When should a start-up be launched? and how?

By Mohankumar Swaminathan on June 28, 2014 18 Comments / 7371 views

Hey Thinkers,

We are a lean start-up working on a niche job portal.

https://www.doparttime.com – Exclusive part-time jobs search website

We are incubated by a MNC company in Chennai after winning the title in TiECON 2013. It’s been three months and we are now ready to go public with our MVP and we call it pre-beta.

Both the founders come from a technology background and have made the platform ready. We are looking to plan our launch day, but the worrying thing is when to launch and how to launch?

Our USPs
– Verified Jobs (email, phone & address)
– Search based on your free time (weekend, weekday, morning, afternoon, night, etc)
– Matchmaking algorithm (Eg. 50% matches your interest)
– On Google Map (search with in your vicinity)

When?
– Is it good to launch when I have 100 jobs posted?
– Or just 10 jobs

How?
– Start-up launch does it mean we just need to write to multiple blogs & journalists informing about our product?

Pain:
– Without users i’m finding it bit difficult to convince job providers also job seekers asking for variety of job fields, So, It’s been a Chicken or the egg, confusing us which one to move first.

FYI: we did try to put a closed invite for portal and were able to attract 150+ users and 10K page views and closed our first customer successfully in last 20 days.

Please let me know your thoughts about when & how to launch a start-up without much investment.

Comments

Mohankumar Swaminathan

18 Comments

Omkar Nisal June 29, 2014, 7:58 am

Excellent Mohankumar!

You have already taken the jump!

Keep swimming and ASK people to come and register, ASK those who have registered to invite their friends and family.

Give some soft incentive for them to do so … May be highlight their profile or something similar when they invite 100+ friends.

Visit colleges with your team and laptops and get people registered in less than 15 seconds each (they will later validate email and fill in the rest of the form)

After students, home makers are pretty keen about part time jobs, so you might want to recruit a lady or two as an employee or even as a volunteer to visit kitty parties and parlors to target this segment.

There are increasing number of early retirement seekers now who cant stay idle at home. Thats another awesome segment since they are very highly networked and have plenty of time and resources. They will do work not for money but for social connections and to stay comfortably busy. Their connections and networks are seriously powerful with others in same segment as well as other segments.

Think: If I were a student / home maker / retired but healthy person / moms of toddlers who had left industry for the baby …. then what can I get from this website doparttime.com?

Best wishes and God Speed! 🙂
Mohankumar Swaminathan June 29, 2014, 9:07 am

Thanks Omkar Nisal noted, So you mean i can go and spread the news to bring in users by visiting colleges, hiring sales people, writing to blogs and other media?
Shravan June 29, 2014, 10:17 am

Nice concept.

Do you have plans to expand and list Work-from-Home part time jobs? Many people are looking for those kind of jobs too. Being a student, I know many students who are looking for part time work from home jobs to earn some extra cash or pocket money:) That might be an good idea as you might be able to get nationwide employers to hire people from all over India.

BTW. Already registered on your portal.

All the best 🙂
Omkar Nisal June 29, 2014, 4:36 pm

Yes! Of course!

To elaborate further, let me share an awesome video by one of my fav entrepreneur and TED Fellow : Derek Sivers

You might also like his other video for which Derek is famous for “How to start a movement”

Best wishes to start & nurture the DoPartTime movement as well as to get loads of followers !!
Omkar Nisal June 29, 2014, 5:16 pm
Some Suggestions:
1. Form Improvement : if 18 is min age requirement let default date be from 18 years ago, disable dates after that.
2. Let users (well why not the non users too?) suggest job openings they know
3. Let users invite other job seekers from their FB / Google+ circles / twitter followers
4. Let Users CREATE a temp job / task requirement (something they want to get done) !
5. Tie up with Instamojo for managing payments on behalf of users. They accept Indian Debit Cards and are awesome! (a fellow Rodinhooder has an cool story to tell here : How starting really very small has made me profitable in a week) If you could tie up with them and manage payment on your site itself, you could be tapping into a mighty opportunity! like.. automatic payment account creation when some one signs up with your site.
Omkar Nisal June 30, 2014, 12:37 am

May be you can get some ideas from this post.

