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Key Values (https://www.keyvalues.com https://www.keyvalues.com) is a one-woman show (oh hi!). I started Key Values as a side project two years ago, but it quic
by lynnetye 7y ago
Key Values (https://www.keyvalues.com https://www.keyvalues.com) is a one-woman show (oh hi!). I started Key Values as a side project two years ago, but it quickly turned into my full-time passion and business. I'm doing ~$30k/month and it's almost all profit since I don't have an office or any employees. I recently talked to Courtland of Indie Hackers (already mentioned in the comments) about how I got here: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/086-lynne-tye-of-key-values https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/086-lynne-tye-of-key-va...
I would never have started Key Values w/o Indie Hackers, so I highly recommend you spend some time there. It's a bottomless treasure chest of inspiration.
- aluminussoma 7y agoThanks for responding. That's really inspirational.
- PKop 7y agoGreat interview on indie hackers podcast. Always motivating to hear from the perspectives of people not trying to grow at all cost, following SV conventional wisdom etc, aiming for more lifestyle type businesses.
- mark-ruwt 7y agoGod, that's a brilliant name/logo.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- damian2000 7y agoAgreed, although I thought it was a key value store as a service at first
- np_tedious 7y agoSame, definitely thought of https://keyvalue.xyz/ https://keyvalue.xyz/ which I haven't used myself, but once recommended (after searching it up) to a client dev for his hackathon project and he was happy with it
- alphagrep12345 7y agoReally good website. However, I'm wondering as to why this is a full-time business. Is most of your time taken by marketing and sales?
- csallen 7y agoA common belief on HN is that any SaaS/tech business is constrained by the complexity of its code and product. Famously, the top comment[0] on Dropbox's HN launch was about how it's not a valuable business because the commenter could build it for himself. There were similar comments here about Asana recently, too, and I'm sure many other startups. If I had to guess, this is due to a combination of two factors. First, some kind of "visibility bias," where we all tend to overvalue things that are highly visible. And second, "man with a hammer" syndrome. We're programmers, so we tend to overvalue the importance of code. But the reality is just as you guessed — marketing, sales, partnerships, content, customer service, etc all play a huge role in a business' success. They require a lot of time, too. Not understanding this is one of the reasons many developer-founders make the mistake of taking on overly ambitious product ideas and not allocating enough time to the rest of their business. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- lynnetye 7y ago^^^ This. Key Values is not valuable because of its code. In fact, it's a simple static site that I could rebuild in a couple of days if I wanted to. I meet a lot of technical founders who love coding and avoid doing everything else. They run the risk of building a lot of fancy features that no one wants or needs.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chii 7y ago> technical founders who love coding and avoid doing everything else. the truth is that these tech co-founders are really looking for a playground to have fun with code/tech, the same way a kid wants to play lego. Building a business is not fun at all. There are tonnes of mundane stuff, and these are fairly important. A technical co-founder is quite likely to have quit their previou job because they want to create an environment where they aren't restricted by the "business people" for doing technical exploration and play. This is why i think finding a business partner who isn't technical is quite important. They can reign you back in.
- ohaideredevs 7y agoI thought this was going to be a storage service for private keys.
- DevX101 7y agoYour indie hackers episode was just recommended to me this week. Will have to check it out!
- tinktank 7y agoSo how are you monetizing it? Is it ads or paid job advertisements or something else?
- lynnetye 7y agoCompanies pay a yearly subscription fee for content creation and listing their profile on Key Values. I never charge software engineers and I don't charge companies any placement fees for the engineers they hire through Key Values. Having a contingency model is definitely the more lucrative path, but I'm against it for two reasons: (1) I'm a dev, not a recruiter, and (2) I think placements fees are part of what's broken in recruiting. The incentives are misaligned among recruiters, candidates, and employers when recruiters only want to place someone just long enough to hit the 90-day mark.
