How to make a Web Site Profitable?

We built a high quality, scalable and well put together Career based web application that caters to the IT/Tech industry. It is designed to compete with the best and biggest (think Dice.com, Monster.com). The only problem is we have the technological know-how but No marketing wits whatsoever. We have no idea how to run and promote the site. to that end we are looking to turn it over either to a company or a group of entrepreneur that can run it and make it profitable. Anyone interested??

Before you built your high quality monster killer - did you find out if anybody needed it? If so - go to them and tell them that you're ready to go. If not - you might be in trouble.

The reason why people go to monster is because there are a lot of jobs. The reason why there are a lot of jobs because businesses see that people come there so they actually post jobs.

No matter how great your app is - if you can't resolve this chicken and egg problem - the business is in trouble.

I will suggest just stop focusing on development new features, instead just start telling companies about your product, and if you can, allow them to post their jobs free on your website or application, by this you will get lots of genuine jobs posted on your website. You can target small companies, as they will be interested in posting jobs for free. You can do contracts with the companies about various services And at the same time market about your product to job seekers, through various social media like facebook,twitter etc. This way you will get your product rolling. Once you get a sustained user base, you can then try monetize them through some premium services.
The problem with job sites is companies need large userbase to post jobs, and job seekers need large number of and regularly updated jobs in job sites. So these things usually take time, if you don't have huge marketing budget.

How do you solve this chicken and egg problem?

You need candidates to post their profiles and employers to pay to get listed and browse through the profiles. This is how usually Dice and monster operates with their revenue model. Employers pay monthly fee to access all the candidate resumes.

You don't have anything,yet.

So first step would be to get candidate resumes. How? You could promote in colleges and universities. You could run adwords on developer communities.

Let say once you have decent database, you would have gathered enough traction and traffic.

Now start pitching to employers and recruiters.

Build some toys for recruiters so they get hooked with your job site. By toys I mean some unique tools that no other sites have it or make something better.

So your continued process would be to promote to candidates and employers. Check out how Dice and Monster promotes.

Rinse and repeat. It never ends. Fun, isn't it?

So your question is, "Anyone interested?"

Yes, I'm interested.

Am I optimistic that you've crafted a sword that could slay monsters? No.

Here's why I'm skeptical.

This is an industry that's well served by established competitors with great revenue models, massive reach into their target communities, strong brands and a high vantage point from which to survey the acres upon acres of derelict web properties that are technically robust and even offer one or two dimensions of "better."

If a friend handed you a business plan that began with that paragraph, what would you say? "I really like the font you've chosen. Now,...""

Here's why I'm interested.

Recruitment is massively important. And what I see in the service model of the big beasts is great for the twentieth century, with only cosmetic enhancements for the world as it is today. With startups, I've seen all kinds of interesting wrinkles, but I've never seen a combination of process innovation and determined, gutsy execution. And that's going to happen some time in the next decade, surely.

Here's what I'll do if you are interested by my interest (!)

I'll do my level best to get together a team of bright, motivated, energetic young people who'll be able to devote some time, who'll enjoy the experience, and who'll probably fail, but either way would learn a lot. You'll need either to donate what you have, or at least craft an agreement that gives them a commanding interest.

What's my motivation? Well, just in the city I live in I've in the last two years watched four startups fail in online recruitment, with in each case their time, energy and cash burnt before they really started pushing into the market. But there's an outside chance that a team that started out as "virtual cofounders" with v1 already in place, and could focus 90% of their attention on pushing out to market, might even swing the sword just right.

Let me know.

Rather than building another monster.com, consider the following:

1. Either build a niche website. Accounting careers, dental careers, etc. You can use the same platform like stack exchange and launch 100's of these sites. You can make it profitable by charging posting fees. You can also make it profitable by eventually making arrangements with sites such as monster to share the postings with them.
2. Consider building a job listings app where any website could post their own job listings, and take applications. You could offer custom domains so a company like google could point googlejobs.com or jobs.google.com to your service. The service would list openings, share benefits, and handle applications. Eventually you could build features such as import resume, background screening etc. An HR app like that would be very useful, specially if the UI could be customized or it could be Iframed in to look exactly as one ones it. Uploading custom CSS would be a huge plus. I love subscription service businesses, I love b2b businesses, this could be both.
3. Consider building a ResumeBuilder app. Having reviewed my share of resumes over the years, I am appalled by how many people dont know how to write a resume and how many resumes look like ass. You could offer a service that creates a resume through a wizard interface (similar to msft word resume wizard), where someone can host their resume, and offer multiple versions (txt, word, pdf). If you build this correctly your users could change their resume styles and make updates quickly and elegantly.

It would be nice if there was a way to share resume data in XML. So that if you had an api for such an app recruiters could tap in and search data quickly. It would also be nice if you asked for dates and calculated times dynamically, so if i built my resume today, in one year it would read 5 years experience at:....