The next 75 days of Vesume

tl;dr

• Launched our first product, Vesume Async - our asynchronous/one-way video interviewing tool with positive feedback! 🚀
• Formed a stable team of 3 - me (founder, full-stack engineer) 👨🏻, Anushka (marketing) 👧🏻, Tarun (frontend engineer + automation tester) 👦🏻.
• We’re incorporated (Vesume Technologies pvt. ltd.) and are set for starting sales and executing our go-to-market strategy. 🏢
• Hiring has been a challenge, with a few wrong hires. But I’m learning from mistakes. 💆🏼‍♂️
• We’re facing challenges in increasing organic traffic and building a substantial waitlist for Vesume. 🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏽🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏽
• We’ve decided to build in public for transparency and feedback.🤞🏼

➡️ What went well

We are ready to unveil our product to the world!

The product is at a stage where the features are sufficient and effective to complete the candidate screening process (video interview) and evaluate the candidates collaboratively. We will, of course, add new features and product updates, but in tandem with our users, leveraging their feedback.

This is a moment of both excitement and anticipation for us, getting different users to interact with our product and are really looking forward to helping our users upgrade their screening process.

With this, we have officially launched in closed beta!

Overwhelmingly positive response from the candidates!

What better way to test our solution than using it to do our internal hiring? We employed Vesume Async to conduct interviews for the positions of a content writer and frontend developer, and we are currently utilizing it to build our business development team.

Did you know doing this is called ‘dogfooding’?

The Async responses were so insightful!

While we initially focused on how Async would be favored by recruiters for its time-saving benefits, our product trials yielded valuable feedback from the candidates.

The majority of candidates who participated in the one-way interview did so for the first time and expressed real comfort with the format. The inclusion of a 'practice interview' option proved to be especially beneficial.

For the role of automation test engineers, we initially assumed that engineers might not be comfortable on camera, so we considered conducting audio-only interviews. However, after giving Vesume Async a try, we decided to proceed with video interviews. To our surprise, candidates responded positively, noting that the video format allowed them valuable time to prepare and confidently address the questions. It turned out to be an unexpected delight!

We have a stable team of three

In the early stages of a startup, the founding team is likely more critical to the success of the venture than the product itself.

Keeping this in mind, we hired our first engineer - Tarun Shelar He’s a really enthusiastic Mumbai boy and has a deep interest in frontend development. He’s self taught (an attribute we value a lot) and his willingness to take feedback is something we really appreciate. Also, it’s simply fun to not be coding alone anymore.

And, of course, we have Anushka, who is currently leading our content marketing efforts. At just 18 years old, with aspirations of launching her own startup someday, she truly exemplifies what, I believe, every Indian Gen Z should aspire to be.

We now have a team of three who take on different roles depending on the need of the hour. As a founder I need to be wearing multiple hats and the team makes it a little easier on me.

We’re keeping the burn low

As you’d know, Vesume is completely self-funded (aka bootstrapped) and we plan on keeping it that way.

So, it’s important for us to keep the burn to a manageable level.

Having said that, one thing I consistently emphasize is that we prioritize investing in our people. As a company, we strive to offer competitive compensation, aiming to pay as much as we can possibly afford. Additionally, we allocate a dedicated budget for learning and development to ensure everyone has ample opportunities for growth and improvement.

We’ve optimized our server costs over the months (reducing it by as much as 40%). We’ll be revealing the exact server costs in the future blogs. We are also almost completely remote (except for a few Fridays where I work out of WeWork with Tarun, our frontend developer).

With this, we have close to 24 months of runway at current expenditure (assuming we never make a dollar in revenue) - we’re lean (but not mean).

We finally incorporated

It was a lengthy process, but we've successfully registered our company. Vesume Technologies Pvt. Ltd. is now officially registered, marking the official birthday of the company on 21 December 2023.

➡️ What did NOT go well

Organic traffic on the site

When we began, our marketing playbook was simple: we aimed to produce a wealth of educational and informational content that our target audience, HR professionals, would enjoy reading and sharing.

I had always known that this was a long-term bet. One would assume that we did this to boost our SEO, but that was never our primary intention.

Having said that, what this did not get us was a lot of traffic on our site.

There is nothing like a sudden surge in traffic with some magical content but some forms of content will be more effective than others and maybe we failed to identify what content would really resonate with our target audience.

So, for the time being, we’re focusing our attention and efforts on outreaches which we’re primarily doing through LinkedIn.

