Google "how to become a software engineer," and you're met with ads. For a new graduate exploring career paths, that's not helpful. Phil Strazzulla, the founder of LifeGuides, realizes that. And on Tuesday it became clear Dorm Room Fund Boston does, as well. The student-run venture firm announced it's investing $20,000 into the startup in hopes of changing how millennials search for jobs.
Lifeguides launched in July, two months after Strazzulla graduated from Harvard Business School. At the time, the website was focused on helping fellow graduates navigate life's most challenging events, providing content around questions like, "What do companies look for in a college hire?" Or, "Should I get an MBA?"
Although those lessons are still there, the startup has switched its business model and, with that, given the LifeGuides' site a redesign.
"We were almost creating a Quora," Strazzulla explained. "But what we realized over the summer is that people need a very strong incentive to create content."
And what bigger incentive do companies need than the ability to hire?
LifeGuides has since brought on a wide-ranging slew of beta customers, including Sears, VMTurbo and HourlyNerd. What the startup will do is interview two or three employees serving the same role at a partner company and create content around what it's like to work as, say, a technician at Sears. From there, LifeGuides will aggregate similar content from other retailers it's working with to provide a comprehensive look at what a particular career looks like.
LifeGuides recently published the guide, "Working as a Software Engineer at a Startup." There, advice is provided by software engineers from the likes of Liminex, Thinkful, Beechwoods and HourlyNerd.
"I'm confident we created the most comprehensive guide [of how to become a software engineer]," Strazzulla said, "and we're going to do that for a thousand other jobs."
Roughly 40 guides are currently on the site, put together with the help of 150 overall mentors.
"Our goal is to keep building that base of content," Strazzulla added, "so hopefully next year we have hundreds of guides among thousands of mentors."
LifeGuides' slight pivot will help. On the sidebar of the same software engineering page, LifeGuides has placed a "We're hiring" sign with a link to HourlyNerd's job postings. Providing companies with the opportunity to market the benefits of a given career, and then highlight their own open opportunities in that field, will prove to be crucial to LifeGuides' growth.
To the Dorm Room Fund, financing LifeGuides was a no-brainer. Wrote Northeastern student Matt Bilotti, a managing partner of the firm, in a blog post announcing the funding:
Across all of the companies we fund, and most startups, there’s one major challenge that still hasn’t been solved … recruiting. Startups are constantly doing their best to virtually strut their stuff, show off their culture and fight for the top talent. Our newest portfolio company, LifeGuides, is going to help companies do just that.
Strazzulla said the Dorm Room Fund has already proven to be an asset to LifeGuides, which is currently based out of the Harvard Innovation Lab's alumni incubator space, the Launch Lab. "I've been super, super impressed," Strazzulla acknowledged, noting the firm has helped him recruit campus representatives, gain free access to software and will likely prove to be an invaluable resource when raising an angel round, which the startup is currently trying to do.
As the Dorm Room Fund highlighted: "LifeGuides is going to make it way easier for everyone to land in a role that they’ll be excited about."
And who can't get behind that?
Images via LifeGuides
