There are now a few businesses trying to "cheat" the business model of railsdevs. And I'm not sure how I should proceed.
Some thoughts 👇
Conversation
Context: railsdevs has two plans.
1. Part-time hires - $99/mo - for freelance and contract gigs
2. Full-time hires - $299/mo - for hiring full-time employees
The full-time hires plan also has a 10% hiring fee for each successful hire you make via a connection on the platform.
4
5
There are a few businesses who are on the part-time plan but are clearly hiring for full-time employment roles. I know this because their messages usually include a link to a job description or mention a salary (instead of a rate/budget).
2
2
I'm not sure what to do next. Some options:
1. Force a call for new part-time plan subscriptions
2. Bump the part-time plan to quarterly payments
3. Add more checks (in code) to "block" this behavior
4. Drop the part-time plan entirely
3
2
1. Force a call for new part-time plan subscriptions
Sounds great on paper, but I'm not inclined to create an additional barrier for this plan. The churn is already high – I don't want to spend more of my ongoing time in 1:1 chats with folks.
1
1
2. Bump the part-time plan to quarterly payments
This sucks for the solopreneurs who need a Rails developer for a month or two and only can pay an additional $99 to find them. It also doesn't solve the root problem - I just get an additional $200.
1
1
3. Add more checks (in code) to "block" this behavior
But what kind of checks? What can be added that don't add friction for other customers? In theory this approach is ideal but I don't know how it would work in practice.
2
2
4. Drop the part-time plan entirely
I've seen a lot of success stories of businesses hiring 1 or 2 freelance Rails devs to help them on a project. And I would hate to stop offering that entirely because of a few bad actors.
1
1
On the other hand, am I optimizing for the wrong thing? Let's assume I "catch" each of these businesses. Can I expect them to be good customers? Can I really expect them to pay the 10% hiring fee when they do hire someone?
2
4
What do you think? How would you handle this scenario if you were running railsdevs?
Feel free to reply below or send me a DM. PRs are also welcome (railsdevs is open source).
Replying to
I'm documenting all of the ideas in a public Notion doc. Thanks for the feedback everyone – keep it coming!
4
3
Replying to
This is a tough one, because truthfully it means you’ll either have to live with people trying to abuse your ToS and enforcing it, or creating restrictions that edge out your smaller customers.
Personally I’d go after people circumventing the ToS before changing the plans
1
Replying to
Yeah, good point. Cleaning up the TOS and making folks explicitly agree to it before signing up is probably worth implementing, too.
Replying to
From the hip: we hire rarely so per-month pricing feels odd – per-candidate seems more appropriate. Also, 10% of first-year salary for a ~cold intro feels a bit high.
1
1
Replying to
Thanks for the feedback Ben! I went with 10% because recruiters are charging 25-30% and some as high as 45%. So this felt more in line with a self-service option.
The monthly pricing is more to unlock the personal information on the site - but maybe I should rethink this model.
1
1
Show replies
Replying to
Collect list of offending companies, email them a message like "Hey, just an FYI but it looks like you're posting for FT jobs, are you ready to upgrade plans?" -- if they don't answer, c'est la vie and ignore it
1
1
Replying to
That's what I'm currently doing. But every time I don't get a response it makes me ache as that's potentially 5 figures of lost revenue.
1
Show replies
Replying to
Do people looking for full-timers tend to post multiple job listings? It sounds like the desired usecase for the freelance tier is "I need *a* dev", so I wonder if number of listings is a more meaningful lever than type of listing.
1
Replying to
The site doesn’t have job listings per se, the developers post their profiles and companies directly message them through the platform. Anecdotally, FT hirers reach out to more devs than PT ones do.
1
Replying to
Maybe have the devs report what kind of contract they ended up signing and use that to drive things. If a company asks a dev to lie to you about the contract to save some fees, I’d say that’s a red flag for the dev as well.
1