traffic for the Orioles game.

Once we got here and found the place, we got to work. Scott knocked off the login/account creation process and made it about halfway through the creating a job req process. Heather made good headway on her designs, and I’ve been working on getting our financial projections into better shape, reflecting our new pricing model and some revised information about churn rates specific to the HR software industry.