

How our staffing-as-a-service IT startup reached break-even - paskster
https://en.instaff.jobs/it-startup/breakeven-7-months-after-launch

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cylinder
I like your site's design but you mention you didn't hire a designer. Is that
a theme I can purchase (boostrap? wp?)

What separates you from myriad other staffing agencies? Is it backend tech to
reduce overhead? I know you have a great welcoming design etc but could you
expand on new tech or other innovations you've made to beat out the
"dinosaurs"?

~~~
paskster
Thanks for your curiosity. First of all, we use the Bootstrap framework but
did the whole design ourselves, so you cannot buy it.

We have two big differentiators towards staffing agencies. 1.) Online
Marketplace: If you go to an agency they think about your request, make you an
offer and afterwards find suitable employees for you. If you go to us, we just
route your job to the employee profiles in our database, they respond if they
are interested and for what wage, and you receive a list of potential
employees with different prices, that you may or may not book. 2.) Software
Technology: Agencies do pretty much everything by hand. The have software to
manage their processes, but they don't really automize any processes. We try
to automize every single step. Right now we just take a look at every new
customer request and if the customer has no special needs our software does
the rest (job routing, automatically sending emails, sending working
contracts, exchanging contact data, reminding to upload workingsheet, etc.)

So basically our competitors have an agency business model where the agencies
employees do all the work. We have an online marketplace business model where
the software does all the work.

~~~
cylinder
Nice! I love seeing stories like this.

I just realized that I was thoroughly confused when making my original post --
instead of clicking your logo, I googled your name and ended up at a US
company by the same name. Now that I see your instaff.jobs site I can clearly
see the tech focus.

Do you plan to remain solely focused on trade fairs and such? Did you focus on
a narrow niche just for the SEO and client acquisition aspect? Are you
planning to expand into other areas now?

~~~
paskster
We are using the niche mainly because of SEO, client acquisition as well as
user acquisition reasons. Exhibition stafff is also a very lucrative niche
because germany is the biggest exhibition country in the world and trade fair
hostesses actually earn pretty good money: about 13 € to 15 € per hour, which
is about 16 to 19 $.

We had some customer requests in the hospitality market, mostly catering
staff. So I guess this is the next market to enter. However nurses could be an
interesting market as well, we are not totally sure yet.

Our vision for the longterm is, to be the "oDesk for onsite staffing". So
everytime you are looking for a temporary worker that works onsite, you
hopefully go to our online marketplace.

~~~
cylinder
I am really impressed with this especially because it's already making money
and has so much potential.

Have you considered licensing out your tech platform for use in other
countries? Licensee would basically just need to do sales/marketing and run
with it and you take royalties. I'd be interested if you're open to it (for a
country lightyears away from Germany).

~~~
paskster
We already have a very solid business model, so licensing / royalties is not
something we are looking for. And we would love to internationalize next year.
There are a couple of competitors in this space in other countries, for
example [http://staff-finder.jobs/](http://staff-finder.jobs/) and
[https://goworkabit.com/](https://goworkabit.com/) If you like this business
model, feel free to copy it ;) In what country are you based? I am more than
glad to help you, except for giving you our code base of course.

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paskster
I am on of the two co-founders as well as the CEO/CTO of InStaff. If you
happen to have any questions feel free to make comments here.

~~~
dontomasini
keep going Pascal!

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annesiebold
Great job, you taught me how important content marketing and SEO is. Yesterday
I recommended your service, this request showed me again the potential of your
startup. The curve is nice to see. go on!

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jonifico
That's a pretty awesome success story. I like how the process seems quite
doable without any uncommon facts. Will definitely take this into account for
my future businesses.

~~~
paskster
Dear jonifico, it was really just a lot of effort into content marketing, seo,
sem as well as customer support. We developed the platform while operating and
only closed the upcoming bottlenecks. So yes, very doable ;)

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kowdermeister
I'm really glad you guys made an awesome start. I hope you can keep the pace.

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Bbolland
Awesome story, thanks for sharing with the HN community

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JanKoenig
great job!

How much did joining the accelerator program actually help you in reaching
that goal?

~~~
paskster
We got basically 4 things out of the accelerator: \- Some press overage,
including backlinks from Bild.de (the biggest newspaper in germany) \- Good
Office space in Berlin and 25.000 €, so that we could focus on our business,
without other overheads \- Talks with intersting people in the german startup
scene \- Branding from Axel Springer, which helped us in hiring a working
student as well as a very good intern

We only gave up 5 % of equity, so it was overall a very fair deal.

~~~
JanKoenig
that sounds like a great opportunity! thanks for the answer

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amir_adincon
great story! thanks for sharing

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jackoemer
amazing job !

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dittes
great job!