Me, and I’m sure many other Rodinhooders would love to get some wild experiences that Jubanashwa Mishra got for himself!

Your site just could be a perfect solution!

🙂
Rishi June 30, 2014, 1:39 am

Congrats on getting so far! 🙂 I think it’s a great idea. Some good ideas from folks too.
Kunal Bihani June 30, 2014, 9:43 am

Great stuff and some pretty good suggestions from Omkar.

Considering its an online portal, the max emphasis and eye balls would be from ‘on the net’ people. This translates to categories where job requirement would be higher online – i.e work from home categories.

At the same time, you should continue developing both sides of the equation in the offline market. You can look at college seminar and events to get visibility from students. For a weekend gig or summer internship etc, they would be keen.
Mohankumar Swaminathan June 30, 2014, 1:46 pm

Dear Omkar Nisal,

Inspiring videos, was straight to the point 😉
Mohankumar Swaminathan June 30, 2014, 1:49 pm

Thanks again Omkar Nisal, Noted and sent to co-founder taking care of Tech. Working on improvements. Got the spark on peer-to-peer job listing.
Mohankumar Swaminathan June 30, 2014, 1:53 pm

Thanks Shravan for the thought and joining on the portal. Welcome and would love to hear your experience every now and then. We are yet to define our verification process for work-from-home type of jobs, having it in our roadmap will be up by end of August. Will be intimated to you via email BTW you may also like to follow our FB at https://www.facebook.com/doparttime
Mohankumar Swaminathan June 30, 2014, 1:54 pm

Thanks Rishi Gorantala, you may also like and follow us at our FB page https://www.facebook.com/doparttime
Mohankumar Swaminathan June 30, 2014, 1:59 pm

Thanks Kunal Bihani, Noted down and already started figuring out list of colleges in and around to reach out 🙂 regarding work-from-home yes it’s in our roadmap of categories also looking at bringing in SEO traffics which is appx 18k for the keyword part time jobs in domestic on google. if i could attract at-least 10% then hope to bring in decent traffic on daily basis. Still online classifieds are running that segment may need help from some SEO experts.

Regarding offline, yeah hope in few days people will see us in t-shirts and flyers outside their college 😉
Omkar Nisal June 30, 2014, 9:15 pm

Thanks Kunal 🙂
Venkat Ramana July 1, 2014, 5:33 am

In the beginning, get jobs and focus on how to get these filled. Currently I see jobs that require 10th standard qualification and offering 5 to 7k salary. College students and people who couldnt study higher but want extra income could fit.
For college students there are enough ideas already expressed in comments here, for the rest one idea could be doing a local newspaper classifieds (some 500 inr) Based on the sign ups you get per ad, you can scale up or get rid.

Posting on various job forums including classifieds sites ca also be tried.

You act like an hr person of the employer, if you are successful in that, you take refrences and proofs to get more jobs and you have built the userbase as well.

No need for a mahurat for launch unless its personal – the founders believe in it or its tied with some event or some celeb doing it.

Your pr stories will come from your successes – how you enabled some much deserving candidates get their job or how ur platform is revolutionary but there is no need to wait foe these for anyhing else 🙂

Good luck
Mohankumar Swaminathan July 1, 2014, 5:54 am

Thanks Venkat Ramana, was quite impressed on the above comment, it gave clear picture on a view to look at launch plan and PR. Understood it 🙂 Will keep working towards solving the problem instead of fancy plan for launching in hurry burry.
Amit Kumar Chattopadhyay July 1, 2014, 6:13 am

Success of a portal usually depends upon number of visitors. So, think in terms of your visitors – is your content good enough to attract and retain visitors ? There must be SOMETHING for visitors to visit and come back again. There are many useful suggestions in this post – perhaps you need to broaden the scope of your portal and include other categories. Times of India has recently launched an initiative for re-employment of housewives who left job for maternity. You may like to team up with TOI.
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal July 6, 2014, 12:26 pm

JUST LAUNCH!!!!!!