 So, some people in our industry are writing long and detailed business plans before they start a product or an idea. Others just build stuff in order to do what they love to do. I never planned to be self-employed or even run my own company. It just happened somehow because I did what I love. I'd like to tell you a story. The story of how I teamed up with great people to build a Cyproject which led us to become a WordPress agency. The team. Let me introduce you how we met. The past 10 years I worked as a designer for several web agencies and changed jobs and agencies very frequently. I worked with a lot of talented people along my jobs. For example, one of them was Sylvan, which I met when we worked as web engineers now called front-end engineers at the biggest web agency in Switzerland. We shared the same job title and worked on the same kind of project, but we were actually very different in our skill set. So, Sylvan was more a front-end engineer with a stronghold on scripting. While I set more focus in designing with HTML and CSS. Oh, sorry. To be honest, neither of us were really happy in our jobs and that's how we eventually connected in the beginning. So, after a while, we decided to go on part-time work to fill the gap of the creativity we had on our jobs. In order to cover the skills needed for our Cyproject, we needed to expand our team with a bit more manpower and skills. So, Sylvan worked with Felti at his former job and was really fond of his designing skills. He proposed that Felti would be a good fit to our team. And I already worked with Stefan a couple years ago. I found Stefan would be a good complement to Sylvan's coding skills. And that's how we sort of teamed up to work on our Cyprojects. We are a good mix in terms of skills. Two of us are designer. While Felti designs nice and usable responsive interface within the browser, I am more focusing on the user flow and information architecture of a web design. The other two are developer. Stefan is a solid PHP developer who builds custom web applications and Sylvan has a deep knowledge in WordPress development. Since we were already experienced in working together on our former jobs, we all agreed to give it a try. The Cyproject. We are doing something without a client involved. So, we love our clients, but there is something... There is the thing when working with clients. You always do what the client wants. So, we always dreamed of building a product where we were actually our own clients. Something where we could express ourselves and follow our ideas. So, let's go back in time to the year of 2006. Back in 2006, finding a job for the web industry was very disappointing. There were relatively few job listings on the major platforms in Switzerland. Besides that, when looking for a term like web design, one would end up with a huge list of jobs from SAP consultants to Java software engineers, which aren't really design jobs at all. So, the use experience of looking for a job in the web industry was not satisfying at all. Well, back then, and still today, in our industry, job titles aren't really formal or somehow protected. Everyone can call themselves whoever they want. Web designer, web publisher, web developer, web whatsoever. Finding a job that matched what we were looking for was a gamble with keywords. For example, the most popular job board in Switzerland looked in February 2006 like this. Let's zoom in to see the text search a little bit. And I remove all the distractions around. With the keyword web design, one could search results like senior Java developer, embedded Linux firmware whatsoever, and JEE software engineer, web application. So, as a web designer, there are no design jobs here. The most relevant result would be the web publisher, which is usually nothing more than a content manager with little knowledge in HTML. So, no job for me. You know, the funny thing in life is sometimes unhappiness can lead to new ideas. Because since we were all unhappy with our day job, we were obviously trying to find new ones. This was really complicated, so we all shared a similar problem, and that's how we connected and decided to change it. We wanted to build a dedicated job board with consistent content quality to provide relevant job results for web professionals. Fast forward to summer 2010. We didn't build anything yet. So, the concept of a dedicated job board popped up again in a discussion over a couple of years. The urge to change job emerged in all of us again, because the pain in searching for jobs still existed four years later. We decided that it is time to finally do something about it, and started brainstorming on features, names and suitable technology to be used. We had some big and awesome ideas. All the features we thought we would be great to build. We wanted to change how people are looking for jobs, at least for the web industry. But we wanted to start lean with a prototype to get the feel for the industry and how a niche job board would perform with its huge competitor, the well-known job boards we didn't like so far. Therefore, we focused on how to provide good quality in content and use experience instead of a fancy feature set or an entirely new concept to present job listings. As web nerds, we had to do this right. The site needed to be responsive. Back in 2010, dedicated mobile websites and native apps still ruled the mobile world. Responsive websites were still new to the industry. We set our focus in the browser to satisfy the webgeeks and iPhone fans with a responsive experience across all screen sizes. Swiss WebJobs was our code or mission name, and we ended up building a proof of concept within three months. Let me share you the initial draft of the design. It was a static HTML and CSS design in the browser. This was our prototype to talk about the idea with people in the industry. We also tried a version where we gave the designer a little bit more of a dark background and with some glossy buttons. The glossy buttons were really popular these days. Really popular. So, as Sylvan was already really fond of WordPress back then, we wanted to build the job port with WordPress. It was still just a proof of our concept, so we took an existing WordPress theme that had job listing features and started tweaking it by removing unused features and added some new ones. The name. That Swiss WebJobs wasn't exactly a catchy