Look closely at the opportunity & challenges before building an HR app

I'm going to pass because I know [your friend's HR app startup's] market up close and personal, and it is very difficult -- very difficult to find decision makers, very difficult to deal with powerless wishy washy HR people, difficult to find a consensus or compelling event, and difficult to get people to pay money. One can make money in HR -- a la Zenefits -- but the "soft" stuff is very hard to sell in any volume and in a way where the unit economics work. I learned the hard way the second time around with [my HR app startup] that if one is applying investor logic -- pick a big big ass market with lots of free and urgent spending -- then HR is off the table as a market space. I usually tell entrepreneurs -- do a ton of research and study all the failures, zombies and barely growing companies and learn from that before starting up. I also say that unless one truly truly loves HR topics and wants to do it for the rest of their lives, then do something else. I know a lot of entrepreneurs that went down with the ship and wasted precious time capital in the bottoms-up, corporate feedback markets -- http://www.quora.com/Why-did-WorkSimple-shut-down And a lot more are still putting copious time in. [A good entrepreneur and person] at [another HR app startup] has been at it persistently for a few years. [Another entrepreneur] who started [an enterprise gamification copany] is now doing it. [Another HR app startup] was doing it and pivoted to CRM. [A brilliant, successful statistics expert] was working on [another HR company that he just sold after years of hard work]. If [your friend] isn't already 1000% in, I think someone as talented as he sounds could find a much much better market to work in and much better place to invest his time capital.

#Marketselection #hr