Vawch Blog

Update on our business as of mid-September 2008

September 21st, 2008 in Random musings

I just got back from a personal trip and in my absence my partner Ben has been managing the business on his own and has made a fair bit of progress, no thanks to me…

We have just completed a review of our position since our going beta at the beginning of july and officially ‘live’ at the end of July and although we have had an encouraging start, we believe that we have not reached the potential that we thought the business would reach at this point. The financial maelstorm in the past few weeks has certainly not helped and we are still somewhat handicapped by the lack of scale on our part. We are now considering new options for the business including external funding and partnerships so keep tuned on those.

Now for the good news:

1) We have our first completion recently (well, pending return of signed letter)  on one of our positions. The offer letter has been sent out and a verbal commitment has been made. We also have another offer in progress. Unfortunately, these successful referrals were made by the founders (myself and Ben), but the other candidates who were interviewed were referred by our members.

2) Two other positions are at the interview stage - these were referrals made by our members. We hope to pay out on these as soon (and if) they complete.

3) We are getting referrals, although not as many as we would like (it takes quite a number to result in a successful completion) and not of the quality that we would like them to be.

4) We have gotten a good sampling of professionals who signed up as members across various industries, although more skewed towards financial services and consulting.

For the not so good news (yes it is still early to extrapolate but as good consultants, we can take any data point and extrapolate away…)

1) We are not getting the volume of referrals that we had hoped. Although we have received enough for us to complete a number of positions but certainly not on par of what we would expect.  Thanks to those of you who have referred at least someone - there are about ~100 of you who have made referrals these past 2 months and we thank you. For the rest of our members, we just have a couple of questions:

- is the monetary incentive enough for you to refer someone? or are there issues with the referral process that we can help solve? or maybe you just can’t be bothered?

2) The shaky economy has led to cutting down of positions at banks and hence there are less positions to go around for the various headhunting companies. Being a startup, we get the more difficult assignments that these headhunters can’t fill or none at all. Despite us charging about half the cost of the traditional firms, change is difficult for these HR people. We would like to thank, however, the firms that have given us a chance and are sticking by us as we refine our model.

3) We now think that the rampup for the business will be significantly longer given the current economic situation and the fact that employees are more concerned about keeping their current jobs then jumping around. This has serious ramifications to our strategy and something that we are analyzing in more detail.

4) We are still below our targets in terms of our membership base. We are trying to refine our marketing efforts to get to professionals who have valuable contacts. For those of you who still have people in your rolodex whom you have not invited to join, we ask you to do so.

That’s the update thus far. We appreciate your support.