Nubel: September newsletter

Hello everyone! Rain is starting to pour in Vancouver, but things at Nubel are heating up! Last month, we focused on refining our talent features, and now, after listening to our early users, we're excited to shift our attention to the other side of the marketplace—employers and recruiters.

TL;DR: after an overwhelming response from job seekers we've pivoted to focus on creating more value for employers and recruiters. We're about to complete a small feature set to get them onboard ASAP and experiment our way up to a successful paid model.

Now, the detailed version (best while sipping coffee ☕️).

What Nubel achieved last month:

In our last update (if you missed it, let me know, and I'll forward it to you), we shared the release of our minimum feature set for job seekers. The response was significant, and overall feedback was positive. The key takeaway? We needed to focus on making the UX for completing profiles smoother. We quickly experimented with AI just enough to understand that this would be a rabbit hole we didn't want to fall in at this time. So we decided to improve the UI and the forms, and develop our idea of incremental updates.

Our solution is a Q&A-based approach where candidates answer questions posed by Nubel or potential employers. For instance, a recruiter might ask, "How big was the team you managed at <work experience>?" The candidate's answer is stored, shared, and verified by other users, making it a collaborative way to build more comprehensive profiles over time.

Updates: 

• As for now, with little effort, we've got 174 signups. Our initial goal was 100 to 500 talents in the first three months, but due to the good traction we had from talents, we decided to pause those efforts and focus on the employers and recruiters.

• Product development wasn't happening as quickly as we'd hoped, so after coming down to the mines, we've identified several opportunities to simplify our stack and code to move even faster.

• Our first event within the Nubel Connect series was a success. We had 31 people out of 74 signups plus 102 on the waitlist and 28 not going. We had a total of 204 registrations. Check out the pictures here.

• Our next event will be on October 17th at Convergence. We already secured the venue and the speaker, and are now finalizing details.

• I spoke at Zen Launchpad's event about using AI and big data to provide tools and solutions for the hiring industry.

• The following day, Nubel had a booth at Northeastern University Vancouver's career fair, where we got to talk with dozens of people, both employers and talents. Pics here.

• I'm excited to share that I've been invited to a panel discussion with Patrick MacKenzie, IEC-BC's CEO, Shannon Kot from Deloitte Inc. and Manu Varma from Swtch Energy, moderated by Sheryl Lee from LIFT Impact Partners. We'll be talking about AI in recruitment on October 31, 2024 at 3:30 pm at the Grand Ballroom, North Tower, 3rd floor. More info about the event here.

• The book "The Death of the Resume" is almost fully written. We're now working on editing. We'll be releasing the edited introduction next week and chunks of the book weekly after that. Make sure to follow Nubel on LinkedIn, as the book will be sent out in our LinkedIn newsletters.

• We're discussing with Northeastern University the possibility of becoming Embedded Partners. This will allow us to learn more from graduates and foster our presence in Vancouver.

Next steps: 

We're now doubling down on building features that make recruiters' lives easier, starting with tools for screening and assessing candidates before interviews. We're testing the idea of "interview less, interview better" by offering pre-screening questions and Q&A modules to provide richer data upfront.

• We'll release an initial feature set for employers and recruiters (soon). This includes:

  • Ability to post (and manage) a job opening.

  • Conditions for applicants. For now, we're thinking about: Email verification, ID verification, Location requirements, Status in Country of residency, and Language requirements.

  • Pre-screening questions (that can be answered in text or video).

  • Q&A questions for applicants (same).

October will be fully dedicated to experiment with this side of the marketplace. The goal here is to conclude the month having a clear understanding of our pricing model and ideally our first paying customers.

Recap:

I'm reflecting on our progress and thought of sharing it with y'all as well. It's been quite busy so I often look back and reflect on whether we're on the right path or not, and whether our execution is efficient.

So here we go:

• May 15th, 2024: We decided to focus on the "Global Talent Pool" idea. Our business model (and product) was completely different at that point.

• May 30th, 2024: After a first round of research, we put together the first prototypes to validate our solution.

• August 8th, 2024: We completed our initial feature set for talents. This took about 10 weeks.

• August 14th, 2024: We launched.

• September 3rd, 2024: Started working on the feature set for employers and recruiters.

• September 11th, 2024: User #100 signed up.

• Plan for October: Onboard our first employers and recruiters. Ideally, our first paying customer.

As CEO of a software development agency, I've seen many startups spending several months on "MVPs" with huge backlogs. So overall, I'm happy with our progress. And it looks like it's getting even quicker. Do you have any suggestions for us? Or maybe any reflection on our progress or the industry trends?

That's all for now! Time to enjoy the weekend with my family—Estanis is already up and eager for some quality dad time!

Want to support us? Great! This is how you can do it:

• If you're hiring, I’d love for you to try posting your job on Nubel: https://app.nubel.ca. Don't just go there, talk to me. I need your ideas, suggestions, feedback, and anything you'd like to say. As for now, this feature is very basic.

• As you can imagine, the moment we understand how to get our paying customer #1 we'll start thinking about customer #10 and #100. This translates into the buzzword every investor wants to hear. So, we'll be in a good position to start thinking about external financing. Now, I'm not super eager to raise VC capital, so I'll look at other options. Should you have any ideas or want to support this project, let's talk.

If you want to stop receiving these emails, no pressure, just let me know. Conversely, if you think someone else should receive it, feel free to forward it to them and/or let me know and I'll make sure to include them next month.

Thanks again for being there. Your support empowers me and my team. We very much appreciate it.

Best!