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Internet Sales Guy

Where Are All The Internet Sales Guys?

By:
on 11/30/2010
Topic:
Startup Stuff.

Earlier this week I posted a job on HN and titled the job post User Acquisition Hacker. Here are the simple job requirements:

  • Demonstrable experience driving quality traffic to a site.
  • Manage a reasonable marketing budget as a tool to aid your hacking skills.
  • Hacking is a requirement. Traditional SEM/SEO will be an element of your job, but finding untapped sources of traffic we can exploit profitably is your challenge.
  • The end.

I received exactly one response from this job post on Hacker News, which is odd because every other job posting I’ve put up has been a tremendous success.  Actually I just lied, I received two responses.  One from someone interested in the job and the other was from another YC startup  that had a job posting that was almost exactly the same.  Airbnb is hiring for this position as well.  (They call it a User Acquisition Engineer). I talked to Brian Chesky over email and he said they’ve had the post up on their site for some time and it is a critical hire for them and haven’t had any success finding someone.

I have a theory that most people that fit the requirements of a “Customer Acquisition Hacker” are likely trying to use this skill to their own advantage and not selling it to a company as an employee.  This is because comp packages for engineers don’t compensate based on sales performance.  When you’re doing your own startup you share in the gains of your hacking skills disproportionately than most engineers and you find your way to taking advantage of that skill in a way that gets you more of the success.

Customer Acquisition Hacking is a special kind of hacking.  It’s so special, in fact, one of the questions on the Y Combinator application is “Tell us about a time when you hacked a system to your advantage.”  When I first filled out the application for YC, I thought this question was odd, but came up with my best answer about taking over a Twitter name at a conference for the sole purpose of making people laugh.  I didn’t think much about it, but I now realize why that question was so important.  YC uses this question to find people who have the potential to hack the “system” (industry) the startup is tackling.  A seemingly simple question that reveals an inherent trait in an individual… can the applicant see the flaws, weaknesses or opportunities in a system and exploit them?

This job is really like a new breed of Internet Sales Guy in my mind and traditional engineering comp packages for this role doesn’t make sense to me.  We’re looking for someone to join us, someone who has the mindset of a founder.  We’re beyond our capacity to continue doing it on our own.  So consider this Part II of our Hacker News job post… with a little more clarity.  If you’re interested in sharing in the successes you bring to the table, making good money and using your “system” hacking skills; respond to our job post.

Photo by: cverdier

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Tommy

Tommy is CarWoo!'s CEO and idea guy.

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  • Michael Andrew

    The job description is for a creative marketer with a technology based approach. They do exist (I am one of them) but they are likely to be found working at an agency or in-house for a range of companies. Startups often want people with these skills but may not be able to pay the comp a more mature company with dedicated budgets and established market can.

    What many find quickly is there is a limit to SEM/SEO success — if people aren’t searching for a solution you can’t get in front of them. Then you need to turn to marketing to generate awareness and interest of your product.

  • http://www.startable.com Healy Jones

    I feel like this position is going to be hard to fill. I left VC to try to become an online marketing person because it was constantly the one position I saw our portfolio companies struggling to find.

    You may have a little better luck if you reduce the hacking element. I very much understand why you want it (and as someone with very, very light skills in that area- ok really, just html and some CSS – I appreciate my “lack of the hack” every day). But beating the search engines and increasing conversion is as much of a publishing/light statistics sort of a job as anything else. If you can build a stable site on a good CMS I think you may find that someone with less hacking can do the job just as well. Tools like Kissmetrics and Google Analytics are really helping less technically minded folks understand conversion, driving traffic, etc.

    Good luck growing the business, and good post!

  • Pingback: Good post on the problem finding good online sales people | Startable - Healy Jones' & Prasad Thammineni's Blog

  • Richard B.

    I’ve had bad luck hiring people who called themselves internet marketing geniuses before. You need to research everybody’s past and figure out if they actually accomplished what they set out to do, whether or not they had access to a large budget, and other information about them because it is easy to get burnt. The types of people that are really good at this are in high demand and want to work for bigger companies in big cities. I think advertising is changing though and theres more than one way for companies to get more traffic. I think Facebook and social media marketing is obviously where its at and sites like GetMorePopular are where advertising is heading towards because nothing beats the positive effect of somebody telling their friends about a business.

    PS: It’s interesting to me that AirBnB is hiring for user acquisition. I thought they were doing great. No?

  • Kyle Johnson

    I saw the ad and was interested, but, I am also a software engineer (with a fair amount of marketing and SEO experience with my personal websites) and I am probably commanding a higher salary in my current position than a dedicated marketing position would pay.

    What you are seeking is a pretty niche job function that is also relatively new in the grand scheme of things. My current company barely grasps the concept of social media, let alone how to drive traffic to their website outside of traditional [phone] sales channels.

