RezScore Year in Review: 2020 was a Great Year

Following the success of our much lauded 2019 Year in Review, we knew it would be highly useful to continue this trend.

We recognize and sympathize that this has been frustrating for much of the labor market. That being said:

• 2020 has been a great year for RezScore.
• 2021 looks even more promising.

Let’s dive in with our four part AAR: (1) what did we expect, (2) what actually happened (3) what went well (4) what can be improved?

1. What was expected to occur?

🎈Our Red Balloon recruiter product was gaining traction, we expected to focus on and grow this program throughout the year as our primary revenue driver. That was the entire thrust of the year, and we’d assembled a top tier team to get us there.

2. What actually occurred?

The hiring landscape across the years became highly erratic early in the year. Around March most hiring abruptly halted and layoffs escalated.

By the end of the year a few companies, most heavily Amazon, would ramp up hiring. However these companies had a surplus of talent to vulture over, so Red Balloon is mostly shelved except for particular fields where supply lags demand (most notably Solidity developers).

On the flip side, several millions of people lost their job. We expect the trends that contributed to this are likely to persist for years. Job seekers are the growth market, so we reoriented our company towards helping this group.

We expanded our summer internship program dramatically. We scaled it up from 2 to 12 people because several bright technical minds had lost their internships amidst the panic. We split interns into teams to rapidly prototype and test products targeting the three operational phases of the job hunt:

• Resume Improvement: Our classic automated resume grader, plus our new crowdsourced feedback tool
• Interview Practice: Take a written interview and have your answers automatically scored by AI
• Internal Company Referral: Don’t apply on the website, get an insider to refer you through the process

The third item, automated networking and job referrals, has proven to have the most demand for paying customers. This is our focus going into 2021.

3. What went well and why?

• We hosted the world’s first virtual job fair.
• Users with good resumes in the tech sector are automatically asked to schedule a Zoom call with the founding team. Users are pleasantly surprised to talk with not just a human being, but people in a high position. This provides us a great pipeline for user feedback from a market who are excessively frustrated. Big shout out to power user Adil M., a skilled product manager, for recommending this feature.
• Our new referral product emerged from these conversations. At its core, the product is to generate internal referrals. Results and metrics are tracked at a job hunter ATS. This product is proving very popular and an easy sell to a growing and acutely frustrated audience.
• We increased revenue year over year. A few thousand from subscription revenue is not where we need to be, but a great start. Especially considering the disappointing $0.00 revenue growth in 2019, we’re pleased 2020 was a more promising year.
• Chaos is a ladder. Being able to reorient our business model toward rapidly shifting circumstances yielded promising rewards, and we are well positioned to grow in 2021.

4. What could be improved and how?

Technology

• We’re moving very fast, now a lot of things are broken. Much of Q4 was dedicated to trying to keep up with cascading infrastructure issues, and these issues may persist into Q1.
• At the moment, technology issues have impacted our email deliverability and payment page. These are critical blockers to growth and getting solved slowly by our team (me).

Operations

• The concept of internal referral is popular. People will pay. But logistically, it is very tricky to implement properly.
• Many of the problems actually disappear as we scale due to Metcalfe’s Law. Fortunately we are indeed scaling. But at its current stage the service offering requires a lot of person-hours from the team (me) to have a functional product.

Marketing

• When the technology and operational concerns are solved, we’ll need money to acquire users, and fast.

Staffing

• We’re a bit short-handed (down to just one person), so we need to grow the team. The challenge is that revenue is not sufficient to hire the talent we need, so we are going to have to get creative about growing the team.

If you can help us with any or all of these issues, chat with us! Or if you want to chat with us just because! Carve out time to talk on Zoom or ping me on LinkedIn.