“Geek Cred Realized”
Work for Pie allows software developers and technical content producers to create a showcase of their skills and their work. Resumes are often full of fluff and lack any real substance. As an alternative, we provide a profile that highlights real skill and work that you’ve actually done. It’s like a baseball card – but geekier. There’s a little bit of style. Users can customize the look of their profile. And there’s a lot of substance. We allow people to list their technical skills such as programming languages and tools, and we let them feature samples of their work. We then accentuate those with a simple score based on stats from other online communities such as Github and Stack Overflow.
Team builders love it, because it gives them a quick way to evaluate talent. Developers love it, because it helps them stand out from the crowd.
“You’re not “given” $15K–you’re charged with the task of turning that $15K into something significantly more substantial. You’re starting a company.”
“I’ve learned more, grown more, and gotten more great advice in 10 weeks here than I did in 2 years there” (about his alma mater)
“Mentors have been tremendous. I’m not sure a single mentor–either ours or all of the mentors that we had dinner with and so on–spoke up and said ‘You’ve got a great, awesome product. I wouldn’t change a thing.’ That’s what you need with mentors. Tough love is good, and it makes you better, it makes your product better, and it makes your company better.”
-Cliff McKinney, Co-Founder, Work for Pie
Updates:
New Profiles
Our new profiles are almost ready to go! Our plan is to have them completely finished and integrated by 7/18.
Press
The positive response we’ve received from our features in Mashable and Inc.com has been wonderful, but it’s only the beginning. We’ve received a write-up request from the guys at The Next Web, which we hope will be released sometime shortly after we integrate the new profiles, and we’ll be featured in an upcoming episode of the Jumpstart Foundry Podcast. We’ve only been in existence for a couple months, so the interest has come as a surprise to us, but an awesome surprise to say the least.
Users
We’re approaching the 1,000 users milestone, and hope to reach it sometime next week. Our daily signups since the Mashable feature are more than 5 times what they were before the article was released, and with the upcoming press we expect user growth to continue at a rapid pace.
Customers
What’s most exciting for us (and probably for you) is that despite exactly zero effort on the customer side, we’ve already received a significant amount of interest. Several recruiters and companies have reached out to us directly regarding the ability to search our user data, and quite a few more have mentioned what a great resource this will be when we launch our careers service. We’ve started a mailing list for potential customers, and will be updating them on our progress on a fairly regular basis.
In addition, we’ve begun the process of reaching out to companies directly and requesting that they allow applicants to submit a Work for Pie profile in lieu of or in addition to a resume for their open developer positions. This helps us increase our user count, develop an early relationship with future customers, and of course get feedback from the right people. We will initially target 50 companies, and have set a goal to contact at least 10 more every week. If you’ve ever wondered exactly how many companies are looking for what we’re offering, kindly peruse nearly every job post on the following threads. That should answer the question for you. 
http://news.ycombinator.com/
http://nytm.org/made/ – This is a similar thread for companies hiring in the NYC area. Again, samples of work is a key requirement in many of the posts.
One Last Thing…
We’re happy to announce that we’ll be sponsoring The Strange Loop Conference, to be held in St. Louis in September. This is our first sponsorship of a major developer conference, and we’re really excited. They expect more than 800 developers to be in attendance, and what’s really great is that they actually allow the attendees to build personal profiles so that everyone can get to know each other. We’re going to work with them to integrate their profiles with our own, so everyone in attendance will get a double dose of pie!
Thanks a bunch for all the support you’ve given us over the past weeks and months. We’ll talk to you soon!
Website: http://workforpie.com/
Twitter: @workforpie
CrunchBase Profile: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/work-for-pie
President, CEO — Founder and Business Lead Cliff McKinney — Hometown: Jackson, SC
Founder and Technical Lead Brad Montgomery — Hometown: Lepanto, AR
Mentors: Brian Swanson, Meka Egwuekwe, Jan Bouten