- luminati 7y ago^^The incentives are misaligned among recruiters, candidates, and employers when recruiters only want to place someone just long enough to hit the 90-day mark. Precisely! That's why I think Triplebyte.com is such an overrated company. Behind all their new-age silicon valley spin, they are nothing but an old-school scheming recruiter, charging $10K++ per hire. Think of about it - it's the ultimate rent-seeking industry out there. I feel that the $10K should go to the candidate who is actually going to do all the work and/or be re-invested into R&D (actually adding value to the world rather than paying fat recruiters).
- enraged_camel 7y ago$10k per hire sounds like a lot, until you realize that engineers add hundreds of thousands of dollars in value to their companies per year, if not much more. And good hires are worth their weight in gold. So clearly, Triplebyte’s success is at least to an extent the result of their delivering value to their clients.
- mandeepj 7y ago
- mrfusion 7y agoNeat! Could you add a category for part time? How do you enforce that the companies are being honest? Also the filters seems to OR each other so the more I pick the more results I get. I think most people expect filters to be AND.
- solipsism 7y agoYeah, the filter really turns me off. The number of matches going up as I try to narrow things down is frustrating.
- hanniabu 7y agoI second this sentiment
- lynnetye 7y ago1. I think only ~1/150 companies I talk to are actively hiring part-time engineers, so it's unlikely I'll add this category any time soon... if ever. (Sorry!) 2. A lot of people don't trust employers, but in reality, hiring managers aren't trying to mislead people. Especially at small startups. It's extremely expensive (and heart-breaking!) to interview, hire, and onboard devs only to have them leave soon after. It's a competitive market and software engineers have their pick of the litter, so companies want to attract the right candidates, the ones who are truly aligned w/ their values and will stick around for the long haul. 3. Trust me, I don't want to use OR logic either! Once there are enough companies on Key Values for AND logic to provide a good user experience, I'll switch. For now, the results are sorted by number of matches and how highly companies rank those matches.
- zrobotics 7y agoConsider that you may be turning people off the product: I had run into this service before (as a job-seeker) , but gave up simply because I couldn't actually drill down to anything meaningful-it didn't offer anything above browsing job boards. Even with a small # of offerings, AND logic allows people to filter down to what they are actually seeking. Providing a ranked list that grows the more specific I am being is, in my mind, negative value, since now I have to sort through a longer list of results that likely don't match at all. There's nothing wrong with providing a page that states "there are zero results for this query, but if you relaxed {X} then there are {y} employers avaliable.
- dominotw 7y agowould love to have an 'interview' section. This has some info. https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
- lynnetye 7y agoEvery company summarizes their engineering interview process in their profile. You’ll find it in the right-hand side panel.
- dominotw 7y agoah ok. I wanted to filter out white board interviewers before applying other filters :D
- lynnetye 7y agoI was just talking to the team at Airtable this morning about whiteboard interviews... and how they aren't binary. Companies use whiteboards in their interviews to varying degrees, and it's not always to answer algorithms or questions about data structures. I also wrote about this exact topic last year: https://www.keyvalues.com/blog/engineering-whiteboard-interviews-yay-or-nay https://www.keyvalues.com/blog/engineering-whiteboard-interv...
- dominotw 7y ago> it's not always to answer algorithms or questions about data structures. Oh yea from the github link > "Whiteboards" is used as a metaphor, and is a symbol for the kinds of CS trivia questions that are associated with bad interview practices. Sorry should've been clear in my first comment.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cypherpunks01 7y agoI was interested in knowing how you got the idea for this, and reading your about page confirmed my suspicion that this is an amazingly simple example of the whole "make a product that solves a problem in your own life" sentiment. Kudos!
- rjzzleep 7y agoHow did you end up managing 150 people a couple of months after dropping out of grad school?
- dahdum 7y agoHeads up I can’t seem to get half the tags (self-funded for example) to filter. I select and then hit select values and nothing happens. On an iPad / Safari.
- yoube 7y agoJust an FYI, the site is blocked under Sophos.
- wayoverthecloud 7y agoUsing Sophos too. Doesn't seem blocked for me.
