How to conduct a job #huntatscale

I’m looking for epic work, and I’ve chosen to use the best of new startup ops and go-to-market tech to conduct a maximalist, leveraged job search.

This is the project home for that job hunt. Last updated @September 8, 2024 .

Table of pancakes

• How to conduct a job #huntatscale
• Table of pancakes
• The stack I’m using to #huntatscale
• Some thoughts as I begin the job search
• Real-time project overview
• Kickoff, setup website, content, project systems
• Create content calendar, expand site, ICP prospecting

The stack I’m using to #huntatscale

Some thoughts as I begin the job search

Reimagining the job hunt as a go-to-market motion

Actively or passively, most of us search for work in ways that are no longer effective. Job seekers need systems, not Easy Apply. I’m building one to find career-defining work.

Low-code, AI and automation: the operators toolkit

Developers may still long have an edge here, but today’s landscape for no and low-code capabilities is more remarkable than ever. It may be most consequential for operators.

The role of exploration and horizontal learning

Immigrant entrepreneurship without prior means requires learning routine utility and survival. To learn broadly (and the resulting set of deep skills) in tech is work in the age of AI.

The pancakes (software stack) to #huntatscale

How do you run a 5-50 person+ company? Unsurprisingly, with many of the same tools to support an extra job search, although admittedly limited to many freemium tiers.

Table stakes for content and community strategies are rising

Today, the overhead to build a high-quality, high-output content and user engagement has never been lower. It’s a go-to-market orientation all startups must consider.

1. Create Buttery Stack directory website, backend CMS for web and LinkedIn, project management hubs and various analytics

I started by building a directory of great software in a single day with Notion and Wordware.

The directory is a valuable web property and serves multiple practical functions to support in my job search, with easy analogies to work in startups:

• Provide utility, deliver value, communicate information
• Track visits, behavior, page or “product” conversions
• Demonstrate quality, builds trust, basis for referral
• Future income from referrals + content, if desirable

At first I was unsure if I wanted to use Super.so to skin a Notion content backend (think Notion for Wordpress) but then I discovered Scheduled.so. This tool allows me to directly cross-publish to the website, web blog, or LinkedIn natively from Notion. I have my backend for content management with some small programmatic flairs both out of the box and built through Notion’s powerful flexibility.

The directory has otherwise been set up with the following goodies:

• Auto-structuring cookies tracking hooray (CookieScript)
• Visitor traffic and account-level analytics (GA-4, Koala, RB2B)
• CMS backend cross-publishing to the web or LinkedIn
• Contact form and meeting booking (Tally, Reclaim)
• Shortlink tracking for directory referrals, inbound conversion (Dub.co)

Finally, I used Notion to build a baker’s dozen different operational utilities to more effectively interact with the databases I’ve made (including for cross-channel content, the software directory, Wordware flows, tasks log and analytics reporting). It’s perhaps a bit extra.

From @September 4, 2024 — @September 6, 2024

2. Front-load content rhythm, define ICP, trial prospecting and enrichment workflows, setup reporting structure

In replicating a go-to-market motion in my job search, Buttery Stack can become an invaluable tool. A blog, About and #huntatscale (this one!) pages are created.

After getting 5-6 days of content out of the way, I can begin looking at how I’ll use Clay to define my prospecting criteria and enrichment workflows. My goal is to find and contact the companies I’d like to work with at scale, or in a highly effective manner leveraging new tools.

Here’s a quick look at the outbound kit:

🧱 Clay — I’m using Clay to a) find relevant companies b) enrich their data profiles as much as I can and c) add personalized snippets to my playbooks, representing hypothetical directions for my job search. With Clay, I can go from the LinkedIn link of a fund I want to search, scrape all of their portfolio companies, search for open roles, and or enrich and email specific people.

🐨 Koala — Koala’s free plan provides company account-level visitor tracking and behavior analytics via intent signals for both the US and EU. I send all events data to Slack, and have otherwise set up a webhook pushing the signal to Clay for optional enrichment. It’s a neat to have.

