Introducing Kareerly! The Airbnb for Career Exploration!

Hi all, I just launched a cool site yesterday that I built on bubble! It’s basically an Airbnb but for career exploration. Professionals, create “Career Excursions” or different ways they want to share their career with others such as a phone call, lunch, or job shadow. And other people can purchase the excursion just like they would an excursion while on vacation. You can create an excursion and share your career or learn about all sorts of other careers. The best part is that the proceeds from the excursions go to a charity of your choice!

I’d love it if you guys could go sign up, create a profile and host a career excursion!

If you aren’t interested in sharing your career with others, use the site to explore other careers. Just sign up, create a profile, and browse through our list of professionals, some who currently work at some pretty impressive companies like - Microsoft, P&G, Bank of America, and more!

http://kareerly.com/

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Site looks great from mobile, although it was taking a few seconds before I could scroll down from the main picture - loading maybe. And the Down Icon didn’t seem to do anything (should it or is it more of a guide?)

Love the idea and excited to see this grow!

Great stuff! Congrats! This is a pretty cool idea. I’ll look to sign-up and will definitely share it.

One question though, do you mind me asking what the driver is behind it solely being funds going to charity? The charity aspect is a wonderful attribute of the site, however, I just wonder if you may attract more people if they are incentivised too. After all, people work hard to get to where they are so may be attracted a little more if there was financial incentive (particularly if they get busy due to being in a desirable career ;). Just a thought, but seriously good stuff!

I thought about that too.

But then I thought if I were the employer, I wouldn’t want my employees making money off of not working (if on company time). However, if the money was going toward a charity that the company supports or is partnered with I could see them supporting it and even pushing it to some employees (PR, recruiting, and corporate charity partnership benefits)

Also I think if the employee got the money, more lower level and lowers salary people would be attracted to this. But with it going to charity it may be tougher to get people on it, but would likely be higher quality employees

I think you’re working on a significant problem and hope that you’re able to get some real traction with the business.

I strongly recommend that you do a few usability sessions with end users because there are few things that are a bit confusing to a new user and it’s very useful for you to see how people new to your product view/understand it. And, I also think it’s great that you didn’t wait to launch until after those usability sessions. Getting out there quickly is awesome – just make sure you prioritize usability sessions fairly soon, imo.

Also, if you haven’t already looked at clarity.fm, definitely do so. It’s a more mature product that matches people for conversations in nearly the exact same way you do. They’re not focused on the career space though (so they’re not competitive) but they’ve done a lot well which you probably want to reverse engineer.

Go crush it!

Thanks @gf_wolfer. Yeah, I’m thinking it was the loading time. I have a carousel with three pictures in the header that I’m thinking of getting rid of. The loading time can take a long time, depending on connection. And the down icon is just a guide, but maybe I should consider it scrolling if someone clicks on it. Thanks for the well wishes!

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Thanks @lyndon.apthorpe for being willing to sign up and share. Good question about not compensating the professional. @gf_wolfer nailed the answer. I thought a lot about whether to pay the professional, but if we did that then employers would shut it down. But they my assumption is that they would be more tolerable if their intentions were to help the student/career seeker and good causes. Also, if professionals get paid, they will undoubtedly drive up prices in order to get more money for the sake of getting more money. Career coaches on the muse can charge up to $300 an hour, and professional entrepreneurs on clarity.fm can charge more than $8 per minute! My vision for Kareerly is to help give anyone, from a poor high-school student to a professional looking for a career change, a chance to learn about careers.

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Thanks @sridharan.s for the well wishes! I will do some usability sessions, that is a good idea! I also was aware of Clarity.fm, but I haven’t actually signed up to see how the whole system works. I think I’ll do that today. Thanks for the good suggestion!

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Good stuff Edgar. That makes a lot of sense.
The company that I work for has a strong focus on donating time to support charities so I could imagine they might have an interest in this.
This is such a great take on it as it can definitely help both charities and seekers, regardless of their income status.

Keep up the great work!

Good job - I like the site design.
After signing up the popup to explain what to do is pretty good.

Here are a few suggestions on things I noticed:

On the profile page I was confused by all the save buttons - there were too many - one for each row? I pushed everyone and it seemed to do the same thing.

You might want to think about giving the profiles easy url’s - use their name combo instead of the long numeric string if they decide to share.

I kinda got lost in the workflow after I made a profile - it wasn’t clear what I should really do next - I think you want most people to setup excursion times and talk about the payment aspect. Some additional thinking there would really help folks from just clicking away.

I would think more about the business model - it seems to me a better way would be to connect to company HR departments that want lead gen from schools. So you get them to pay (most likely an annual subscription) for a service where students can learn more about the role and the company and they can get to know students they might want to talk to more. This changes your model to a B2B vs B2C sales and eliminates your conflict with employees being compensated for their time.

Anyways looks good - I’ll post on linkedin.

John

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Can we feature this on our homepage? Reach out to support@Bubble.is if you’re up for it :slight_smile:

Thanks @john3 for the great feedback.
All of the save buttons and long profile url’s came from not understanding how to do it more effectively. :blush: I’ll keep trying to figure out how to do this better, but yes - I want to get rid of all the save buttons too and make their profiles url’s easier!

I agree, this workflow needs some help. I’ll be working on that next!

I couldn’t agree more with your business model thoughts. I started with this strategy but after pitching it to several companies and getting rejected, I took on the current strategy. However, this was just a concept back then. Now that I have a product, I’m thinking I might get further. I’ll continue to grow this model and as I get more people start hitting up companies!

Thanks for signing up and sharing!

Edgar

Absolutely @emmanuel! I’ll send an email out this weekend!

Ah - I see, no problem - I thought the saves were by design :wink:

How were you pitching - was it for feedback or was it more for sales? Happy to give some thoughts as I’ve been doing lots of pitching and helping others to get into companies as well.

I have a friend who runs a company that does applicant tracking software for companies - might be worth an intro if you’re interested shoot me an email john@gleamfire.com

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