Dear Members,
Happy Friday! It’s been 2 weeks since we announced the launch of our closed beta. Thanks to many of you who have submitted questions, and more importantly, those who have taken the time to craft thoughtful responses!
As we head into the weekend, we thought it might be interesting to share some of the top Q&As that we got from the group.
Top Q&As
How do I hire great engineers in India? We pay top dollar but a lot of candidates are just not passing our interviews.
US Engineering Manager building an Eng Team in India
According to Ganesh Arshavin who’s a former senior engineer at the eCommerce unicorn Carousell and familiar with India engineering hiring, the key is to
Be in the four cities where tech talent is abundant (Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Gurgaon)
Hire a good site director. Referrals are very big in India and it is common in India for managers to recruit other engineers they know with minimal interviewing (even if not many will admit this). From an engineer’s POV, you can imagine how appealing that would be
Paying well and having good benefits are hygiene factors. Note that FAANG engineering salaries in India have risen quite dramatically over the last 2 years. Not uncommon for junior engineers to be paid $60-70K USD in base alone.
I rely on 3rd party distributors for my sales. How do I manage them well and avoid distributor turf wars?
Co-Founder for a B2B tech hardware company
Channeling Adam Iversen, the CEO of Swannies Apparel in the US,
Geographic separation is the easiest way to do it. Having different types of accounts (e.g., mom and pop vs. chain vs ecomm) within the same territory is difficult and I wouldn’t advise it.
The key is to not cede exclusive access to a territory without some minimum sales guarantee, and to make it clear when distributors don’t meet certain sales thresholds. The positive thing about this model is you can forecast sales very well if expectations are clear
Note that distributors have been known to buy from other distributors instead of straight from you if you set up different pricing between geographies
I’m looking to test market demand for a new product line. What is a lightweight way to perform this test?
Head of Growth for EdTech Software, Series A
From Edmund Soriano, Director of Product & Strategy at Noom,
Fake door testing is a pretty common test that start-ups use. You can read more about how to execute one well here.
Key is to capture real purchase intent, possibly through the capture of payment information
If at all possible, selling to existing customers is also your single best bet for efficient expansion given minimal incremental sales and marketing effort
Who is Unsearch?
We are in closed beta with 300+ start-up builders representing
850+ distinct skillsets (everything from optimizing product search to battery life for consumer electronics)
30 industry verticals and 133 sub-verticals (drones and tokenized communities anyone?)
6 continents and 15+ countries (we’re still working on the penguins)
1,000+ company experiences including at places like Loft, Lyft, Uber, Careem, Rotten Tomatoes, Traveloka, Better, Magic Spoon, Drop, PolicyGenius, SEA, Grab, Bytedance, Meta, Airbnb, Divvy, Candy, Spin, Tron, Reserve, Bubble, Spotify, Noom, Forge, Carousell, Vroom, Tokopedia, Coursera, Google …
Fun facts
Someone runs a national sports league with 15 franchise teams in 15 cities
Someone else negotiated the spacecraft launch contract for a lunar lander
Our preferred names cover every letter of the alphabet except O and X
Worth a Read
The State of Start-Up Compensation from Carta. Benchmark HC growth by valuation, job function, salary trends by function, org level
How to value a high-growth, tech company from the former COO at Forge (Global Private Securities Marketplace)
Looking forward to your next question.
Shawn