Meander
Data-Driven Career Management and Hiring
We've been winding down the pilot program through January and preparing for our beta launch. Last night I confirmed the onboarding plan for our first beta customer to start next week.
It looks like more of our pilot customers will also be joining the beta, and we're hoping to add 10-15 recruiters to the platform over the next couple of months. This should get us to ramen profitability quite comfortably!
After a couple of sprints working through the workflow and architecture, we now have a working front-end to replace the Google Sheets proof of concept.
Very excited to see the vision come to life, and this step marks the move from pilot testing to selling access to our beta offering. The next few months will really test the business viability.
Recognizing the challenge of trying to build a product and a business while also running a pilot, I was able to find someone to join part time to help with operations. This will also be a great way to test the scalability of the platform before I bring on 2 planned FT hires in January.
We also have another call for a 4th pilot customer onboarding next week, so this could be a much needed boost.
Excited to now have 3 paying customers testing out the product. Early revenue is small, but this should help to prove that we are solving a problem that exists and that people are willing to pay to solve.
The pilot will run through January and we'll be able to gather some good insights as we work through the process with our early customers.
Busy summer working on market research and (re)learning how to build basic machine learning models in Python.
I now have a working prototype to demonstrate how this concept will work. We take a LinkedIn profile as an input, then estimate competencies based on the roles in that profile. These data points should be much easier to use to match candidates with roles, while also removing unconscious bias as recruiters won't see the name, profile picture, or educational background for these individuals.
Now I just need to sell access to the pilot...
With a large network of MBA grads and People/Talent Executives, I shared the early proof of concept in my LinkedIn feed. I received ~150 visitors in the first 24 hours, and generated interest from potential partners, hires, and users within my network.
Post is available here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6803761782474211328/
After completing a 3 week Bubble bootcamp with AirDev, I spent about a week pulling together my ideas into a basic proof of concept for the user-facing module of Meander. Focused on better transparency around career paths, I built a framework to allow anyone to create a Linked-In style career timeline with a simple UI.
After 3 years leading analytics and operations for Wayfair's recruiting function, my frustrations with existing hiring platforms pushed me to leave my Director role to bootstrap a new venture and solve these problems.
I had saved enough to bootstrap the company for 2 years, and learned a ton from 3 years of innovation and experimentation at a high growth tech company.
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