Nubel: August newsletter

Hi all!

What an August we've had! Nubel's team has been incredibly busy this month. Launches are always exciting, but this one was especially motivating because it was ours and we're redefining how hiring is done. It feels great. The team at Nubel is highly motivated and hyper-focused. We're iterating not weekly or daily, but hourly. We are all into this mission.

Quick updates:

• Our first event is already published as part of Vancouver Tech Week. We haven't started promoting it yet, but we've already gotten 50 signups (our limit) and 11 waitlist entries (and counting).

• Our collaboration with IECBC continues to develop. I had a 2-hour meeting at their offices in Vancouver with their team. The alignment between our organizations is amazing, and the possibilities are numerous. I'll update you when we have something more concrete. Also, Toronto IEC shared our post on LinkedIn.

• We launched our alpha version on August 14th. Our approach was super lean, which meant that early feedback was direct and incredibly valuable. More details on this below.

• The first podcast in our PR campaign is published: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7MK585huvA.

Launch:

• We've launched the first version of our talent solutions (talent-facing feature set only). This includes account creation and initial experiments for data input. Remember, at Nubel, we're throwing the resume out the window and building a new information system to store information about professionals, their experience, skills, and more. Figuring out how to help users input this data is a top priority now.

• Our top feedback is that inputting data isn't fun. Traditional forms are cumbersome for the amount of data we need, so we're exploring alternative methods.

• Since web interfaces might not be very successful, we've been experimenting with a "human interface" (calling job seekers and helping them input the data into the system). This has been a good experience so far. People are very willing to hop on a call and share data with us. This process has also been valuable for iterating on our data structures and learning the best ways to request specific pieces of information. Although this method is not very scalable, it'll give us the initial growth traction we want.

• So far, we've completed 75 signups, and we just hired a contractor to help us grow at ~100 signups per week. We will greatly exceed our initial estimate of 100-500 talents in the first three months. The new question we're asking ourselves now is how to grow at 10,000 talents per week. I want the team to start thinking about exponential growth.

• Our mission statement book — I'm writing a book about the problems we've been exploring. This book will be used as our mission statement and to support speaking engagements and general marketing. Here's an unedited version of its introduction: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tBe4xSJG32Zvl8dKOjPVZKduRGjleX7G/view?usp=sharing (no download tracking). Happy to hear your thoughts about it.

Market potential / exit strategy:

• We've been studying Microsoft's LinkedIn's business model and revenues. According to the official Microsoft FY24 Q4 Earnings report (see page 93), LinkedIn's revenue for 2024 (year ending June 30) was $16,372 million. I've found, through unofficial sources, that about half of this revenue comes from LinkedIn's Talent Solutions, and a significant portion of that originates from LinkedIn Recruiter, which generates a big chunk of its revenue from small companies (1 to 50 headcount). Continues:

• It's well-known that LinkedIn Recruiter is expensive. The lack of competitors allows them to charge whatever they want. We're developing a strategy to release affordable or even free talent solutions for small companies. If (a big "if") we're able to capture a significant portion of the talent market, we'll be in a very good position to launch search capabilities that enable talent sourcing from Nubel. If we achieve this, we could introduce a competitive tool that has the potential to significantly impact LinkedIn's revenue. This strategy can be built incrementally, starting in BC, Canada.

• Big "ifs," but huge potential.

Next steps:

• Collect job references and ID verifications.

  • We're signing a contract with Certn to get access to their production APIs. With this, we'll be able to send an email to every job seeker asking them to verify their ID. In parallel, we're exploring how to collect job references. This is a very important piece of information we want to have. We'll use these references to verify profile information and add a layer of credibility to the data.

• Explore methods to improve data input and scalability.

  • We've quickly explored web and human interfaces, and now it's time for AI-powered interfaces. We're prototyping a conversational AI-powered web interface. So far, this looks very promising. It will allow us to gather information incrementally and directly from users. We're also looking at ways to import data from different sources (including the person's PDF resume). The more data, the better.

  • The human interface is not completely discarded, though. There's also an opportunity here with recruiters. There are too many recruiters out there, and the vast majority are sophisticated data entry specialists (no offense). We have some ideas on how to reinvent the role of these people in the ecosystem. Doing this means that we could tap into a huge pool of people that'd be motivated to input data into Nubel.

• Get feedback from our Talent Search feature set.

  • So far, with under 100 talents, our AI-powered search is very impressive. Not only does it seem to be very accurate, but the fit justification also works as an assistant to improve the initial search. This feature is under development, but if you'd like to see it, let me know and I'll happily demo it to you.

I'll gradually shift my focus from talent acquisition to user testing for the recruiter/employer end of the marketplace in the next few weeks. Ideally, I'd love to see our first paying customers for our talent solutions by Q4 2024.

How to support Nubel:

• Create your account! — Get on a call with @Federica Petrazzini and get your account set up. The #1 goal of this is to get your first reactions and feedback.

• Find your next hire on Nubel — Looking to hire someone? We can get your job posting on Nubel for free. Just send me the info and I'll get it published. After that, you'll receive full access to the candidates' profiles that apply to your job.

• Capital — Things are getting busier, bigger, and faster. We'll need to inject a substantial amount of capital by Q1 2025 to scale our efforts. We'll have more details on this later on, but if you want to be part of this mission, this is the moment to start the conversation.

There are many things happening at Nubel right now. Your involvement in this project is very important and appreciated, so I made an effort on summarizing everything down. Please, let me know if there is anything else you'd like to know or if you have any suggestions or comments.

Also, we're being more active on social media, so make sure to follow Nubel to stay updated!

Thanks again for being there!