Why Invest in the Jobful Career Platform?
Invest in Jobful – we are a flat organization, organized in lines of business, giving ownership to each role to drive business growth. This allows us to deliver in time, give feedback constantly and accelerate on each of our OKRs.Â
Business Model
Jobful offers customers the solution in Software as a Service model (monthly subscription). The offering covers support, maintenance, hosting, updates, and upgrades. We have another offering for premium support, with an added consultancy layer for clients.
The commercial changed in Q3 2020 from a local approach on the Romanian market to a global approach, focusing on the US market. The strategy is built on four layers, starting with inbound – dedicated content for organic growth in SEO and lead generation systems on our blog and continuing with outbound using LinkedIn Navigator for contacts and automated email flows. These two first pillars generate leads in the mid-market.Â
We’re now partnering with SAP (AppCenter), Microsoft (Marketplace) and Oracle to drive new business in the large enterprise sector. Finally, we have a dedicated sales team conducting our process for closing new business and a dedicated account manager for key accounts.
Offering, pricing and deployment
We offer our customers Jobful Career Platform under a SaaS subscription model and premium support package, available as a monthly subscription. The SaaS model includes deployment, customization, standard support and quarterly product updates. The premium support package includes on request features and consultancy for the recruitment team.
In January 2021 we also launch a dedicated offering for startups.
Our pricing model has a flat monthly fee and variable cost based on solution success (new hires and active candidates in the database) providing our customers with positive ROI within the first year and up to 50% talent acquisition cost reduction within 3 years.
Deployment of the solution happens in 3 stages, aligning the platform with the customer’s brand book (front end), customizing fields (admin) and integrations (public APIs). After technical deployment we work together with our customers for content (jobs, courses, challenges) and schedule the go live. We offer hypercare for the first month after going in production and standard support after this period.
Action PlanÂ
In order to realistically project any future, we should always start by understanding the past and present. The future is more often an incremental iteration of today rather than a totally different story shaped by miracles.Â
We officially launched Jobful in May 2018, after piloting twice in 2017 with Microsoft and Banca Transilvania. In October 2018 we won two awards at Startarium and concluded the year at ~30.000 EUR in revenue. We joined Spherik Accelerator in February 2019 and SAP io Cohort in May, landing our first investment of 100.000 EUR two months later. Jobful concluded the 2019 year winning Best Pitch at How to Web and closing 75.000 EUR in revenue.Â
The accelerated pace of our business didn’t change in 2020. Jobful grew to 14 employees focused on sales, marketing and product development. As the Pandemic hit, our pipeline and revenues were hit and we changed the strategy to adapt to the new circumstances. During the last 7 months, we:
- Created and shipped a freemium model for the Romanian market;
- Changed our strategy for 3, 6 and 12 months;
- Raised 325.000 EUR as second pre-seed round;
- Launched our AI / ML implementation;
- Cut our gross burn rate in half, becoming cash flow positive in November;
- Joined an graduated NUMA New York accelerator;
- Qualified 5 international VCs for our Seed round;
- Pivoted to B2B SaaS model and moved 90% of resources on it;
- Closed our first deal on this model and qualified 10+ others, ready to deploy;
- Partnered with SAP, Oracle and Microsoft on SaaS model for co-sell;
- Attract and commit with our global Advisory Board members;
- Launched the solution on ProductHunt.
Today, recovered and optimized after the hit from Covid-19, cash flow positive, our action plan is changing from resilience & adaptability to accelerated growth, which in itself answers to the question ‘why invest in Jobful’.Â
The SeedBlink campaign represents a bridge round as we want to grow our investment in the US market, based on the experience and the test we already ran and close our Seed round in Q2 2021.Â
Our next steps, following the current bridge round are:
- Invest in the global marketing strategy for inbound and outbound lead generation
- Invest in senior sales reps dedicated for the US market – Sales Manager & Channel Manager
- Invest in development team to shorten and automate deployment
- Continue to Invest in innovation capabilities for AI / ML and gamification framework
Jobful will officially launch on the US market at the beginning of 2021 and focus solely on growing the business internationally during the first 2 quarters of the year, committing to closing the Seed round at the end of 2021’s first half.Â
Our current priorities and milestones that might want to make you invest in Jobful:Â
- confirming our new, highly-scalable and predictable SaaS revenue model (Q1 2021)
- passing 30.000 EUR in monthly recurring revenue (MRR, Q1 2021)
- bringing an institutional investor (Seed, Q2 2021)
Team & Culture
Looking to invest in Jobful? As the World Economic Forum stated: talent, not technology, is the key to success in a digital future (blog post). Within a startup, each productive or non-productive employee makes a difference. It is critical to have the right talent in the right roles at the right time. During the current year, we’ve been changing and fine tuning our way of working and our headcount.
We early defined our core values and prioritized culture, as a critical dimension of our business. Right now, we’re conducting business under a healthy startup mindset: “Hire easy, fire fast!”, not rushing to onboard new colleagues without making sure they have the right experience, they can commit to what’s expected of them and they are a good cultural fit.
Jobful is a flat organization, organised in lines of business, giving ownership to each role to drive business growth. This allows us to deliver in time, give feedback constantly and accelerate on each of our OKRs.