Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Lily Stoyanov, CEO of Transformify (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the PR angle to this?

Lily Stoyanov: We have an HR suite. The freelance marketplace is just one of the modules. We have freelancer/contingent workforce management software, which is something that comes after you hire freelancers from the freelance marketplace to manage the relationship with them over time and to use the same people.

Then you have diversity hiring. What I was explaining about PR marketing campaigns is related to diversifying. Diversifying is our third module. It is specifically for companies that engage with diversity hiring and corporate social responsibility programs.

Put simply, they create jobs for people from specific vulnerable groups. For example, there are young people in conviction centers in Peru. They’re not criminals, but they’re in a detention center. Unless someone helps them, they will be on the street when they leave the center. They will be engaged with gangs and they will end up badly.

Companies create jobs specifically for people who face challenges to integrate with the workforce. It could be because they have a disability. It could be possible that they could not move and need to work from home. There are many use cases there.

What is super hard for the companies is to reach out to these people and to tell them that there is a program specifically for them. They can apply for this program and they will be employed because such people normally fear that they’ll never go through the interview processes.

They don’t because it’s not at par. They don’t have the same skills. They’re not as confident as other people who are healthier and who have not been through hardships. That is the diversity recruitment model.

Every module of our HR suite has different customer bases even though it’s an integrated suite. We have one more module called employer branding. Employer branding is there to establish the brand of the employers and to track the right talent. It is a mix of recruitment, marketing, and PR. It is everything a recruiter needs regardless of the size of the company, whether they have regular employees, or independent contractors, or if they need to run corporate social responsibility campaigns or diversity hiring campaigns.

Sramana Mitra: How do you charge? Is it a marketplace commission? Is it a subscription for the software? How do you do that? 

Lily Stoyanov: The business model varies per module. The modules are different. You have the marketplace which is B2B/B2C. It is a mixture of subscription and transactional. The employers pay to post jobs and they pay when they transfer money.

The subscription needs a package to be able to post jobs and then one day, transfer money. It’s similar to what Upwork has.

Then the applicant tracking system is a pure SaaS model. Companies buy subscription packages. The contingent workforce management software may be purely on a subscription model if the company decides not to use our money transfer and billing functionalities because some companies prefer not to do that. It could be subscription and transactional if they’re also using the money transfer and billing.

Finally the other two modules are diversity hiring and employer branding and pricing is custom. When we talk about CSR, it has different objectives. They don’t necessarily need to use our applicant tracking system if they’re hiring people. They may need us for different reasons. They may need us to strategize the program. They may need us on the communication side. Sometimes they need me to run workshops or speak to inspire people. It’s custom pricing there.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Lily Stoyanov, CEO of Transformify
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