Path To Profitability
Once upon a time everyone used to ask — Have you raised funds yet?? As Indian start-up ecosystem is evolving, people have started asking the right question — Are you Profitable yet??
We will get to that in a moment 😊
Scriptifi came into existence by sheer accident when Abhimanyu and I met during our corporate stint @ Micromax. While working together we just hit it off instantly and in a short span of time, became great friends. Considering that both of us have the same fundamentals in life and have similar life stories, we knew we will end up building something meaningful in future. What exactly, we were still figuring it out back in 2015. One year into Micromax and that’s when we came up with this audacious idea to disrupt the Recruitment Consulting Industry by creating a Virtual Global Delivery model (inspired by what Infosys did for IT Outsourcing) for Recruitment. On our way, we would have fixed the recruitment industry by making it extremely efficient & transparent and all this while creating a shared economy for recruiters.
When we started our journey in April ’17, it can best be described as moments where we were — Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…HELL YEAH…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…HELL YEAH… Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…Oh Shit…HELL YEAH (if you look carefully Oh Shit moments are decreasing :)).
Just 3 months post our launch, we had cracked 20 odd clients and thought to ourselves this is just the start we needed, however, that was exactly what we didn’t need. You see, we had underestimated the challenges of running a dynamic marketplace with quite a few moving pieces. With that, began our struggle of fixing seemingly unending list of problems during our first year of operations. We did have a highlight in the middle when we got selected as one of the Top TechHR firms across India by People Matters which gave us immense visibility and feedback from investors and mentors across the board helped us grow in the right direction.
Cut to July’18 — WE WERE PROFITABLE AT A CAPEX LEVEL growing at 3000%. Lesson learnt —> When it rains, it pours — which means even the not so bright ideas hit the ball out of the park 😊
What changed for us?
I will try to list down some of the reasons that lead to this outcome:
1. Obsession with Quality — At Scriptifi we were very clear that Quality will be our key differentiator across all our Stakeholders. We started that by fixing our onboarding process for Scripters (Recruitment Partners) which led to a selection of only 8% of the applicants who apply to us. The next piece we fixed was the Employer Onboarding process and yes, we were judging them as well :). They were continuously being evaluated on their intent to hire as that is the holy grail for our industry. Recruitment Consulting Industry has been abused due to this INTENT (or lack of it). We were quick to de-list Employers and Scripters (Our Recruitment Partners) who didn’t adhere to the quality behaviours required on the platform — all of this highlighted by our technology platform.
Then came our Talent Advisors who interacted with Employers and helped them in developing long term hiring strategy to create a healthy pipeline of talent which can be accessed anytime.
Icing on the cake — Our Machine Intelligence which successfully predicts the success rate of the candidates and has helped us bring down the profiles shared per closure to 7 as we speak. This is just bound to improve further :)
2. Hustle, Execute and Stay away from limelight — Hustle for Business Development, knock on every door, call every relevant person, leverage your network was our mantra! As Founders, both of us have stayed away from the limelight by focusing on work that matters rather than attending meaningless events, conferences, networking events, etc. (not all are meaningless though :))
3. Transparency — One of our key values is Transparency — We are straightforward with all our stakeholders and say it as we see it. This has helped us create great equations with Scripters and Employers. Some of the teething issues related to the marketplace model like status updates, payments, employer’s intent to hire, closures have all been resolved by just being transparent across the value chain and facilitating honest conversations.
4. Recruiter Driven marketplace — My views on Recruiters can be read here. Considering that we have put the Recruiters at the heart of the recruitment process, we plan to shift the market equilibrium from candidates to Recruiters to bring back some sense of sanity across issues like ghosting, offer drop-outs, exorbitant hikes, skill gap, etc. As a result, our Top Scripters earn 2X of what a great Technical Architect will earn in a Product Company.
So, these were some of the factors which helped us reach our current state and with a crazy pipeline in store we are now looking for our next set of Scripters — be it freelancers, Boutique firms, HNIs (Highly networked Individuals) or people who are intrigued with our business model and believe they can help us in building this globally. We will be more than happy to have a cup of coffee with them :)
WHAT NEXT: Profitability at 10X of our Current Scale 😊
