tl;dr
- We've launched the initial site featuring a landing page and blog primarily focused on lead generation. Fair response, but could be better! 😄
- Hired Yaamee Jain, intern for graphic design and content writing. Welcome aboard, Yaamee! 🎉 👩💻
- Pitched to the first VC. We got quite a few compliments and 0 cash. 🙌 💰 😅
- The interview demo flow is ready! ✨
- First three (of six) solutions pages out - Retail, Airlines, Education ✈️ 📚 🛒
A lot of you have been asking me for updates about my startup - vesume.net. So, I thought I’d put together this post (Kidding, no one has asked me anything. Anyone who ever said something like that, is lying to you 😄). Still, I thought it might be a good way to document the early stages of a company. Who knows, it might just become a source of motivation for individuals who, as Elon Musk put it, “like eating glass and staring into the abyss”.
The beginning
I wrote the first line of code on June 30th, which also happened to be my last day at Veriff, the incredible Estonian company I had moved countries to work for.
My amazing team at Veriff in Tallinn, Estonia
Design, setup, and the first few pages
While still holding the full time job, I started working on Vesume’s designs. By the time I wrapped up things at Veriff (and Estonia), I had finished nearly 90% of the design work. So, I had a pretty good head start when I moved back to India and started working full time on Vesume. In the next week or so, I set up the code repo, and the server infrastructure on Google Cloud, prepared an explosive LinkedIn post announcing my transition to business, and started working on getting the landing, the blog, and the waitlist pages out.
Vesume’s designs on the free version of Figma - thankfully they only limit the number of pages you can have (three i.e.) and not the frames/screens on each page 😄
Marketing strategy
Why specifically these three pages, you might ask? Well, here’s the current marketing strategy while we're in the process of building the product:
- Establish a personal brand/following on LinkedIn: I'm consistently sharing content that I hope resonates with my target audience – individuals in middle to upper management roles within small to medium-sized businesses. Find me here.
- Generate valuable HR-related educational content for our blog: Yaamee, our graphic design and content writing intern, is dedicated to producing informative blog posts that centre on human resources and recruitment topics. Our goal is not only to enhance our SEO but also to provide a valuable resource for anyone looking to expand their knowledge in these areas.
- Build an Email list: Collect email addresses of people who have shown interest. So that there is a list (hopefully a long one) of people who’d sign up when the actual launch happens in December ‘23.
We got these three pages out in about a month (by the end of July). How has the response been so far? Well, I’d call it lukewarm! We collected close to 50 emails and close to 120 followers on my LinkedIn profile. “Not great, not terrible”.
First employee (well, intern!)
And of course, I was glad to come across Yaamee, who became employee #1. 🎉 Since Yaamee joined, we’ve put together about six blogs which have boosted our organic traffic. And she worked on a bunch of graphic design (most of the illustrations on the hero sections of various pages are her work)
Solution pages and demo interview
My next aim was to put together a way to explain what Vesume does by not just talking about it, but by enabling people to undergo the same experience that a candidate would when they interview using Vesume Async. (For someone unfamiliar with it, it’s Vesume’s primary product and it helps companies do ‘one way’ asynchronous video interviews. The candidates respond to pre-determined interview questions via video without the need for real-time interaction with an interviewer).
So, we put together the first three of six solution pages. And each solution page contains a link to a ‘demo interview’. This is where you get to experience the entire interview flow! Go ahead, give it a try - demo interview.
Antler India
While we were in the middle of all of this, and focusing solely on coding and content, we heard from the folks at Antler India. They are a pretty good early-stage VC fund who, well, invest in early stage startups. I was approached by their investment manager on LinkedIn and we hopped on a call the following day.
It was a lovely interaction! Although I have no plans on raising funds (I have a sufficient runway for more than a year and a half), it was lovely trying to see what the VCs look for when they’re evaluating potential investments. Without delving too deeply into specifics, here are the key takeaways (many of which were inferred rather than explicitly stated):
- You need to have some traction before VCs will take you seriously.
- You need to seem ‘venture scale’ - if you aren’t potentially a company that might be the next unicorn, VCs will think twice before investing. Which is insanely paradoxical - if a startup idea was so obviously good, everyone would want to do it and has probably already been done. It’s the fact that a startup idea does not sound as good at the beginning (think AirBnb - strangers living in your home), but is actually secretly really good, that it ends up becoming pretty big (getting some major Paul Graham vibes from what I just wrote?).
Anyway, we got some compliments and a ‘we should talk again in four or five months’.
What’s coming next?
I’ve started developing the ‘recruiter app’ - this is where they’ll be able to create Vesume Asyncs and I’ve started doubling down on marketing efforts in order to get that initial 50 or so signups for beta testing (know someone who would want to sign up? Direct them here). We’re also putting together an ebook for helping recruiters decide if asynchronous interview is the way to go for the particular role they’re hiring for. And we’ll keep trying to come up with content that HR professionals will love reading.
Overall it’s been a lovely two and a half months. I think I’m averaging 14-15 hours a day. My typical two-week sprint now breaks down into 9 days of coding, 4 days of various marketing efforts, and 1 day of rest. It is overwhelming, of course! But it’s insanely gratifying too! :)