The Inspiration

Bounty started with the observation that startups are willing to pay a lot of money to hire the right people and were advertising this fact on social platforms.

Take this tweet for example. Or this one.

These people were offering tens of thousands of dollars to incentivize their audience to refer candidates for roles and were managing the entire process (marketing, back and forth, payment processing) manually. It all seemed incredibly inefficient.

Why are companies willing to pay so much for referrals?

Hiring is often the hardest thing to get right when building a company. NFX has a great piece on this called “The Infinite Conflict of Hiring.” The hiring conflict describes the need for founders to hire fast but also hire quality people. It is very difficult to do both. Finding quality people to hire takes time.

Fortunately, startups are able to raise capital and use that capital to either hire recruiting agencies or set referral bonuses to incentive folks to refer quality people quickly. These methods help cut through the noise and mediate the infinite conflict of hiring.

To understand how much a startup is willing to set their referral bonus at, it’s important to understand how much the alternative of hiring a recruiting agency costs. These agencies will typically charge 20% of the median salary. Assuming a typical salary of $100K, this means that the cap for how much companies are willing to offer up for referrals is around $20K.

Why now?

Referrals have typically been a more closed process where hiring managers ask employees of the companies for referrals. But more recently, with founders becoming influencers themselves on platforms like Twitter and Linkedin, founders have approached their audiences to help out with referrals.

With these changes just coming into fruition, a widespread tool that helps facilitate the referral process from anyone (not just employees), had yet to be created. That’s where Bounty comes in.

How does Bounty work?

Bounty helps streamline the referral process for everyone involved. No more excessive back and forth, repetitive intros, and uncertainty about payment. Bounty also has internal tools to drive virality by allowing people to get paid for sharing the bounty.

Here’s how it works if you’re interested in referring:

• Find a bounty on our site or newsletter.
• Refer candidates you know through our referral form, it’ll take < 1 min.
• Share the bounty to increase your odds and get a cut of the sharing bonus.
• Get paid when your actions lead to a hire.

Here’s how it works if you’re interested in posting a bounty:

• Set your bounty amount. We’ll handle paying it out.
• Increase reach by adding a sharing bonus to incentivize people to pass on your bounty.
• Triage incoming referrals in your dashboard.
• There’s no upfront costs. You’ll only pay if you end up hiring someone.

More then just hiring

Outside of using bounties for hiring, we’re excited about bounties being used for other things. This is based on the simple premise that people are generally willing to pay for what they really want. Other than hiring, people / organizations also want more sales, projects to be completed, bugs to be found, etc.

Perhaps the most interesting nascent use case I’ve seen is using bounties to find a future partner. Lucy Guo piloted this with Pitch a Date when she offered $1M for someone to intro her to her future partner.

We’re excited to see where Bounty will go and what other applications of this model will exist. But, in the meantime, check out Bounty here and leave any feedback in our Product Hunt launch page.