  • https://eartrainingpro.com MusicGuy

    just FYI – your first link has a double “http://” so isn’t going to HN…

  • underdown

    I would turn your question around and ask why would someone with those skills come work for you? If I have the skill sets to achieve your goals what is the benefit to me? I already have a “job” that pays well.

  • Chris

    If I really believed I had all those skills (and I guess to some extent I do) I’d be doing my own startup (I am). Honestly, the “traffic” problem is a bit of digital alchemy, turning 1s and 0s into gold.

    There are people who know portions of this, like the SEO, or online ad management, but it sounds like you’re saying “here’s $X, go turn it into $CX where C is a positive number greater than one (hopefully much greater). Someone who can do that is likely to take those $X from an angel investor or their own bank account, rather than work for any other company.

  • tommy

    @underdown The reason someone would want to take this job is to play a major role in a company causing major disruption in a huge space. Fundamentally our problem space is an inefficient market where consumers have had extremely bad customer experiences historically. Same reason people initially started working at Google or eBay. Compensation is part of it, but creating solutions to hard problems is what drives us and hopefully the person we hire. I’ve personally been doing our customer acquisition, but one thing you find out is your time as a founder is split amongst many different things and at this point we need someone to focus on this full time.

  • http://www.seaneby.com Sean Eby

    There are people out there that can do this but you’re right that it’s limited and the majority of them are more “traditional” marketing/sales types, those not as familiar with the intricacies of online customer acquisition.

    Then you’ve got the multitude of “SEO/SEM consultants” out there that all claim they’re experts (similar to the roaring 2000s when everyone who knew the acronym HTML was also a “web designer” or worse, “web master”).

    The issue I’m sensing here, and I may be off, is that you’re looking to better understand who your customers are, where they may be coming from, and how to find more of them. Quite honestly, I wouldn’t try to hire for this position until you guys, the founders, firmly understand those fundamentals of your business yourself. If you don’t, it’s probably not that likely that anyone you hire as an employee will know better than you. And if they do, then perhaps shame on you guys.

    I would suggest learning as much and experimenting as much with these aspects of your business first and then try to find the right people to take what you have, learn from it, and run with it.

    • tommy

      Thanks for the comment. Your point about us needing to know who and where our customers are is a fair point. Ultimately we do know the answers to these questions and have done a ton of experimenting to know the paths to them. The industry we’re in (and any large, competitive, established industry for that matter) requires taking unique approaches to standing out amongst the noise. The hacking element of this role is really to find creative ways to market to our customers in a unique way. We have done a bunch of this already, but it’s a never ending task that requires someone’s full time and attention.

  • http://zachbruhnke.com Zach Bruhnke

    Great post,

    I, like many other people I am sure saw this post (and the one on Airbnb actually) and found it interesting. I am a hacker of sorts (been developing in some since since I was 12) and what most people would refer to as a guy who can sell anything to anyone. I once sold cars to keep my startup software company afloat and made over six figures working only on the weekends, so this job appealed to me, but instead of applying let me tell you why I chose not to apply.

    1. There is no “Magic Sauce” for SEO, there are systems and different sets of ideas, some work better than others. Almost none of them are fool proof. In your job posting you led me to believe if for some reason I did not drive traffic to an insanely higher rate I had failed. That is not appealing to most people.

    2. I am young, a college dropout, and have always worked for myself. This makes me (at least on paper) less appealing to almost all employers, and to boot the last time I made less than six figures in a calendar year I was 17 years old and a junior in high school. Obviously the standard pay grade for someone with my “qualifications” does not warrant the kind of pay I would need.

    3. While it may seem like the “cool” thing to do to create new job titles, all too often it just confuses people. A sales guy typically thinks of themselves as a sales guy, a business developer does the same. You guys are in a unique market (auto sales) and as someone who has done quite a bit in auto (ranging from complete dealership management software systems to day to day IT work for groups of car dealerships) you need someone who understands both the auto industry AND hacking, the chances of that being in someones skill set is slim. You guys should probably consider people whose skills are not totally developed in some areas, for instance a guy who knows the auto industry and has contacts in it but is not an SEO genius but a fast learner would be my first choice if I was hiring.

    4. It would probably help to clarify the kind of growth you are expecting within the next 12-24 months, some people are afraid to jump aboard a company they know very little about and even though YC companies have a great following they still have a fail rate close to the average startup.

    At the end of the day what I am saying is that the job post seemed to be looking for a person that did not exist (although many people fall into that category, I think very few people are willing to put themselves out there and claim they have all those skills), settling in some areas and/or relaxing some of the qualifications (even slightly) would probably yield you a larger amount of applicants while still weeding out the grossly under-qualified

    just my $.02

  • http://hotnamelist.com jorge

    I looked at that ad, and first thought: That doesn’t sound very fun.

