Founding a marketplace to connect early stage startups with talent
The goal
Intro
SkillsRobin (www.skillsrobin.com) is an online marketplace connecting early stage startups to their first engineering hires. Whether they are looking for a co-founder, CTO or founding engineer, SkillsRobin connects them to pre-vetted talent through a referral.
Every engineer on SkillsRobin comes with a reference from another tech professional we trust. Think of it as an employee referral system, except you can also get referrals from people who are not your employees!
My role
As the founder of SkillsRobin - I work on it as my side hustle and am involved in everything from sales, to web development to business ops and financials.
I founded SkillsRobin as the result of an iterative product design process, testing multiple prototypes for recruitment solutions with tech hiring managers before finding a business model, buyer persona, sales process and product that would land customers.
What encouraged me to start the business was my love of startups, and recognition that while many talented developers wanted to be involved in a budding enterprise, they didn't necessarily know the best place to find them.
Outcome
So far, SkillsRobin has helped to match numerous companies and job seekers who would never have found each other. For examples of some of the people I've helped through my business, check out the testimonials below or visit the SkillsRobin blog.
Company
Year
Team
Timeline and constraints
Skills
- Entrepreneurship
- Sales
- Marketing
- Product development
- Web development
- Design
- Business operations
"SkillsRobin connected us with exceptional talent to add to our engineering team. Especially loved that they were pre-vetted, which helped our hiring process and gave us the assurance in selecting the right candidates."
"SkillsRobin introduced us to high quality, diverse engineering candidates with relevant technical and startup experience. Pre-vetting of candidates saved us time in initial calls and made us more confident moving them down the recruitment pipeline. They provided tremendous value compared to working with recruiting agencies or doing open-call online posting."
“It is really difficult in the start-up ecosystem to find talent that not only lives and breathes the problem you are solving, but has the heart, skills and experience to help build a solution. Skills Robin helped me find both. Skills Robin has the intuition and network to find talent that founders need and for that I am so thankful!”
Thanks to SkillsRobin, I not only found an exciting opportunity to work on an AI product but also connected with individuals who truly appreciate my skills and values. It's been an incredibly rewarding experience.
"I would definitely use SkillsRobin again. The fact that all the candidates are referred and pre-vetted is really good. I would much prefer to use it than put an ad on Seek" - Christina Maher, Stealth Startup.
Examples of assets created
More projects
Learn more about my work
Contact me on lisa@lisadeng.net for in-depth case studies or to learn about how I work
Subscribe to my blog to get updates on my work and learnings.