Work for Pie is Partnering with Group Talent! :)

Today we’re happy to announce an exclusive partnership with GroupTalent!

When we decided that it was time to close the doors on Work for Pie, what upset us the most was that we wouldn’t be able to give our users the service we had envisioned. We’d always hoped that Work for Pie would eventually become the best place for software developers to discover great companies and find awesome jobs. The truth is, there aren’t all that many companies that do it very well. It’s part of the reason we got into the business in the first place.

One exception is GroupTalent. The company is run by engineers, and they’re one of the few companies that truly put developers first in the recruiting and hiring process. When they contacted us about partnering with them, we were intrigued. Then, the more we got to know Manny and the team, the more excited we became about giving our users a career search option that was every bit as good as what we’d hoped to offer.

GroupTalent has been at this for a while, and they understand what developers hate (violations of privacy, spam, and opportunities for which they’re not qualified and/or interested) and what they love (awesome job opportunities that fit). They can help you whether your search is urgent or passive, and they can help whether you’re looking for full time or contract work.

It’s important to us that you know that your joining GroupTalent is completely optional. We’re not selling or giving away your information without your permission. We of course highly encourage you to give GroupTalent a try, but there is no obligation to do so. At the end of the day, we want you to be happy, and if a shiny new job brought to you by GroupTalent does that, then that’s really awesome.

It’s super easy to get started. Just go to workforpie.com and sign up through the portal we’ve set up for our users. Once you do, you’ll be seamlessly transitioned and when you’re ready the good folks at GroupTalent will get you set up for your next great job.

If you happen to be a company looking to hire great folks, you can do that via GroupTalent as well. Again, just go to workforpie.com and sign up via the company link.

Direct links:

Developer Sign Up: https://grouptalent.com/apply/workforpie

Company Sign Up: https://grouptalent.com/submit/workforpie

We hope that for those of you who are looking for work, this outcome makes you happy. Thank you all so much for your support these past couple years!

Work for Pie is Shutting Down

Well, the day we’d hoped would never come is here. We’ve made the difficult decision to shut Work for Pie down on August 31st. On the surface, the reasons are simple:

1. Work for Pie isn’t generating enough revenue to allow us to continue working on it full time.
2. We failed to secure additional funding to support the company as we built the business.
3. We needed to be able to financially support our families and ultimately decided that we needed new jobs to do so.
4. We didn’t think it was fair to our users, our clients, or especially to our new employers to continue to run Work for Pie on a part time basis.

Underneath the surface, it gets a little more complicated than that. I’m sure we’ll write about lessons learned at some point in the near future. For now, though, we’d rather steer clear of that and instead give a huge thanks to all of the people who have supported us over the past two plus years:

To our investors, thank you for allowing us to try to make our dreams come true. You put great faith in us and in Work for Pie, and we’re deeply sorry that we’ve failed to make it the resounding success we’d all hoped for. Please don’t let it stop you from continuing to invest in startups in this great city of ours. One day soon you’ll start to reap the rewards for doing so.

To our clients, thank you for taking a chance on us. Selling a brand new concept to companies that have never heard of you is tough work, but you took a chance on us and it means a lot.

To our users, thank you for joining, for providing feedback, and for helping us grow. We’re truly sorry that we weren’t able to give you the product that we’d hoped to give you. The next version of Work for Pie was going to be pretty awesome, and not being able to build it really sucks.

To Seed Hatchery and Start Co, thank you for getting us started on this entrepreneurial journey. Despite this outcome, we’d both do it all over again, and you helped us get off the ground. We learned a lot via Seed Hatchery, and are still learning from the folks we’ve had the privilege of mentoring over the past couple years. Thank you for taking chances on crazy ideas and hungry founders who don’t yet know what they don’t know.

To our many friends in the Memphis community and beyond, thank you for all of your support. Many of you have supported us and have seen us grow from the very beginning, when we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. You’ve given your time and in some cases your money to help us out. We’re sorry the outcome isn’t quite what we all wanted. Don’t let it deter you from starting your own companies, from helping others with theirs, or from supporting entrepreneurship. Yes, most startups fail, but some of them don’t.

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We decided back in March that we were going to spend the three remaining months of our runway giving Work for Pie everything we possibly had to try to make it a success. Some folks had already given up on us, but we truly thought we still had a shot. We worked around the clock during those months, and though the outcome wasn’t successful, we can both walk away knowing that we gave it our all. To be able to say that we’ve been good stewards of our investment dollars and that we’ve tried our best to make things work is extremely important to us, and we’re glad we’re able to do so.

For now, both of us will be getting back into the working world. We both crave some stability after all the stress and uncertainty that these past two years have given us. But we’ll be around, to mentor, to bounce ideas off of, and hopefully to help others so that they don’t make some of the same mistakes we made.

To both our users and our clients, we’d like to recommend that you give Group Talent or Coderwall a try if you haven’t already done so. Both companies have a high degree of respect for developers and put them first, and they also happen to be building something that’s pretty close to what we’d hoped Work for Pie might become.

That’s all for now folks. If you have any questions or comments don’t hesitate to reach out. We appreciate everything you’ve done for us.

Cliff & Brad