Ask HN: choose between 2 startup ideas

[petervandijck]

I may do them both. But still:

1. App to make hiring easier. Enter your jobs, submit, and we auto-submit to all the relevant jobboards that you check. When candidates apply, easily define your screening process and move them through it with your team. Pay X$/month.

2. Translation marketplace. Translators make $, clients get fast/good service, we sit in the middle, provide acquisition and some tools and get a cut.

The marketplace idea is harder to get going (you need to find both clients and translators), but I haven't seen it done well, yet.

The hiring space is an annoying problem that everyone would like help with, so that seems ripe for a SaaS app. Good thing: even with just 1 paying client you're making some money.

Which one would you spend 2011 working on, and more importantly, why? What's your analysis of these basic ideas?

[netmau5]

1. There is alot of work being done in this space to my knowledge. I know pg has mentioned that there at least a couple YC startups working on this problem and there is already a contingent of sites out there.

There are many different problems in the hiring process and thus opportunity to attack it from many different angles. See some of these:

http://www.simplicant.com/ http://www.iapplicants.com/ http://www.applicantstack.com/ http://www.theresumator.com/ (sexy!)

I've never met anyone that was perfectly content with the way they find and hire people. Not that my experience is huge in this area, but I think there is plenty of room for disruption. And with that comes plenty of room for competition.

2. I've never heard of anything like this, but it sounds like a useful tool. From my anecdotal experience with translators, it seems most of them are in such high demand that they don't need a marketplace (I know 1 in Chinese, 2 in Arabic). Then again, these are full time jobs for the people I know, it might be different for those who work as contractors on shorter projects. The bottom line is that this idea seems like it will require heavy networking effort and may not work out; I'd want to do some market testing really early to test the viability of it.

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If I had to choose between one of these, I'd probably pick #1 and tightly focus on a very specific problem. If you could make an elegant solution for just one piece of the hiring puzzle, you get two outs: a standalone product or a potential acquisition target as this space develops over the coming years. A translation marketplace sounds interesting but building the network/community will be challenging and time-consuming; regardless of your technical solution, you could still fail at creating critical mass. This adds risk of spending much time before you know it will fail; without market validation, I'd be hesitant.

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(shameless plug) If you'd like to discuss your ideas more, I've got an invitation to http://www.sparkmuse.com with your name on it. Sparkmuse is a community site I'm building where internet entrepreneurs can gather to get feedback, refine, and act on their ideas. We just started the alpha last week~

[toumhi]

Funny as I have also considered to tackle both of these problems.

Translation is a big problem where I work, we waste lots of time going back and forth between developers and copywriters. This should really be streamlined.

Hiring is painful now. I'm also thinking of making something in that area. I actually wrote a blog post: Things to fix: hiring software developers. http://sparklewise.com/?p=462

Out of the two, I agree with other commenters that the hiring app seems more promising.

[abhikshah]

FYI: http://mygengo.com/ provides a platform for crowd-sourced translations. Of course, the market is big enough for multiple players..

[Mankhool]

Translation. This is a huge area. I'm working on an app that would benefit from "instantaneous" (unseen live bodies doing the work - NOT software) translation between texting parties. Also I work in a broadcast environment where we send English transcripts from Vancouver to Montreal and have to wait for days to get the French copy back. FYI the cost for that is $1.50 per WORD.

[danest]

I think the best way to pick, is to choose the one that gets you excited and keeps you up at night.