Welcome to the “We’re Building Something Big” blog. The purpose of this blog is to document the ups and downs of building a start-up from the ground up for two reasons: (1) selfishly, to (hopefully) build a little buzz about our company, and (2) unselfishly, to share some lessons learned with others in the startup community.

To summarize, I do Business Development for Transmitive. Transmitive is creating a product that turns your phone, tablet, or PC into a remote control for your entire home entertainment system. As of the writing of this post, we are a few short months from launch.

Our product consists of both hardware, which is essentially an infrared emitter, and software. Thus far, we have contracted out our software development work. While this has been a relatively successful approach, we concluded that it’s critical to have a full-time technical member on the team. So, we launched a search for a Lead Developer / CTO in New York City.

Our initial approach to recruiting a Developer was to post on Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, and various other no- and low-cost sites. Craigslist in particular yielded a large number of responses; probably 20-30 for each city to which we posted. Of these:

• Roughly one third were contract design firms offering to on/off-shore the work
• Another one third were people who were obviously applying to every job posting with the word “developer” in it, who ignored our “interested candidates should submit…” requirements, and often didn’t even have cover letters.
• The final one third were generally qualified applicants, but a very small number (maybe 5-10%) were people that got us fired up.

Coincidentally, I met with Charlie O’Donnell two weeks after starting our search. Charlie is a Principal at First Round Capital, prolific startup/tech blogger, and generally sharp guy. I told Charlie about our struggle to recruit tech talent. Charlie had recently written an incredibly relevant post on “This is going to be BIG”, but he also gave me some advice that really sunk in: “It’s not hiring. It’s recruiting. Great candidates aren’t going to find you. You have to find them.” He explained that he had called 500 developers before finding the right person for his last startup.

In the weeks since that meeting, I’ve proactively contacted about 100 promising candidates located in New York City. I’ve identified people by scouring development-related groups on Meetup and using LinkedIn’s advanced search feature. There are certainly other ways to source names, but both of these were very effective. Then, I tried to find each person’s personal email address. They can usually be found on a blog, StackOverflow, Google Plus profile, etc. If I couldn’t find an email address, I tried to message people using LinkedIn InMail or through the “contact” link on that person’s Meetup, Quora, or other web profile.

While we haven’t hired anyone yet, I can tell you definitely that the “recruiting” approach has been a success. Sure, it takes a little bit of time, but developers are surprisingly responsive to direct outreach, and the average quality of the candidates with whom we’re speaking has soared. I’m confident that another few weeks of effort will land us the perfect candidate. There are also lots of ancillary benefits, too, such as meeting interesting people, and getting your company’s name in front of 100 local folks in the tech community. Here is a summary of the data:
Also, if you know any developers looking for an exciting startup, send them to dk@transmitive.com.