How Nixa.io went from 0 to 100 in 8 months
A whole year has almost passed since we launched a pilot of Nixa.io in February 2019 — and what a journey it’s been. Before we head into 2020 and continue our crazy journey, let’s take some minutes to review what we’ve been up to the last year and what we have achieved so far 🎉
February 2019 — April 2019
WE LAUNCHED A PILOT! After spending 6 months on user research to understand the pains that developers were experiencing when looking for a remote job — and what challenges companies were facing when hiring developers, we finally launched a pilot of our platform at the beginning of February. We were super excited to share our idea and product with the world, but a bit nervous about how Nixa.io would we welcomed.
Little did we know that the response was going to be overwhelming. We received so much positive feedback from developers telling us that Nixa.io was exactly what they had been looking for and that they would love to become an early adopter. Throughout the following 3 months, we received over 1500 applications from developers who wanted to become a part of our platform. We had (and still have 😏) a steady flow of 150 applicants every week — and we were just super excited to welcome so many talented and great developers to our platform.
For those of you that don’t know how Nixa.io works, all candidates have to complete and pass a technical pre-qualification process to become a part of the platform. This means that even though the total applicant number was high, there were only 3% of these candidates that actually got through the process and was accepted to join our talent pool. We were therefore extra proud to welcome our first 34 top talents to Nixa.io throughout the first 3 months of the pilot 💛
At the end of April, we also signed our first candidate 🎉One of our highly talented developers, Slawek, accepted an offer to join Superside as their Lead Front-end Developer. You can read more about that story here.
After running the pilot for 3 months and gathering a lot of valuable feedback from both developers and companies, we decided to put the pilot on hold for a couple of months so that we could get the time needed to iterate and improve. From day one, it has been important for us to learn by practice and to be as closely attached to our users as possible. We believe that the only way to build a meaningful and valuable product is to test it together with our users and listen to their feedback.
May 2019 —July 2019
So we took some time off to work on the platform and the product itself. We spent the whole summer analyzing the data we had gathered through user interviews and the general feedback we had received from the talents on our platform. Based on this feedback, we decided to change the pre-qualification process from a two-part technical challenge to a more standardized time-locked technical challenge. One of our value propositions is to cut away the time that developers normally have to spend on recruitment processes with different companies — and especially the time that they have to spend on completing multiple technical challenges.
To make sure that we were able to deliver this value, we decided to strip our technical pre-qualification process down to a 2-hour challenge only. We also interviewed a lot of CTO’s in different tech companies to understand what skills they considered crucial when hiring a developer. Based on this insight, we decided to focus more on testing candidate’s problem-solving and algorithmic skills instead of language-specific skills. These are skills that are considered valuable across both companies and positions— and would, therefore, give our talents a better chance of qualifying for multiple jobs on the platform. By changing the content and the format of the test, we made sure that the process of joining Nixa.io became much quicker and the developer’s road to a new remote opportunity — much shorter.
In late July, we also brought onboard Georgiana to the Nixa.io team as our Talent Manager. It was about time to hire a person that could give our talented developers the royal treatment they deserve. Georgiana is responsible for all candidates on Nixa.io and she has played a huge part in growing and nurturing our talent pool. Georgiana is working remotely from Romania together with her four assistants Nina🐶, Kara🐶, Liza 🐱and Squeak🐱.
August 2019 — December 2019
After a couple of month's break, we kicked off the pilot again at the start of August. At the same time, we also released our new visual identity and website. We had previously teamed up with Superside and their talented designers to help us shape and create our new identity.
The symbol “N” is a letter composed of a two-way arrow that symbolizes how Nixa.io enables a mutually beneficial and professional match between developers and remote tech companies. The diagonal position of opposite direction arrows and the bright gradient colors — also contribute to reflect Nixa.io as a modern, efficient and effective digital tool. Overall, we were super happy about the results and are still proud to brand ourselves with this logo and identity 👏😍
In addition to welcoming a lot of new candidates and talents onboard throughout August and September, we also scaled our commercial activity to attract more remote companies to the platform. Although we already had some great remote companies looking to hire through Nixa.io — we wanted to reach a more diverse group of clients. Throughout the next following month, we managed to onboard eight new remote companies to the platform. These companies were ranging in size from small start-ups hiring their first remote engineer, scale-ups hiring a bunch of remote engineers and large companies looking to hire remotely to solve their increasing demand for developers. It has been so cool to see how Nixa.io constitutes a valuable tool to fuel growth in all of these different types of companies.
The feedback we have received from these pilot clients have really been amazing. There has been a common consensus that the candidates from Nixa.io hold a much higher standard and level of quality than anything they have experienced on similar platforms and that we have, by far, exceeded all of their expectations. We are very grateful for the chance we’ve gotten to prove ourselves for our pilot clients throughout the last year — and it has especially been crazy to see how we have been able to place permanent remote developers with these companies in just 2 weeks.
Although we worked hard to grow both sides of our platform, we spent most of our time doing matchmaking between our top talents and remote pilot companies. Throughout the autumn of 2019 — we have matched over 50 talents with remote opportunities and given them the chance to interview directly with the CTO in these super exciting remote companies. It has been a pleasure to facilitate these matches and to see how some of our talents have proceeded all the way to offer stage before accepting an offer to join the company in the end 🎉
Below, we have summarized the key numbers from 2019 in terms of talent pool growth and successfully signed candidates. The overview also shows the current size of our talent pool and the variation of experience level and skill set among our developers.
To sum it up, it’s been a crazy ride building, testing and growing Nixa.io throughout the last year. We are overwhelmed about the interest we have received in the market and proud to have gone from 0 to 100 active developers in our talent pool in just 8 months. Every individual developer on our platform is a valuable member of our family and we are going to continue to sacrifice blood, sweat, and tears for you to match with the remote opportunity of your dreams.
Heading into 2020, we are excited to continue this journey with every one of you. We are planning to release the first technical version of our platform at the end of January and we can wait to show it to you. We want to give every talent on our platform their own Nixa.io profile so that they can feel like a part of the family in the same way that we do. We also want to create a better interface for companies to review candidates, and make it easier for companies and developers to connect directly. We are probably also going to expand the Nixa.io team very soon — so that we have enough capacity to fill the 15 permanent remote roles that we already have in the pipeline for 2020. Please stay tuned for more updates and info about our plans for Nixa.io in the year that comes.
At last, I just want to thank every individual that has shown curiosity, interest and engagement for Nixa.io in 2019. We can’t wait to start the next chapter with you in 2020 🌍👫🙏
Lots of love and appreciation,
Kristine // CEO & Co-Founder of Nixa.io