However, we haven't abandoned the idea of being a hub for HR professionals and recruiters to continually enhance their skills, and we fully intend to stay committed to this goal - we are simply taking a short break.

However, we are currently directing our content marketing efforts toward adopting a building in public approach. More details on this shortly.

Low number of people on the waitlist

Something that is quite proportional to the organic traffic is the waitlist that we’ve built - and unfortunately, it isn’t a particularly long one.

So there’s a lot of direct outreach we’ll be doing through emails and LinkedIn in the coming months.

I mishired

I have to admit, hiring is difficult. Makes me glad I’m building a product that gives hiring managers some way to make more accurate hires.

Startups frequently fail - that’s not news to anyone. However, research says less startups fail due to poor products than interpersonal issues within founding teams.

The early stages have numerous opportunities for disagreement, doubts, frustration and everyone trying to do their best. When someone just doesn’t make an effort to contribute it brings down the output the entire team’s capable of. In the initial stages to bring forth growth with the resources available, everyone NEEDS to do their best.

I was handling everything from product development, to strategizing marketing and doing sales - you can only wear too many hats so I hired someone to help with the product side of things, mainly with automation testing.

We opted for the Playwright automation framework for its speed and reliability, despite it being relatively new in the market. I was aware that not many would be familiar with it, so the plan was to hire someone willing to learn from scratch. This approach offered dual benefits: the new hire would gain expertise in a soon-to-be sought-after tool, and we would gain a valuable team member to help identify product flaws.

During the learning phase for Playwright, we continued with manual testing, allowing the new hire to develop skills in identifying test cases. The learning was slow which was alright for the first few days, however it had to pick-up at some point. But it didn’t. And this was mainly a function of insincerity, which is unacceptable.

Hiring for values not skills has got to be a hiring hack. Skills can be acquired, values can’t. My goal with Vesume was to have a product that "makes people successful" regardless of what's on their resume.

Ideas can change, we can work on a different product but the key is to get the team right.

➡️ What’s coming next?

We’re all geared up for sales

During the early stages is when you figure things out. There’s no guaranteed sales template that’d give you promised results. At best you start with best practices to follow and find your own sales playbook with trial and error - laying a framework for the complete sales process.

Not many people are aware, but my first job was in sales for one of the world's largest ed-tech companies. For years, I couldn't comprehend how spending seven months there would add value to my career. Now, I couldn't be more grateful. Products change, industries evolve, and your ideal customers shift, so sticking to the basics is crucial - sales is a numbers game.

If I was unaware that a conversion rate of 6% is actually pretty good, I’d have probably given up my will to live after getting 25 replies for every 500 outreaches - to know that’s normal helps us have less doubts about if we’re doing it all right.

Currently our sales playbook is simple - we are going all out on direct outreach. We’re experimenting a lot with the messaging and keeping track to see which ones work better.

The best use case for Vesume Async is in the context of customer facing positions that get a high volume of applications - where personality, presentability and communication would be evaluated before resume and experience. Since we aren’t completely sure of who our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is, we’re focusing on companies with an employee count between 50 and 500, mainly (and not limited to) hospitality, retail and customer support.

Initiating a feedback loop and iterating

You can never assume you've done enough research. Founders will stop after receiving enough compliments from their friends, family, and a trusted business advisor - please don’t.

We're actively engaging with our customers, and all future product development will extensively involve them.

This of course stems from the lean startup methodology I’m a big fan of.

The product is at a stage where the screening process can be done comprehensively along with ensuring basic evaluation of the candidates.

So we're talking to the people experienced in Talent Acquisition to identify and tackle factors that keep them from adopting a solution even after having a genuine problem.

It could be an unclear value proposition, the product lacking some important features, the cost - we'll find out.

Start developing Vesume Intro

Vesume intro is the next tool in our suite of tools. It's also catered to the hiring industry. But its use case is not limited to companies doing high volume hiring for customer facing roles.

It'd be specifically helpful for HRs wanting to tap into the passive talent market - candidates who already have a job. Video job ads have had higher conversion rates and get more attention from candidates than a long email/text job ad. This is the spectrum we aim to focus on next.

We’re ideating on a pre-launch strategy with Vesume Intro. We’ll publish how it does in our next update of #buildingInPublic.

Founder’s, get help when you need it I've known how to code, ideate and develop a product. And with the little background I had in sales we have started outreaches.

It’s great to start with what you’ve got but to continuously learn about your customer, industries you’re serving, and the solution you’re serving with is the ‘strategy’.

Here are all the resources that helped: