Allen May (http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3030327) and I came in touch over the same topic a few months back. And whatever Nicholas is saying here makes so much sense that I couldn’t agree with him more.
I myself have been engaged in a couple of mentorship programs this year and planning to continue doing it. I’ve set few rules and created my own process on very similar lines that Nicholas has explained; although not that precise and thoughtful. This blog post has helped me with some really great directions. Sincere thanks to Nicholas for it. Great work, there.
I feel, we could use a transparent system where the ongoing mentorship program highlights are shared publicly and other mentors can learn/contribute from/to it. It is such an important aspect of our professional life that it saves huge amount of time (in years), makes us a stronger person, gets us the right kind of contacts, polishes the existing knowledge, teaches how to learn effectively and provides us with a solid foundation that lasts through the whole life. Making small mistakes as a mentor can have disastrous results on the mentee’s life.
I appreciate that the auditions are actually paid ($25 an hour, irrespective of the position) and as they claim, you can complete the assignment at your convenience, sounds really reasonable.
Where I feel hesitant is - they hire "all" their employees on contract basis. Wouldn't a great work place want their 'employees' be their 'people'? Would you feel like the product belongs to you? And the tone of the whole article also makes it a little dry - check out the comment by "Eugeny Brychkov" and may be you'll understand what I'm saying.
When you are passionate about building products and solving real life problems, it is not always possible to work on our own problems. But there is always one really big problem that nobody else has solved for you. And if you haven't found it yet; then you should keep looking for it. Because I firmly believe, the solution to that one problem take years to build and mature.
Taking example of many successful product builders, entrepreneurs and corporate, they all have had one or two 'winner' ideas.
The last para - If there is just one thing you should learn, it is: Just speak to prospects and extract their pain, then sell the painkiller (before building the product). If they are willing to buy, do take their money and invest that money into building the product.
Is that really possible? Making someone pay for a product that doesn't yet exist? How can you do that?
This concept really is the holy grail of people who like to talk about startups.
I think there are some mis-perceptions about the idea. Here is how I how found the concept useful, in my company.
Startups who focus on revenue rather than growth can use this technique as a success metric (duh). Rather than using active users, etc., as proxy metrics for success, this method is a very direct one to measure how marketable your idea is. Get one success banked, then you can start to optimize -- pretty neat!
However, it's also incredibly difficult to do. So the second purpose becomes this: a proxy to evaluate the importance (in your customers' eyes) of the problem you solve. If you're solving a problem that everyone in the banking industry desperately needs solved, they will be more willing to try something that isn't feature-complete (or in existence).
So while few people will actually buy your product before it exists, using that as the goal can help you in your business development. You can figure out the problem's importance (and, believe me, it's better to solve a hair on fire problem than to solve a minor inconvenience). You can get feedback from people who are actually willing to pay -- this signals they are probably your customer! (So it helps you prioritize feedback, and sort people you talk to into actual / window-shopper type customers).
What the gurus don't tell you is this is very difficult to actually accomplish, at first. But after several iterations, you can get valuable feedback from people who are closer to having skin in the game.
And, of course, there is the chance that someone will have such a big problem that they want to pay you to solve it right now. If you can find that big fish, and their problem is similar enough (or uses core technology sufficiently similar to your "productized" version), then you can partially pay to make the product. (This comes with the caveats about how you don't want to be a slave to a single customer, etc. But we're having luck developing our core technology in the process for the big customer, and will re-use it for our product.)
Being from small company, the human resources function isn't organized. Everything mainly happens over phone, e-mail and on-the-desk chats. Finding a particular track after few weeks is almost impossible.
And when it comes to being a candidate the world is a horrible place. Some companies have put us through upto 16 rounds of technical discussions and you could clearly sense it that the panel have absolutely no idea how many earlier rounds have happened and respective feedback.
I myself have been engaged in a couple of mentorship programs this year and planning to continue doing it. I’ve set few rules and created my own process on very similar lines that Nicholas has explained; although not that precise and thoughtful. This blog post has helped me with some really great directions. Sincere thanks to Nicholas for it. Great work, there.
I feel, we could use a transparent system where the ongoing mentorship program highlights are shared publicly and other mentors can learn/contribute from/to it. It is such an important aspect of our professional life that it saves huge amount of time (in years), makes us a stronger person, gets us the right kind of contacts, polishes the existing knowledge, teaches how to learn effectively and provides us with a solid foundation that lasts through the whole life. Making small mistakes as a mentor can have disastrous results on the mentee’s life.