Onde team –
I missed sending out an update for last week as it was a strange week of making adjustments and writing code to assist with our job owner marketing strategy. I am pleased to report that we have provided companies with the ability to create a profile and immediately see the available OndeWorkers that match the skills/tickets they are looking for.
Worker Team Updates
Goal: We help workers upskill and connect with opportunities.
We are trying to figure out what the right advertising rhythm is for attracting workers. We did not run any ads last week and this week only started again on Wednesday. I am not sure we have the right strategy for paid advertising yet – seems to me that we can improve the ads and messaging to speak more to our mission which is to help individuals work short-term jobs with companies that are looking to hire on a long-term basis. I think we are missing the opportunity to build a story and a narrative outside of “need work”. I will work with Lisa on this over the next few weeks as this is something that differentiates us from the rest of the job posting marketplace. It also means we have to work at telling our story in a simple and engaging manner. I am thinking of a series of ads that tell our story and our mission which (if done properly) should help us find individuals that align with what we are doing.
Job Owners Team Updates
Goal: We help companies grow their team using temporary OndeWorkers
As a recap of our last 80 days of marketing:
ββββββ1. Cold call small companies to see if they had plans to hire or need workers
ββββββ2. Send a follow-up email with some information about OndeWork
ββββββ3. Build an internal profile system where we could track companies that plan to hire and need workers
ββββββ4. Allows prospective companies to see their profile and access available workers that match their profile
ββββββ5. Send out a monthly update encouraging prospective companies to view their profile (amongst other content)
ββββββ6. Make a “check-in” call with all prospective companies asking if they have any upcoming work
The above efforts found us a few companies that posted jobs with one company in particular deciding to use the platform for 4 weeks as they had a large job they needed help with. This past week we started telling our story to the market through paid ads (we are trying a LinkedIn PPC campaign) and have given companies the ability to create a profile without our help. We currently have 155 customized profiles and will continue to use this metric as a way of measuring our top of the funnel success. Similar to the worker side of our business, it seems obvious to me that we have the “bare bones” of a marketing and sales strategy and now need to focus on telling a story and creating a narrative for companies that aligns with our product. The more calls I have with companies and the more research I do on the competition, the more a I realize that our key differentiators are meaningful and need to be explained before they can be utilized. The opportunity for workers and companies to try each other out before making longer term decisions is powerful as is our technology stack that allows this to happen instantly and seamlessly.
MB agreed to a revised role with OndeWork that better matches our current state of affairs and we are grateful for her making the adjustments. We spent the past week going through our financials and while we are close to breaking even, we are not quite there yet and MB has agreed to make adjustments to her role until such time as we are.
With the end of the year approaching the focus will be to work hard at defining and presenting our story to the market as we continue to manage new worker and job owner sign-ups as well as job postings. Our strategy will be using this time to learn how to create effective PPC campaigns to the end of the year and we will measure our success by how many new worker and job owner profiles are being created.
There is no question that a start-up is hard but we have proven our idea works and now we need to focus on telling our story to the people that need our solution. We have all witnessed the difference our idea is making in a small group of people and companies and it will be exciting to see more people benefit from what we are doing.
Have a great weekend!
DG