name, and people would probably mean that this is just another platform with PHP, no, sorry, with SAP, enterprise solution jobs on it. So, we decided to come up with something catchier and a little bit less specific. We came up with the name FreshJobs and felt he designed the visual identity. We were already done with what we were experienced in, building and designing a web application, but we eventually had to make a decision in how to run a job port. That was new to us. We had to create a pricing structure. So, compared to other platforms in Switzerland where a job listing starts from 500 francs, we wanted to help startups and smaller agency to access talents by creating the pricing very affordable, because we all know how crucial budget is when companies just start, right? So, for us, it was more important to solve the problem than making money. But most people in Switzerland are weird creatures and have different mindsets. So, they believe if something is for free, there is no value behind it. So, that's why we decided to sell the job listings. And we also had to cover our basic costs regarding web servers and the time we would spend by maintaining the application. So, we designed the following pricing structure. A full-time job would be 79 francs. A part-time job 59 and a freelance job 29. On average, it takes 60 till 120 days in Switzerland to find good stuff. That's why we doubled the usual 30 days duration for a job listing. So, on fresh jobs, a job would last 60 days. How do we ensure great content quality? That was a big question. By manually reviewing every listing before we publish it. We reviewed a job. We checked if the content matches our visitors. And if not, the listing got retracted. We fixed formatting and spelling issues, if necessary. And we then updated the meta information on the listing to improve search result rankings. Search engine rankings. It took approximately 15 minutes per listing. But it was totally worth it to ensure platform quality and to learn what our customers actually needed in terms of features and usability. How did we spread the word? So, it was time. In January 2011, we planned to launch fresh jobs to the public. In order to reach the people working in the web industry we decided to use Twitter to create interest. So, we also created a landing page to allow people to follow and like us. We spread the word by creating some creative tweets to catch them by their curiosity. And these were the tweets we shared. If someone in this room does not speak German, there. Okay. So, I tried to translate one or two, but I must confess they only really work in German well. So, I pick one. For example, this one would be Internet Explorer 6 sucks. I need a bug remover also. And yes, back then we had to deal with ISX. Or working with Photoshop is very stressful. I need a pixel pusher right away. Yes, there was no such cool app like the Sketch app. We had to deal with Photoshop to do our web designs. And here is a screenshot of our splash page. The curious who followed the link in our tweets will get a little more info about the upcoming platform. So, what does this page say? Not much, actually. Just that there will be a job board for and from people from the web industry. And that one would find jobs like web design and front-end engineers and so on. The splash page was indeed a good preview. It started to gain traction. And the community started to notice and wonder about what will come to fresh jobs. We launched fresh jobs on January 31st in 2011. In order to already serve content, because a job is only good with active listings, we asked big agencies for their current openings and offered them a special deal. By the time we launched, we already had lots of interesting job openings on the page. And we had our very first paid listing on the day one we launched. All the memories. This was what it looked like. We had dedicated categories like back-end, design, front-end, consulting and a job listing had to fit into these categories. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a fit for the job board. And on the right, you'll see the responsive experience on a small device. So, back then our competitor looked like this. As you can see, there are about 29,000 jobs from over 5,000 companies. Jobs from all industries. In comparison to fresh jobs, fresh jobs had a average of 40 jobs from around 10 companies. Very few but relevant jobs for the web professionals. The missing features. We launched fresh jobs with some missing features. For example, the renewal process that allowed companies to extend their job listing was broken. This wasn't a showstopper for us because since the duration of a listing is 60 days, we thought, well, we have 60 more days to fix that feature. Therefore, we just went online without this feature. 60 days later, and the renewal process was still broken. We hadn't had time to work on that. So we ended up doing this manually. Five days before a listing would end, we manually sent an email to the customer to inform them about the possibility to extend the listing for free. This way, we could manage to renew their jobs by ourselves, and our customer didn't notice that there were no feature for that. This was actually awesome because we had consistent content on the platform. We engaged with the customers and could answer their emails personally, which made them feel good. And we got a sense of how our customers needed, so we could later automate the right features. Fresh jobs run smoothly. With a team of four, we could easily delegate responsibilities and support requests. This way, we managed to drop out besides our day jobs. To further spread the world, we spent time by attending meetups and talked to people about it. To further support the web community, it was clear early on that we are going to sponsor relevant events in the industry with some money we make. Like I said, we wanted to build a job board for the web community and help people from the web community. It's part of our philosophy to give something back. So we are sponsoring local conferences with some of the money we get. One of our sponsor package includes that we provide vouchers to the other sponsors of the event. They can post their jobs on Fresh jobs for free during the conference. We then create a dedicated feed to put it on the conference website. As you can see here, for the front-end