    My second thought was: How would the compensation work for that? Sometimes its really hard to tell what drives the customer to sign up … is it the SEO? the marketing/buzz? the product? Of course it’s a little bit of all of these and more, so how would you know if the new hire is working out?

    My last thought when I’ve thought of hiring this type of person for my own businesses: Hire a gamer. Someone who likes strategy games and likes to find/exploit the flaws in the system. This is the type of person that will have the persistence (and willingness to cheat) that you probably want.

  • http://www.vangal.com Mukund Mohan

    Hey there,
    Some guess (educated I think, but you may disagree).

    You got few responses probably because you

    a) chose the wrong place to advertise for it – I would choose niche marketing, SEO/SEM boards like searchengineland etc.
    b) are looking for a rock star who (similar to many others at HN), who’d rather work on her own ideas (if she possesses these skills) than work on yours
    c) similar to “business founders” looking for technical folks, and finding the going tough, the technical folks looking for “sales” types are not going to find it an easy to fill role.

    Mostly though, there are too few of these talented folks, and they are making lot more in cash than most startups can afford.

  • http://robbiemitchell.com Robbie Mitchell

    1. The tech-marketing guys you’re looking for probably don’t surf HN as much as you’d think. You could try posting an ad to The Deck or Fusion Ads–inventory with more of a mainstream tech focus.

    2. Customer acquisition experts love working on business where the customers are repeat visitors or there are at least upsell opportunities, or the products are cheap. Selling cars is an expensive, one-time purchase, and will be an uphill battle.

    On top of this, traditional car sales is based on pressure sales tactics, which are hard(er) to replicate online. People can easily walk away, and given that it’s an expensive purchase online, they’re already more likely to do so, anyway.

    It’s not out of the question, especially if the comp is competitive, but I’m not surprised you didn’t get a flood of applicants.

  • Jonathan

    Try speaking English next time.

  • Greg

    +1 to the comments about the job posting being confusing, unappealing, and perhaps in the wrong place. By hacking, it’s not clear how much you’re talking about coding versus being creative in marketing approaches. If it’s the latter, you should probably just say that instead of being cute. And try being more specific – referrals, social, viral stuff, gamification, etc. If you don’t know which areas to pursue yet, maybe you need to break the job into vision/strategy and execution components. Otherwise, you end up over-paying for execution or wondering why a visionary doesn’t sign up for execution rates.

  • http://motorlot.com/ Auto management soft

    Nice post it will help a lot to the management and users

  • Peter

    There’s more than one way to drive traffic to your site. You are completely focused on the ‘hacker’ part. That is, perched at a keyboard, delving into html or CSS, poring over analytics results, a/b testing and iterating this process all over again. A single-minded reliance on technology solutions will generate results but absolutely must be combined with the offline activities that will build awareness and engage potential customers when they are most likely to ‘have their guard down’ or be open to considering your stuff. Do you think Loic LeMeur relies solely on SEO/SEM tactics to build his Seesmic community? Perhaps he does to some extent but he’s one of several examples of very successfully getting the word out through events, evangelism and engaging potential users where they congregate. I would bet he gets more traction through direct engagement than through SEO/SEM. My point is to get out there in the ‘real world’ and engage in the old-fashioned way, face to face.

  • http://www.headwise.net international SEO

    if any one of you knows a real SEo/SEM company plz share a Link Here .

  • EBurdett

    Great article! I imagine part of the issue is that people with the mind of a founder are busy founding. Perhaps even the flashy title may be a bit confusing, but I doubt that’s the issue. Probably more related to the fact that the best people out there aren’t looking for jobs, since they are busy working and making money.
    Eliot Burdett
    PeakSalesRecruting.com

    • EBurdett

      ps- oh…yes and the fact that the concept is relatively new and that will make the pool of eligible people smaller.

      Eliot Burdett
      PeakSalesRecruiting.com

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  • Jake

     

     TOP SECRET! So I see this ad on Craigslist to test a new
    social media site… Curiosity gets the best of me… and I go in to test it.
    Wow! Was I in for a shock.  If only Facebook new what is coming! While
    Google+ was rethinking social media and came out with a copy of Fb another team
    of people was unthinking it. For real. Unthink social media is literally the
    name. They have been in secret development for over 3 years!!! Kidding you not.
    This will blow the market open. How did they keep this SECRET?  From what
    I saw it’s about to launch. Facebook and Google are in for a huge surprise.

  • http://www.ragnarok.existencero.com/ragnarok/ragnarokprivateserver.html gegory

    You first have to sell yourself before you attempt to sell products give some real personal experiences that people can relate to this will help people to realize that there not much different from you and make them more likely to buy what your selling.