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This is one of the fastest growing newsletter for anyone looking to build profitable Micro SaaS products.
No fluffy content. If your goal is to build a $100m ARR business, this is not the right post. Here I am are NOT going to talk about building the next Facebook or Twitter. If your goal is to make a $1K to $10K MRR, continue reading.
This post will cover one SAAS area and talk about multiple niches in this space. This post also explains more on how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and also ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.
Hiring is one problem that people are happy to pay for working solutions. Companies pay hundreds to thousands of dollars to find the right candidate and spend a lot of hours in hiring.
Note: In this, we are not talking about HR tools. We are talking about challenges around hiring and how we can build solutions for hiring problems.
Let’s see some players building tools around Hiring challenges.
HireBeat: HireBeat is a tool to evaluate candidate with automated resume screening & video interviews along with collaborative screening to invite team members to evaluate candidates. Currently at $200K in revenue per year.
Adaface: Adaface is candidate friendly assessment tool on the market with a lot of features. Currently making $500K in revenue per year.
Codility: Tech recruitment is changing. Whether you need online code tests to screen thousands of engineers, or a flexible way to run tech interviews remotely, Codility platform will help you adapt with the times. Currently making $14M in revenue per year.
HireVue: Your end-to-end Hiring Experience Platform with video interview software, conversational AI, and assessments. Build a faster, fairer, friendlier hiring process with HireVue. Currently making $60M in revenue per year.
WeekdayWorks: Earn new connections, passive income and $1500 per hire by recommending friends.
CodeAlly: A toolkit helping tech-forward companies discover talent, run interviews in the cloud with the next natural step in engineer assessment software evolution. It helps with automated screening, pair programming and also lets you run candidates code in browser.
TestGorilla: Hire the best with no bias and no stress. TestGorilla screening tests identify the best candidates and make your hiring decisions faster, easier, and bias-free. Recently raised $1.2M in funding.
CoderByte: Evaluate candidates quickly, affordably, and accurately. The code assessment platform for screening, interviews, and take-home projects. Serving 1000+ Enterprise customers.
TogglHire: Hire smarter and use skills tests from TogglHire. TogglHire has served 140K tests so far. Use Toggl Hire to screen candidates and cut your time to hire by over 80%.
OnTribe: OnTribe’s basic motive is to make recruitment more data driven and conduct an in-depth analysis on a candidates work, making technical recruitment a piece of cake.
KandIo: Hire proven candidates with curated skill-testing marketplace with assessment tests made by the world's top engineers. Currently at $3M per year in revenue.
CodeJudge: Remotely assess and hire developers across all roles based on skills and nothing else, using proprietary Real World Micro-Project Technology.
Suitable: Hire Coders, vouched by your Teammates and Other Techies via Referrals.
BeApplied: A faster way to find qualified, diverse talent through removing unconscious bias out of your recruitment process.
HackerRank: The HackerRank Developer Skills Platform creates a seamless experience that developers and hiring teams love every step of the way.
Imocha: AI-powered digital skills assessment. Start building winning teams with Imocha’s 2000+ skills, enterprise-ready features, and plug & play ATS integrations. Currently at $2M per year in revenue.
Mettl: A talent assessment tool to conduct customized online assessments using cloud platform. Currently Mettl is making $5M per year in revenue.
Pymetrics: Pymetrics helps companies build the workforce of the future, using behavioral science and audited AI technology, resulting in more diverse teams and more efficient processes. Currently making $4M/year in revenue.
TripleBye: Use Triplebyte's data-backed assessment to identify skilled applicants before wasting time in tech screens. Triplebyte's estimated annual revenue is currently $9.1M per year.
SkilledUpLife: SkilledUpLife has 4,000 volunteers to build the next wave of tech startups. SkilledUp Life is a two sided marketplace that helps tech startups reach $10K MRR as fast as possible.
Negative Nancy says - “It’s much easier to review the resumes myself and talk to the candidate to understand if he/she fits the job”
Me - Agreed. But this is never scalable when you have hundreds of candidates applying for a bunch of open positions. You need tools.
Negative Nancy says - “Ready-made assessment tests can never screen a candidate 100%”
Me - Agreed. With ready-made assessment tests, you are not finding the candidates who fit 100% of the role. You are finding candidates who don’t fit the role at all and remove them from the hiring pipeline.
Negative Nancy says - “I can fire a candidate if he/she doesn’t fit. So why worry about hiring?”
Me - As a company, yes - you reserve the right to fire the candidate by following required guidelines. But this has a lot of negative impacts on social media. For example, your employees can go to GlassDoor and write negative reviews. On top of this, it takes a lot of time to find the right candidate again.