🔍 RB2B — RB2B is a bit of a darling or a nightmare depending on which side of the privacy spectrum you have. Only targeting IP addresses in the US, it gives me LinkedIn profile visitor identification.

🗂️ Notion — Hub to track weekly reporting across sales, marketing and pm, etc.

As for CRM… well, let’s leave CRM for another day. I don’t want to end up paying for Attio just to ditch the data set when no longer subscribing, in which case I’d use Airtable and have to eat the inefficiencies in the workflow once I begin engaging en-masse with job prospects.

I’m committing to weekly public reporting as a routine of business during my search. Beginning with engagement numbers from LinkedIn and Buttery Stack I’ll slowly expand reporting to include things like intros made and hiring process counts. Fun times.

Lastly, let it be known that an obscene amount of time can be wasted fiddling around with new tools you either haven’t used or used in this context. Every project has this, but when the timeline and efforts are accelerated (as in a competitive startup) it feels like a huge loss.

From @September 6, 2024 — @September 12, 2024

3. ICP prospecting in Clay, data export to Airtable and a week in San Francisco

You can do incredible things with a list of LinkedIn URLs of VC funds these days.

This week was all about prospecting and enrichment in Clay — aka finding companies, people, and their contact information, for portfolio companies that I have determined “most relevant” according to my Ideal Company Profiles.

I’m in San Francisco for the week and had the opportunity to speak at length with the B2B startups advisor and Community Leader for B2B Sales SME from Startups.com, Jay Miller. I asked him what he felt the #1 issue that Seed and Series A startups face in their go-to-market motions. The reply, perhaps unsurprisingly (and yet…) was that we all need to niche down, to be more specific about who we sell to and why. Focusing on a list of 50 highly relevant accounts is a better use of time for early stage startups than trying to reach 500+ accounts.

In my case, even if I have a shortlist of 50 companies I know I’d want to work with, I need higher volumes to make the conversion math work. There are some shortcomings to this logic which I won’t go into here, namely for those companies that I can identify in my ICP and with relevant, open roles. In Norway and Scandinavia, this presents a problem, as there are just too few companies if I limit myself to “what I know I know” about open role opportunities. And despite only needing a conversion acceptance of 1, candidates have more leverage when they have several offers from different companies to compare and choose from. So let’s leverage.

Here’s how I’m tracking application stages:

• Lead with open role
• Applied
• Lead no open role
• Contacted
• First meeting
• Second meeting
• Third meeting
• Offer made
• Offer accepted

If we apply back of the napkin conversion percentages on top of this funnel, it tells us approximately how much top-of-funnel volume would be required to receive 1 offer. Real world numbers are needed to update these assumptions and plan future prospecting, i.e. what volume of new leads are required per-period in order to hit closing targets X days (present sales cycle) into the future.

Here is a simplified example starting with 50 leads in my ICP:

• Lead to first meeting — 20% conversion, 10 role/company leads in ICP
• First to second — 25% conversion, 2.5 make it to second meeting
• Second to offer — 10% conversion, .25 make an offer

For anyone with a modicum of sales experience out there, this example (and skipping stages!) will raise a few red flags. For one, a 20% conversion on cold applications / outbound would be a rock star number to post for any rep. So too would any job seeker balk at the idea that 1 in 5 applications sent into the void would result in an interview. Without dwelling too much on this, I don’t believe that any of these numbers are accurate, and my hope is that my maximalist approach to this job search will improve top-of-funnel conversion numbers — I want <50%…

My present hypothesis (and CRM data set of companies and leads) is that ca. 400 companies and ca. 650 individuals leads will result in 5-10 offers, which I will leave you to do the math on. In Scandinavian terms, 400 potential employers is an enormous number, and I have failed to niche down in any meaningful way. In fact, I’ve only really applied 2 primary and 2 secondary criteria to my prospecting: companies of 15-75 employees in specific portfolios, and that are predominantly based in Scandinavia and not operating in certain industries.

