Seeing how a team works before applying

Lynne Tye found a strange order in the hiring process while looking for a full-time developer job. Applicants wrote cover letters, did phone interviews, sometimes even eight-hour assignments, yet only learned late how the people they would work with actually collaborated. Having worked with many teams as a freelancer, she treated who she worked with and how as an important choice. Key Values was built to check that information before applying.

Her starting point was scientific research. After finishing undergrad at MIT, she entered a neuroscience PhD at UCSF but left after two years. Later, working as an operations manager at the cleaning startup Homejoy, she watched software change work, and at twenty-six she started learning to code. She wanted the ability to fix bugs or build ideas without waiting on another developer each time.

After becoming a web developer, she picked freelance work that would help her build her own product. On projects with designers and marketers she built websites from scratch while learning other roles' work. At the same time she saved money for over a year and a half, securing about a year of living funds. She used her own earnings to buy time to cut freelancing and focus on product development.

When choosing ideas she used to drop candidates for having competitors. Then she started reading existing companies as evidence that customer spending existed, and noticed the hiring market where companies already spent money. She took her own job-search problem as the starting point but spent weeks meeting developers, managers, and recruiters to check whether others shared the discomfort.

Key Values let developers pick the work conditions and values they cared about to find teams. Early on it held 44 items, including low-meeting environments, work-life balance, growth opportunities for junior developers, and high code quality. To searches narrowing postings by stack and seniority, it added criteria for judging daily life there.

Registered teams had to pick eight values and rank them. Blocking every good item from selection revealed what each team valued most. Each chosen item also needed writing explaining real work practices and examples. Tye demanded companies unpack slogans into everyday meetings, decisions, and collaboration.

The resulting profiles held specifics job seekers could judge by. Carbon Five, which she introduced in 2017, offered three months of unpaid sabbatical after two years of service. Flatiron let offer recipients reverse-interview up to five people from new hires to the CFO, plus four outside-expert career sessions. Reading such cases showed what a company's talk of rest or transparency meant as institutions.

In development she made the mistake of delaying launch. After preliminary interviews she worked alone for almost three months, fussing over details like hover effects. Her first Indie Hackers introduction drew fifteen comments including six of her own replies, yet even that small conversation exposed needlessly built features and missed problems.

Afterward she released to small groups in turn. She applied Indie Hackers feedback, showed the product to bootcamp alumni and other communities, and refined product and copy. After a September 5, 2017 Hacker News launch, Product Hunt attention followed, with page views reaching about 30,000 within days.

Which values visitors picked also became content material. Tye analyzed about six weeks of post-launch data and published that work-life balance and high code quality were picked most in that visitor group. She also noted interest differences by source community, such as support for junior developers or parent-friendly environments. Writing about conditions people actually picked gave reason to reintroduce the service to developer communities.

In December 2017 registered team profiles reached fifty. Finishing one profile meant going beyond transcribing a company's account to fixing vague wording and drawing out concrete cases. Tye said each profile took substantial work, including demanding copy edits from companies. The introductions accumulated this way became the site's core content.

On December 12 that year she launched Culture Queries, recommending interview questions. Picking values a user cared about showed questions and explanations for checking those conditions in interviews. Someone checking work-life balance got suggestions to ask how fast after-hours or weekend email and Slack messages required replies. It helped job seekers who read company accounts get needed information in real interviews too.

Culture Queries also carried a path into the main service. In February 2018 it showed six of twenty questions directly, asking an email address for the full set. Result screens also showed companies matching the user's chosen values. Someone arriving to prepare interviews would receive materials by email and discover new hiring companies — a connected composition.

Gathered visitors did not immediately mean revenue. In December 2017 Tye said she charged nothing yet and was considering billing companies for profile placement and production help. The settled model had companies paying a yearly flat fee, as she explained in a 2019 interview.

Company fees covered profile production plus a year of placement and promotion. Tye worked with companies to organize what applicants would wonder about and delivered that information to Key Values readers. She rejected per-hire referral fees. She did not want her pay tied to whether an applicant joined, nor did direct placement work interest her.

Growing it as a paid business meant learning sales too. In a 2019 interview on sales experience she stressed finding mentors, understanding customer goals, asking fair prices, and following up after first conversations. Persuading companies to buy meant discussing together the results each company sought through hiring.

Pricing involved trial and error too. At first she tried quoting five successive inquiring companies different amounts to watch reactions. But a two-person startup with no revenue and a company hiring at scale gained different benefits from the service. Later she judged prices by hiring headcount and roles, regions, and budgets.

Revenue results went public. In March 2019 Tye said Key Values had made $78,000 in the previous quarter. An interview bio that year said business income fully supported her living. A website started on freelance-funded living money had grown into a business supporting her.

How far to grow it was a separate decision. Key Values joined the winter 2018 Y Combinator program, but Tye chose independent operation on revenue over raising follow-on investment. She stated plainly that her goal was a business supporting her living, saying that without explaining the goal even experienced founders' advice drifted astray. She fit even the growth mode to the work and life she wanted.

Customer testimony arrived that the service led to real hires. Zapier recruiter Kim Wilkes said publicly she had hired several applicants who found the company through Key Values. The post drew an employee comment saying she too had joined Zapier through Key Values. Content explaining how a company works had connected to applications and hires.

Tye located her edge in a disposition enjoying meeting people, talking about work culture, and writing it up. She built the site with development skill, filled information with interviews and editing, and drew company spending with sales. Key Values gathered and processed the information she had wanted to know while job hunting, turning that work into her job.