Before Rony Kahan co-founded vertical job search engine Indeed.com, he was building JobsInTheMoney.com and collaborating with the NicheBoards.com group. He’s one of the brightest sparks in job board industry and it was no surprise when he made such a splash with Indeed.com. It’s true I’ve said there are too many new job ventures. Nothing I said in that post applies to Indeed. Rony is in a class all by himself.
Greg: Rony, you're working with VC's this time… Fred Wilson wrote this about your courtship:
Not all of our deals take seven months but Paul and his partner Rony Kahan took a lot of convincing. They had built and sold their last business (another jobs business called Jobsinthemoney) without venture capital and had to be convinced that they should sell a meaningful ownership interest to people they didn’t even know.
So what do you like about having investors now? What did you like about bootstrapping that you might have lost in the bargain?
Rony: Taking outside investment has definitely helped Indeed. Having institutional investors lends credibility with partners and press and allows you to grow faster than if you were bootstrapping. You also get the benefit of the eyes, ears and experience of your investors. Our venture capital investor - Union Square Ventures - has a great depth of experience in helping early-stage companies, and our industry investor - The New York Times - has tremendous media industry experience and attaches a lot of importance to its digital operations. Both these companies are represented on our Board.
One great advantage with bootstrapping is focus. When you have limited resources you are very careful about staying focused and efficient. When you have extra cash in the bank its very tempting to add that extra feature or launch a new product - which can mean a loss of focus. It's almost always better to improve what you have than it is to add a new feature or product.
Greg: What’s the most fun you have with your work these days?
Rony: Great people and hard problems. Also, the blogging and web 2.0 era has created a lot of great content and opportunities to learn - which did not exist 5 years ago.
Greg: You seem to have a gift for growing traffic – do you do your own seo or do you employ a consultant?
Rony: We do it internally. I know it sounds like a cliché but the key to SEO is great content that is easily crawlable. My advice to a someone starting out would be to read forums like WebmasterWorld, try to reverse engineer what others are doing, and talk to people who face similar challenges as you. At jobsinthemoney I discussed SEO with a couple of experts like yourself and Jake Firth (JobsInLogistics). Another key factor is tracking and analytics. Google Analytics can be a great tool - but having your own tools is still necessary.
Greg: You were the chief programmer at JITM if I’m not mistaken, do you still do any programming? How many programmers do you employ?
Rony: I don't do any programming today because we have team of engineers that would put my coding skills to shame. Indeed faces quite a few technical challenges that Jobsinthemoney did not face. Running a search engine for jobs with CPC advertising instead of a traditional job board means that our technical platform has to resemble a Google more than a job board. So although my knowledge of the job board industry is useful, knowledge of Information Retrieval(IR) is more relevant.
Greg: How do you like to keep track of the horserace between the top job boards? Alexa, Media Metrix, Hitwise – what do you use?
Rony: Alexa is free and hard not to watch since it is updated daily. Google Trends is good but less frequently updated. Media Metrix and Hitwise are great, the downside is they are not good at tracking sites smaller than 1m uniques per month and they can be quite expensive.
Greg: What are your goals for Indeed?
Rony: To be the starting point for everyone's job search.
Greg: Can you give us some interesting anecdotal evidence that employers will widely adopt the CPC model?
Rony: I think the public wildly underestimated the impact of cpc advertising when Overture was launched 10 years ago. I believe it is the same with CPC for jobs. Pay for performance is here to stay. Although we had no direct employer advertisers a year ago, today we have many. Contrary to what some pundits in the recruiting space say, there are many HR departments that embrace new technologies and look for new and better ways to reach jobseekers.
Greg: What websites do you visit everyday?
Rony: Indeed.com, Google(search & email).
Greg: Do you read any business books?
Rony: The last book I read is Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. It's an excellent book on usability that was written 7 years ago, but still holds true in the age of Ajax and Flash. The next book I read will be Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston.
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