How our staffing-as-a-service IT startup reached break-even | Hacker News Reader

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

en.instaff.jobs

36 pointspaskster19 comments

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"?

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.

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?

We are using the niche mainly because of SEO, client acquisition as well as user acquisition reasons. Exhibition stafff is also a very lucrative niche because germany is the biggest exhibition country in the world and trade fair hostesses actually earn pretty good money: about 13 € to 15 € per hour, which is about 16 to 19 $.

We had some customer requests in the hospitality market, mostly catering staff. So I guess this is the next market to enter. However nurses could be an interesting market as well, we are not totally sure yet.

Our vision for the longterm is, to be the "oDesk for onsite staffing". So everytime you are looking for a temporary worker that works onsite, you hopefully go to our online marketplace.

I am really impressed with this especially because it's already making money and has so much potential.

Have you considered licensing out your tech platform for use in other countries? Licensee would basically just need to do sales/marketing and run with it and you take royalties. I'd be interested if you're open to it (for a country lightyears away from Germany).

We already have a very solid business model, so licensing / royalties is not something we are looking for. And we would love to internationalize next year. There are a couple of competitors in this space in other countries, for example http://staff-finder.jobs/ and https://goworkabit.com/ If you like this business model, feel free to copy it ;) In what country are you based? I am more than glad to help you, except for giving you our code base of course.

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.

keep going Pascal!

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!

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.

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 ;)

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

Awesome story, thanks for sharing with the HN community

great job!

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

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.

that sounds like a great opportunity! thanks for the answer

great story! thanks for sharing

amazing job !

great job!

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