Story of JobFact and the Lessons from a Failure

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From the course by HEC Paris

Entrepreneurship Strategy: From Ideation to Exit

107 ratings

HEC Paris

Entrepreneurship Strategy: From Ideation to Exit

107 ratings

This course covers in the chronological order each defining step of an entrepreneurial project. It begins with very personal considerations related to getting to better know yourself better so as to decide if you are ready for the multiple challenges of entrepreneurship. It then deals with creativity in order to provide the right set of tools to find an idea with the right potential to disrupt an existing business. We then discuss how to gather a founding team, how to raise money to initiate the project, and how to deal with day to day cash management. Later in the course, we discuss the art of selling, focusing on business to business sales, and how to measure the product launch phase using cohort analysis. Later on, we discuss the challenges of HR in an entrepreneurial environment, and of recruiting at a point where nobody knows your company. We then describe very practical techniques to initiate the international development of a small company. Last, we cover the exit strategy topic.

From the lesson

The path to maturity

In this module, you will explore the challenges of human resources i.e. recruiting when nobody knows you, training on constantly evolving processes, and managing on a perpetually changing scale. Furthermore, a step by step strategy to international expansion. Finally, you will understand the importance of exit strategies.

Monitoring your product launch5:36

Story of JobFact and the Lessons from a Failure4:59

Interview: Julien Recoing, Co-founder of JobFact2:36

Meet the Instructors

Ambroise Huret
Partner at Eleven Strategy & Management
strategy and management

[MUSIC]

As we enter the final phase of our entrepreneurial journey,

I would like to share a very concrete business case

of one of my own entrepreneurial stories where we failed.

As you know, there is always a lot more to learn from our failures

than from our successes.

Jobfact is an idea I had in 2008,

which was based on a previous successful experience

in the online recruitment market.

During the summer of 2008, I had the idea for a service

that would allow employees to share the details of their compensation.

I had noticed that there was some information available

regarding executives' compensation in the press,

but that this information was not really valuable for two reasons:

First, it was too generic.

If you bought this special issue of a magazine about compensations,

you would notice that an IT executive with ten years' experience

makes between X and Y,

but you would not find any details about the bonuses, stock option plans,

or perks related to such a position.

And at some point, this is precisely the information you're looking for.

Second, it didn't mention the names of the companies,

and as you know compensation can vary significantly from one company to another.

For instance, an IT executive might want to know:

how much does an IT executive with ten years' experience precisely make

at Microsoft or at Oracle?

Any employee could anonymously subscribe to the service for free,

as long as he provided the name of his company, his educational background,

his generic title, like "head of product", the length of his professional experience,

and all the details about his compensation package.

As soon as he had subscribed and given us this information, we would validate it

and grant him access to a whole database.

When I began to look at the internet for similar ideas

I quickly found out that a US-based company, "glassdoor.com",

had just launched this exact same service

and had added the possibility when you subscribe

to write a short review about your experience at your company.

I immediately felt this added a lot of value to the service

and integrated the feature.

It is interesting to note at this point that "Glassdoor" has since managed to raise

a total of $160 million in capital,

and has notably achieved a $70 million round, led by Google Capital.

I was already leading another technology company I had co-founded at the time.

So I called a long-time friend and successful serial entrepreneur, Julien,

who had just sold his previous company to a Chinese group,

to ask him if he would like to be the CEO of JobFact

and co-found the company with me.

It didn't take him long to decide.

Very quickly he told me, "OK, let's do this", and began to lead the company.

We released the service a few months later,

and you can see here a few screenshots of how it looked.

The public's response to the service was good,

and we quickly managed to convince several hundreds of thousands of people to sign up.

We also secured over a million dollars in a friends and family round.

Our business model was to sell access to our member database

to the HR departments of companies willing to hire,

with the unique selling proposition that we were the only database

with precise details about the compensation of potential hires.

The HR department of our client's company could browse through our database

with an advanced tool and contact potential candidates directly.

At this point, a subscriber could decide whether or not

to get in touch with the company and reveal his identity.

We also enjoyed significant media coverage,

and Julien was interviewed by the most influential

TV channels, newspapers, and radio stations in the country.

We thought we had all the green lights to raise a significant 1st round with VCs,

so we built a business plan in which we asked for 3 to 5 million dollars.

Yet, while we were trying to raise capital,

we faced one difficulty in trying to convince

the HR departments of our clients to use the service on a daily basis.

Remember, we had several hundred thousand high level executives in the database.

Before I give you my final word on this whole story,

you can listen to Julien explain what happened.

Now, I want you to close this video and go to the next part,

where I want you all to participate in a very interesting discussion.

[MUSIC]

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