paskster's comments

We are mainly targeting short term jobs for exhibition, events and promotion right now. 80 % of the time, customers book young females for these jobs. So your are right, that we show "young attractive women" on a lot of landing pages, but this is more a result of our business model. The comparison to GoDaddy is not fair, since it has no relation to their business model, that they show young females.

And we make sure that our jobbers not only upload high quality pictures but also write their personal experience in a targeted and concise format. For example we now started other verticals such as temporary chefs and on these pages you see mostly middle aged men with cooking experience:

https://www.instaff.jobs/koeche-mieten/frankfurt

edit: same content but better english

We are creating an online marketplace for short term work in Germany (https://www.instaff.jobs). Businesses can publish their jobs on our platform, jobbers apply with their profile and then these businesses can book the jobbers online. We take care of quality management and employment overhead (working contracting, payroll accounting, etc.).

We made close to 3 Mill. EUR revenue in 2016. We acquire 90 % of our customers via SEO and about 10 % via Google Adwords. We don't do any direct sales.

Our #1 growth strategy was creating well designed and highly targeted landingpages for all relevant keywords. For example if potential customers search for certain type of jobbers in certain German cities, these are some of our landingpages:

https://en.instaff.jobs/fair-hostesses-agency/frankfurt

https://en.instaff.jobs/fair-hostesses-agency/berlin

https://www.instaff.jobs/promotion-agentur/stuttgart

https://www.instaff.jobs/catering-personal-agentur/hamburg

Europe is not a single market at all. Simple thinks like making sure your invoice is paid from a customer who is based in another european country is practically impossible.

I know because I am the CEO of a staffing company in Germany: national as well as international businesses book exhibition staff and other temporary employees for events in Germany and Austria through our platform.

If one of our german customers does not pay, we can easily use the german legal system to ensure that we get our money. If we have to sue, our legal system makes sure that we are reimbursed if we win in court. But if for example an Italian business is using our service and they don't pay our invoice, we have no way to get our money. We technically could appeal to a court in Italy, get a lawyer in Italy, translate all documents to Italian and sue in Italy. But this would cost at least 20.000 EUR in total which are not reimbursed even if we win in court.

That is why businesses who are not based in Germany have to pay upfront. I cannot call the EU a single market, if my business has to treat a customer from EU the same like any other customer around the world.

So, maybe the UK will have some disadvantages if they are not part of the EU anymore. But they are not leaving a "single market" because the EU never was a single market. I guess they will be just fine without the EU.

1) If you expect a certain refund quota, lets say 20 % within 6 months, then you should already account for it: only account 80 % of the actual revenue and adjust this number after 6 months when you now the actual refund quota. This makes it more complicated but it would be the right thing to do and will help you get a somewhat decent financial plan.

2.) If your growth curve flattens out than this approach obviously does not really give you a good representation of how well you are currently doing.

1.) Refund: Yes, I would adjust the revenue in the month it was recognized.

2.) Monthly growth: It is actually really simple, you just caculate:

(16/1)to the power of (1/6) which equals: 1.58 This means the average growth rate was 58 %.

16/1 is the total growth rate for all 6 months. And to the power of (1/6) because it is calculated among 6 months

I really like the fact that this post first distinguishes "#1 Bookings vs. Revenue".

I hear it almost everyday among startups, where they talk about bookings, revenue and incoming payments interchangeably. And sometimes even in the same sentence such as "We made 100 k in the whole last year [meaning revenue], we currently make about 50 k per month [meaning bookings] and just last week we made another 30 k [meaning incoming payment]."

This makes it way to hard to properly communicate with founders. So great stuff this post.

I am very pro Euro. But I don't like the fact that a single country in Europe feels that 18 other countries have to pay their debt.

These bailouts in the past were signed from the greece government in the best interest of its people. A lot of people make it seem that we (non-greece european) somewhat forced theses agreements onto greece. In fact these bailouts where were unpopular in Germany, because it cost us a lot of our money, we could have spent on infrastructure, education, etc.

Therefore I would love Greece to give up the Euro currency and leave the European Union, so that these other 18 countries don't feel any obligation anymore to transfer more money to greece.

I believe that Europe will be stronger that way. Because a vision of a truly united European Union can only be reached if all countries play by the same rules and abide to their agreements.

I am astouned by all the comments, who say that "Greeks were getting a shitty deal" or that the bailout terms were somewhat "unfair".

Facts are: Greece had a spending deficit for several decades now. This spending deficit accumulated to such a big dept, that no investors were willing to lend greece any more money. 18 european countries transferred billions of euros in the last couple of years to greece, to help the country and the people. In return they had an agreement that greece would cut their spending. Greece never lived up to the agreements it made. In the last weeks 18 european countries offered greece another bailout, where greece would receive several bilions again. In return they asked greece to finally cut spendings.

Now greece voted against this bailout. There are a lot of people in europe (myself included, I am from Germany by the way) who are not willing to transfer further billions of euroes to greece, just so that a socialist party can fullfil its "promises" and increase their deficit.

I love the first reason "Because I can’t afford to allocate the time needed". Soooo true. You have really high upfront cost if you start fundraising and it might be that you end up with no real good offer at the end.

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/ and 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

I understand all your points. But that is why I like to see some mobile specific Case Studies, just to help and give some basic rules of thumbs. Otherwise all you have is opinions. At the end you obviously have to test your different designs / approaches. But some basic and well tested rules would help to start up the design a lot.

I would love to see more Case Studies on Mobile App Design. For example how big should images within a mobile app be, to increase user engagement. Especially inside a listview bigger images can mean fewer items, but might still increase conversion because it looks more appealing.

I could only find the german press-release: http://schwartzpr.de/de/newsroom/pressemeldung.php?we_object...