CareerCoach

An interactive professional profile as an alternative to LinkedIn. The product is all about career development - either helping consumers find their next job or recruiters find top talent faster.

Consumer

• People who want to take control over their career and stop waiting for their manager to hand them opportunities

• Consultants who don't want to be employees but still care about their professional development

Companies

• Startups or small business employees where career paths are rarely defined

• Startup recruiters who want to source and screen on vetted skillsets

Key features:

• Career Vision. Call out your dream job in the future, whether that's 3-5 years down the road or more like 8 - 10.

• Dynamic Development Plans. Work backwards from your career vision to identify the key "stepping stones" roles that will get you there, along with the key skill / experience gaps you'll need to fill to take your next step.

• Career Coaches. Not sure what you want to be when you grow up, or how to get there? Talk to an experienced career coach in your functional area for guidance.

• Relevant Feedback. Get feedback from coworkers, your manager or a client on specific areas of your development plan. (ex. roadmapping for PMs)

• Shareable Plans. Want to share your recent feedback with a mentor or career coach? No problem. Or send a recruiter praise from your coworkers? You got it.

• Promotion Tracker. Identify the top 2-3 things you need to demonstrate to get promoted, and track them with your manager, making it easier for her to make the case for you.

Phase 1: D2C subscriptions (ex annual plan for $89 / year)

Phase 2: Layer on recruiter subscriptions

1. Phase 1: D2C

   • Sell directly to users who want to take control of their career and keep their own performance feedback somewhere they can easily access and control it.

   • Use the built-in viral loop of requesting feedback from coworkers or clients to acquire new users.

   • Build 2 insanely valuable, unique data set

     1. People's career aspirations and next job hop, organized neatly

     2. Actual performance feedback on people for a specific skill (vs general feedback, which might also be valuable)

   • Exit criteria: 10k users, 3k DAU, $XX CAC, $ZZ MRR (to demonstrate willingness to pay)

2. Phase 2: Recruiters

   • Charge a monthly subscription to recruiters / hiring managers to find the types of people they seek.

   • Exit criteria: Average App Store / Google Play rating of 4.9, with at least 100 reviews. 100k users, 20k DAU, $XX CAC, $ZZ MRR

3. General Availability - every device

   • Add support for tablets and computers to connect from any of your devices

   • Success here might be in the range of 1M users, maintaining a 20% DAU rate and healthy CAC:LTV ratios

• This product would compete with

  • Internal performance feedback tools - the reason employees would prefer this is that they can request feedback whenever they want and take it with them to their next role.

  • LinkedIn - the reason people will choose this product is that the feedback is real, unlike only-positive Recommendations or skills endorsements from total strangers

• For recruiters, the key differentiator would be able to search for candidates based on their desired next title (ex find me people who expect to be promoted to a Senior Product Manager in the next 6-12 months) and based on specific skills (ex show all the Product Managers who have actually done Product-Led Growth well at a B2B company, based on peer feedback)

• Managers loathe time-consuming annual performance reviews, which are fraught with recency bias.

• Employees lack clarity on what they need to do to get promoted, or what their career opportunities look like (especially at startups).