Deep-dive & some niches
Bot-based hiring challenges/questions: Build a Micro SaaS solution that can create a bot with pre-entered questions. For screening a candidate, most companies conduct the first round of phone screening (telephonic interview) and it’s a manual effort most companies want to automate. Build a web app, where companies can enter the initial set of questions and create a bot out of it. Now candidates can take the first round of interviews from the Interview Bot. Make sure to support multiple-choice questions as well in the bot. If the bot can also support, video recording the candidate while the candidate answers the questions, that can be an add-on. This is also called as “conversational style” where the bot starts interacting with the candidate as a casual conversation and starts asking questions. To improve this and charge more for customers, create ready-made conversational bots for various roles that customers can pick and assign to candidates. This way, the customer doesn’t need to worry about building the bot manually or providing the questions manually. But provide an option to customize the selected bots for additional flexibility. Adaface has been trying to automate this and found success with this process.
Hiring for Cloud: The number of open positions for the cloud has been growing exponentially where every company is trying to move to the cloud. With this, there are many companies opening positions for the cloud. One big challenge with cloud hiring is the broad skills one needs to be tested on the cloud. Unlike other positions like Backend developer, Frontend developer where you need to be tested on definitive skills, the cloud is different. In the cloud, there are many positions like Cloud SRE (Site Reliability Engineer), Cloud DevOps Engineer, Cloud Engineer, Cloud Database Specialist, Cloud Architect, etc. On top of this, there are multiple cloud vendors - AWS, GCP, and Azure are the major cloud players. So, having a mechanism for cloud hiring isn’t easy and it consumes a lot of hours from engineering teams to screen candidates. Create a Micro SaaS around cloud hiring by automating what is required for cloud screening. Note that the automation required for cloud hiring isn’t going to be easy with each vendor having hundreds of services across various domains. But start with the most tested skills like ‘Cloud Engineering’ skills and keep the test cases as agnostic as possible to programming languages. For example, define the automation to give the problem statement and let the candidate pick the programming language, and provide a solution that you can validate. Automating this may not be possible all the time. Start with manual validation after each candidate submits and slowly plan to automate things as you get more customers.
Hiring for Non-Tech roles like Marketing, Sales, Ads Manager: While there are tools for automating assessments for technical roles and programming roles, there aren’t many solutions around assessing non-technical roles. Create a Micro SaaS that can test candidates for these skills. It doesn’t have to screen the candidate 100% but if the SaaS solution could help eliminate face experienced candidates, it solves a problem. Instead of someone manually spending an hour on a candidate, a tool like this would cater a big solution for most companies. For example, if you want to automate hiring for ‘Paid Ads Campaign Manager’, start with questions around Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, CPM, CPC (not that some of these terms are related to the advertising industry), etc. At the end of the test, give a case study and ask for a written response. Your SaaS solution should automatically screen if the candidate is worthy for the next rounds or not. In either case, the tools should send a report to the hiring company with questions, answers, and any ad hoc writing questions requested. Add more skills to the tools. There are hundreds of different kinds of non-technical roles in companies. Automate and add pre-assessment tests for most of the roles.
Hiring via Testing live coding skills: There are many companies still using Zoom and shared screens to test live coding skills. Create a Micro SaaS tool that just creates a sharable browser with controls both for recruiter and candidate where they both can see each other via a video call. The tool should automatically create a link that can be accessed by both recruiter and candidate. On click of this link, it should allow video calling along with automatic ‘live coding’ options. The ability to video and voice means that your hire managers can interview applicants remotely and rapidly while creating a natural interview experience. Interviewers can easily create an online room and code together with applicants for an intuitive and remote evaluation of real-life skills on the fly. Live pair programming in a shared editor enables candidates to demonstrate their true abilities while enabling the interviewer to see their thinking, working together, and communicating. CodeLive and a few other tools are successfully able to run this model. Make sure to support as many programming languages as you can in the live coding tools.
Pre-assessment Skills Tests for Technical roles: Almost all companies want to screen candidates with pre-assessment skill tests. These are ready-made questions that can be sent to candidates by hiring managers. The candidate usually will have his/her login credentials to log in and answer these questions. The questions often range from simple programming questions to complex real-world challenges. Tools like these should support a working environment inside the browser so that candidates can write the code right inside the browser. Create a SaaS tool that can handle this. It has to let employers select the read-made tests and add candidates to tests. Once the candidates are added to the selected tests, the candidate should receive an email with instructions on how to log in, detailed questions, and information on the deadline to submit the tests. The tool should also send reminders if the candidate has done no activity. A premium add-on can be a ‘video record’ feature where employers can record the video of the person who is answering the questions. This will help to cut down on fake candidates. Make sure to support as many programming languages as you can in the live coding tools.
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