Status update - 2022-04

This is a monthly series reporting on how things are going at Console. This post looks at what happened in April.

Focus for April

I wrote last month:

In April we'll be publishing more company profiles and experimenting with how they should be highlighted in the newsletter. We're also thinking about how we can collect preferences for the types of jobs engineers would like to see, and how to connect them with companies hiring.

So how did we do?

Devtools jobs

We spend a lot of time speaking with companies as we try products for our weekly devtools newsletter. There are three main challenges we end up discussing: how to find initial / early users and customers, how to hire good engineers, and how to find good investors.

We started Console to help with the first problem - solving the challenges developers have discovering interesting devtools whilst working with vendors to get the best tools in front of experienced engineers. This is the primary goal of the weekly Console newsletter.

Helping address the third challenge - finding good investors - came naturally as we spoke to more and more early stage startups. Having successfully sold several businesses in the past, we've been investing our own capital as an angel investor in interesting early-stage startups we come across. We've have now made around ~20 investments and have helped several of our portfolio with reviews in the newsletter that generate significant interest timed to launches and announcements. We apply the same newsletter selection criteria for our investments so our subscribers can continue to trust our quality checks for what we review.

The company profiles section of the website we soft-launched last month is our first iteration towards helping with the second challenge - engineering recruitment. We now have 8 devtools company profiles live on the website - AutoCloud, CodeSee, Grafbase, Oso, Retool, Sourcegraph, Trunk, Vantage - with another 6 in the pipeline for the next month.

Most engineers have experienced the pain of trying to find interesting places to work, recruiter spam, and discovering roles that match their preferences. Companies hiring see the other side - low response rates, difficulty standing out, and major challenges even finding the best people.

Over the coming months we'll be developing this idea further with the aim of launching an email-first product for experienced engineers to find the best jobs and for companies to reach the best engineers.

Jobs Console visualization.

Focus for May

In May we'll be launching the initial test of our jobs email product.