Now to enjoy my time at the Wordware offices as I watch their rocket ship take off.

From @September 13, 2024 — @September 20, 2024

4. Oslo Innovation Week, playbook content prep and some last tinkering before outbound begins

Returning from San Francisco always instills a combination of inspiration and FOMO. This time was fortunately tempered by Oslo Innovation Week, which despite living in a socialist petro-state, does its best to highlight and further the great things being done by the startup and technology bubble in Norway.

Unfortunately, as time would tell (projects updates coming in late due to sickness mentioned below), said government has closed the door to the future of non-state and non-extractive industries through a structurally detrimental tax regime that has and will continue to chase capital and talent out of the country.

Okay, on to some updates.

Initially, I believed content preparation would be made towards VC and startup ICPs, and assuming the possibility that there were funds that are looking for venture builders to work on a combination of portfolio support and deal flow. I am at present dropping this hypothesis more for a personal disinterest, however it may prove to be tenable for my job prospects. The main reason being that I sincerely hope to be able to focus my time and energies on a single prospect. This corresponds to my equal desire to be a part of a growth journey that is equal parts fun, difficult and lucrative — there’s really no point without the win.

The second hypothesis I was planning on testing was that of consulting opportunities vis-à-vis startups that may need my expertise and support but are not in a position to or not well timed to hire me full time. The reason I am no longer going to test this explicitly is because it has become clear that I don’t need to; based on my engagements to date, there would seem to be a sufficient number of consulting opportunities to tide my over should I choose to pursue them.

Therefore, I can define my #huntatscale ICP as the following:

• B2B startups with a Scandinavian fund I admire on their cap table
• Stage Seed — Series A+ using filter parameters 15 — 75 employees
• Not including marketing, sales technologies, a couple other industries

As detailed above, this limits me to a relatively small number of companies for an outbound campaign (iykyk) even if that presumption falls short of the realities of a job search, where the closing rate can be asymptotic towards zero so long as we’re dealing with a lower bound of 1. Nonetheless, from experience and knowing the job market in Scandinavian tech (poor) it may very well be that I need to go on 3-400 dates before meeting anyone who wants to go steady.

The content I have created to speak to these companies is comprised of 3 snippets:

• My personal journey and professional background
• The ambitions I have for my next company, role and scope responsibilities
• Why I am interested in the company and 3 things I can immediately bring to the table (unique)

The one thing I am missing, and that I still don’t know how to square the circle on, is the distinction between the Chief of Staff and other operational or growth roles. Scandinavia is a decade behind the US in more ways than one, and my dream role just doesn’t exist here to the same extent as it does in the states. My attempts to remedy this through information (link) and dialogue have fallen short of my hopes — founders in the Nordics don’t know what they don’t know and they don’t seem to be interested in updating their points of reference to what the best companies in the world are doing. Sweden may be the only exception.

To this end, I am going to effectively prioritize remote opportunities with Swedish startups, followed by Danish startups. While I’d love to work on-site in my hope market, the Norwegian startup landscape is getting nuked from above by the government and I do not believe I will have any job security unless I look abroad in as many ways as I can. The de-risking of relations with Norway is not my own — dozens of founders, investors and other business leaders have been speaking out for months (falling upon deaf ears) about how dangerous the government’s decisions are. I want to stay, but I will not tie my personal economic wagon to a crippled horse. I am increasingly open to working hybrid internationally as well, as my permanent residency timeline is fast approaching…

From @September 21, 2024 — @September 29, 2024

5. Outbound begins — just kidding — birthday weekend and the sickest I’ve been in years…

No notes beyond a wicked case of norovirus following a birthday weekend and a much anticipated trip that was cut short after only 24 hours.

Still recovering. Next updates tbd. Hoping that outbound can begin next week, but will have to see based on the body and other responsibilities.

From @September 30, 2024 — @October 9, 2024

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