- nodesocket 7y ago> I'm doing ~$30k/month and it's almost all profit since I don't have an office or any employees. Awesome job. I am really surprised with that kind of revenue you don't spring for an office or dedicated office space at WeWork. You might as well spend money on your business, either that or you paying taxes to uncle sam (assuming you based out of the US). I try and buy a new MacBook Pro each year, might as well get a high end asset I use daily and the deduction.
- Swalden123 7y agoI’m not sure how the US tax system works, it seems doubtful that if you spend money on an asset you can deduct the full amount from the tax you pay? In Australia you would basically deduct the purchase price of a MacBook Pro off the total profit you calculate tax on so it ends up being around a 30% discount on the MacBook Pro. If it’s similar in the US at all spending profit pointlessly would just be throwing money away?
- bryanrasmussen 7y agosurely that depends on the type of company you have? If you have a personal company then I expect it is like that, if on the other hand you are incorporated the full purchase should be deductible, the reasoning of course is that a product you buy for a personal company is also used for you.
- jjeaff 7y agoNo matter the type of company, deducting 100% of something does not reduce your tax burden by that amount. Multiply your tax rate times the amount of the deduction to see you tax savings. If you deduct 100% of a laptop and you or your company pays 30% tax rate, then you save about $300 because you were able to deduct. You aren't getting the laptop for free.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoIf a company buys a laptop for a 1000 that is an operating expense of that company, if it is a personal company that is to say you are the sole owner and it is not incorporated then you can deduct part of the cost of that laptop which I thought I already indicated. If on the other hand the company is incorporated in some way - and because I am not referring to any particular country I just mean in some way the money spent on that laptop will not be counted in the company's profits and not be taxable. on edit: unless of course this is different in the country under discussion but in the countries I'm familiar with it works that way, also note I have not discussed depreciation which would definitely apply to a laptop.
- ttty 7y agoA suggestion would be to make that select values button to work or do something.
- onesmalluser 7y agoHow much do you charge each company?
- Aeolun 7y agoIt may just be that all companies select the same values, but even deselecting basically everything I still get +/- 80 results.
- Tepix 7y agoI think in the beginning nothing is selected. For example selecting „work life balance“ gives me 7 results.
- noisy_boy 7y agoI have a feedback for you - would be great if you can add filters (separate from the value filters) e.g. I selected my priority values and then wanted to filter the results with only remote jobs but no such option was available. Similarly one might want to filter the results by location etc.
- tixocloud 7y agoReally great idea! How do you measure the softer criteria like “Eats lunch together”?
- dandare 7y agoCould I ask how much time you send on sales and marketing compared to development/engineering?
- amelius 7y agoNice idea, but I miss society related values here (which are increasingly important for many people). For example, what if I don't want to work for a company that trades user data? Also negative externalities of a company are not clearly shown.
- cyrilbenson47 7y agoI hope you can add more remote work soon.
- codesternews 7y agoHow do you collect data?
- dorfsmay 7y agoWhere do you get revenue from? Ads?
- bggy00 7y agoI call BS on some of these, like EQ > IQ at Github, lol.
- bggy00 7y agoA lot of these are manager-dependent, like 'fosters psychological safety'. My impression is that these are snapshots of how the companies would like to be seen, which is what they are paying for. They aren't paying for an 'audit' of what their true value are, or for insight from employees (like Glassdoor).
- erroneousboat 7y agoLoved the interview by the way!
- bitcoinmoney 7y agoLove the name! What’s the business model? Not very obvious from the website
- akash7 7y agoIs there a way to AND the filters, instead of OR?
- real-hacker 7y agoI thought this is a Key/Value store. :)
- jdwyah 7y agoThis is great. In a mildly amusing side-note, in order to fill out my companies profile, my (barely profitable) side project is a perfect fit: https://forcerank.it https://forcerank.it lets you have your team rank all the values so you can see what the team actually thinks your values are.
- bigboris 7y agoSweet mother...this is awesome. As a very technical engineer currently lost in a sea of bean counters and project managers, it has been a real challenge wading through idiotic recruiters and endless repeated garbage job postings. Thank you for Key Values...this is gold.