Gyfted - 3 person startup growing at 120k users per month
At first, I didn't believe the numbers, but I spent enough time with the founder to verify.
📈 Yes, Gyfted (AI-enabled job marketplace) is driving 120k new users per month today, up from 0 just a year ago without any media spend.
Oh, and the startup is pre-seed and has 3 co-founders and no one else working full time…
Much of the success can be attributed to their user magnet. How did they create one?
🧲 They created psychometric assessments and made those free for job seekers. The assessments help job seekers figure out roles and work environments they would succeed in and point out gaps in skill sets and knowledge. Once job seekers take an assessment, those are used to match with employers versus matching CVs to job descriptions, which as we know doesn’t work.
Lessons learned...
1️⃣ Create a magnet valuable on its own and not easily available elsewhere. Quality soft skills assessments are expensive and are not offered by job boards. Test companies offer assessments and sell them to companies. The model is flipped here where the assessments are offered to job seekers for free to help them improve and get the jobs they are a right fit for.
2️⃣ Ride the market trend. Keyword “free personality test” gained 100% of search volume in the last 90 days, “assessments” gained 50% of search volume. The easiest way to grow is to grow with the market and then use differentiation to outpace it.
3️⃣ Connect the magnet to your core business/product. The data they get from tests powers matching that works a lot better than keyword matching. In fact, keyword matching doesn’t work at all as we all know.
What else should you know?
↪ The founding team has all skills needed to execute the product vision, which is "building an AI-first hiring marketplace by combining user-generated data and matching." Founding team: Robert (behavioral economics), Blazej (data science), Kacper (full-stack developer). There is no one else they need to build the magnet and the core product; everything else they can outsource without shedding equity.
The team is now seeking angel investors to transition to a seed round. An excellent opportunity to acquire valuable equity! If you know angels that might be interested, please DM for an intro or contact Robert Kowalski 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 directly!