5 ms·

How our staffing-as-a-service IT startup reached break-even

36 points by paskster 12y ago

paskster 12y ago
I am on of the two co-founders as well as the CEO/CTO of InStaff. If you happen to have any questions feel free to make comments here.
- dontomasini 12y ago
  keep going Pascal!
jackoemer 12y ago
amazing job !
jonifico 12y ago
That's a pretty awesome success story. I like how the process seems quite doable without any uncommon facts. Will definitely take this into account for my future businesses.
- paskster 12y ago
  Dear jonifico, it was really just a lot of effort into content marketing, seo, sem as well as customer support. We developed the platform while operating and only closed the upcoming bottlenecks. So yes, very doable ;)
JanKoenig 12y ago
great job! How much did joining the accelerator program actually help you in reaching that goal?
- paskster 12y ago
  We got basically 4 things out of the accelerator: - Some press overage, including backlinks from Bild.de (the biggest newspaper in germany) - Good Office space in Berlin and 25.000 €, so that we could focus on our business, without other overheads - Talks with intersting people in the german startup scene - Branding from Axel Springer, which helped us in hiring a working student as well as a very good intern We only gave up 5 % of equity, so it was overall a very fair deal.
  - JanKoenig 12y ago
    that sounds like a great opportunity! thanks for the answer
kowdermeister 12y ago
I'm really glad you guys made an awesome start. I hope you can keep the pace.
annesiebold 12y ago
Great job, you taught me how important content marketing and SEO is. Yesterday I recommended your service, this request showed me again the potential of your startup. The curve is nice to see. go on!
cylinder 12y ago
I like your site's design but you mention you didn't hire a designer. Is that a theme I can purchase (boostrap? wp?) What separates you from myriad other staffing agencies? Is it backend tech to reduce overhead? I know you have a great welcoming design etc but could you expand on new tech or other innovations you've made to beat out the "dinosaurs"?
- paskster 12y ago
  Thanks for your curiosity. First of all, we use the Bootstrap framework but did the whole design ourselves, so you cannot buy it. We have two big differentiators towards staffing agencies. 1.) Online Marketplace: If you go to an agency they think about your request, make you an offer and afterwards find suitable employees for you. If you go to us, we just route your job to the employee profiles in our database, they respond if they are interested and for what wage, and you receive a list of potential employees with different prices, that you may or may not book. 2.) Software Technology: Agencies do pretty much everything by hand. The have software to manage their processes, but they don't really automize any processes. We try to automize every single step. Right now we just take a look at every new customer request and if the customer has no special needs our software does the rest (job routing, automatically sending emails, sending working contracts, exchanging contact data, reminding to upload workingsheet, etc.) So basically our competitors have an agency business model where the agencies employees do all the work. We have an online marketplace business model where the software does all the work.
  - cylinder 12y ago
    Nice! I love seeing stories like this. I just realized that I was thoroughly confused when making my original post -- instead of clicking your logo, I googled your name and ended up at a US company by the same name. Now that I see your instaff.jobs site I can clearly see the tech focus. Do you plan to remain solely focused on trade fairs and such? Did you focus on a narrow niche just for the SEO and client acquisition aspect? Are you planning to expand into other areas now?
    - paskster 12y ago
dittes 12y ago
great job!
amir_adincon 12y ago
great story! thanks for sharing
Bbolland 12y ago
Awesome story, thanks for sharing with the HN community

36 points by paskster 12y ago

I am on of the two co-founders as well as the CEO/CTO of InStaff. If you happen to have any questions feel free to make comments here.

dontomasini 12y ago
keep going Pascal!

jackoemer 12y ago

amazing job !

jonifico 12y ago

That's a pretty awesome success story. I like how the process seems quite doable without any uncommon facts. Will definitely take this into account for my future businesses.

paskster 12y ago
Dear jonifico, it was really just a lot of effort into content marketing, seo, sem as well as customer support. We developed the platform while operating and only closed the upcoming bottlenecks. So yes, very doable ;)

JanKoenig 12y ago

great job! How much did joining the accelerator program actually help you in reaching that goal?

paskster 12y ago
We got basically 4 things out of the accelerator: - Some press overage, including backlinks from Bild.de (the biggest newspaper in germany) - Good Office space in Berlin and 25.000 €, so that we could focus on our business, without other overheads - Talks with intersting people in the german startup scene - Branding from Axel Springer, which helped us in hiring a working student as well as a very good intern We only gave up 5 % of equity, so it was overall a very fair deal.
- JanKoenig 12y ago
  that sounds like a great opportunity! thanks for the answer

kowdermeister 12y ago

I'm really glad you guys made an awesome start. I hope you can keep the pace.

annesiebold 12y ago

Great job, you taught me how important content marketing and SEO is. Yesterday I recommended your service, this request showed me again the potential of your startup. The curve is nice to see. go on!

cylinder 12y ago

I like your site's design but you mention you didn't hire a designer. Is that a theme I can purchase (boostrap? wp?) What separates you from myriad other staffing agencies? Is it backend tech to reduce overhead? I know you have a great welcoming design etc but could you expand on new tech or other innovations you've made to beat out the "dinosaurs"?

paskster 12y ago
Thanks for your curiosity. First of all, we use the Bootstrap framework but did the whole design ourselves, so you cannot buy it. We have two big differentiators towards staffing agencies. 1.) Online Marketplace: If you go to an agency they think about your request, make you an offer and afterwards find suitable employees for you. If you go to us, we just route your job to the employee profiles in our database, they respond if they are interested and for what wage, and you receive a list of potential employees with different prices, that you may or may not book. 2.) Software Technology: Agencies do pretty much everything by hand. The have software to manage their processes, but they don't really automize any processes. We try to automize every single step. Right now we just take a look at every new customer request and if the customer has no special needs our software does the rest (job routing, automatically sending emails, sending working contracts, exchanging contact data, reminding to upload workingsheet, etc.) So basically our competitors have an agency business model where the agencies employees do all the work. We have an online marketplace business model where the software does all the work.
- cylinder 12y ago
  Nice! I love seeing stories like this. I just realized that I was thoroughly confused when making my original post -- instead of clicking your logo, I googled your name and ended up at a US company by the same name. Now that I see your instaff.jobs site I can clearly see the tech focus. Do you plan to remain solely focused on trade fairs and such? Did you focus on a narrow niche just for the SEO and client acquisition aspect? Are you planning to expand into other areas now?
  - paskster 12y ago

dittes 12y ago

great job!

amir_adincon 12y ago

great story! thanks for sharing

Bbolland 12y ago

Awesome story, thanks for sharing with the HN community