conference in Zurich. So, a niche job board with an average of 40 jobs does not cover the cost at all. And in order to push things further, we have to come up with a solution to finance it. Fresh jobs got noticed and we got approached from investors offering us money to build jobs to build job boards for them in order to niche us. First, we thought, well, why not? Since we collected all those valuable experience in how to run a job board, it would be beneficial to take the advantage and spread the idea in different niches. So we were open to discuss possibilities with partners. Unfortunately, none of them were in line with our vision. Some wanted to include fancy features that we couldn't agree on and some even wanted that we gave up fresh jobs for the new job board we would build for them. Fresh jobs was kind of our baby, so we believed in our passion. That's why we cancelled all plans with possible investors to stick to our ideas. We would stick to our client projects, to finance our side project. But we would do it right. We would also quit our part-time jobs to follow our passion full-time. We would found a company. That's when we as individual freelancers founded the required Gambira. We are required. We would provide services in the field of UX, design and PHP development. One could book us as individual freelancer or one could develop a complex project with us. Since each team member has its same value to the company, we split the company shares through four. Each of us got 25% shares. Fresh jobs version two. To be honest, running a job board based on its proof of concept prototype over three years, it was damn time to build it new. Fresh jobs version two came to our mind. Three and a half years after the launch of our initial prototype, the version one, we finally planned the milestone to build the fresh jobs we always wanted. But how did we do it? Some of us did focus more on client work because they just wanted to work for clients. So we decided to do it on the job board. If we put that on a scale, I would say one and a half person were working on the job board and the other two and a half for clients to bring the money in. Over the last three years of running a job board, we collected many valuable experiences and we knew exactly what our customers needed and most of all what features we as providers needed to maintain and run the platform more efficiently. And that's where we focused on. Building features and designing user flows which we knew were valuable to all. We not only wanted to redesign the platform, we also wanted to reach more web professionals across Switzerland. There is this thing about Switzerland which is a small but very complex country. As you might know, the country is divided in three parts. The German, French and Italian part. Fresh jobs was only present in the German part. So in addition to the redesign and rebuild, fresh jobs should bridge the Röste Graben. This is called in Switzerland where we eat Röste and there is like the gap between the German and French part so we bridged the Röste Graben by translating the platform into French and spread the word in the so called Romandy, the western part of Switzerland. Fresh jobs do. That was our mission name or in German fresh jobs 2. With the subdomains 2.freshjobs.ch and 2.freshjobs.ch one would get an info page. We made a microsite explaining our mission to the web industry. We partnered up with the UX agency ratio in Lausanne to they sorry they helped us with the translation of the whole application and approach possible companies who would post jobs for the western part of Switzerland. Does someone speak French in here? Good. On this microsite one could subscribe to our newsletter in order to be informed about our launch day and of course we again spread the word on Twitter. In July 2014 we finally launched fresh jobs with its new design and features. The job board still runs on WordPress. We built a lot of the features in custom plugins and we open source most of them. To our users the job seeker there is an overall improved user experience for searching jobs with the filter. You see that in the gray area. To our customers the employee the employers we improved the user experience to post a listing less form fields and an easy sign up flow. Most important we improved the payment process with the stripe integration which makes paying by credit card very easy. And we sent transaction emails to our customers so that they are always on track with their job status. And this is how a company gets the viewments locked in. As you can see three and a half years later we finally have this renewable feature. So one could stop the listing and activate it later on or one could just extend the listing. There is also the possibility to see transactions and download received if they want. Since we collect company infos over the past five years we built a company index page. So web companies are present with its profile even if they don't have an active job on fresh jobs. So far we have over 400 web companies across Switzerland. So yes, Switzerland is a small company and we have many small companies. Ten years later and the major job board in Switzerland have the same issues regarding job results when searching for web jobs. As you can see, with the keyword web design today one would still get irrelevant job results like Web Intricler Java Developer Web Analyst No Web Design Jobs here. So ten years later of the initial idea of fresh jobs celebrates the fifth anniversary. Yay! So we learned many things. We couldn't learn if we wouldn't run a platform like this. And we are keen to give our learnings back to our clients projects and work camp like this. Since we launched the version 2 we observed better usability by our customers because of fewer support requests and the renewal feature and the automatic email the platform sends to our customers led to the fact that almost every job gets extended. So with the presence in the RomoD fresh jobs also increased reach in popularity. The idea of a niche job board for web professionals seems to work and we are really proud of it. The balance. Working for clients and product equally well is really challenging. So we have so many ideas for fresh jobs but rarely time to work on them. Sometimes it can be frustrating because we automatically put the agency work first. Because that's what we decided to focus on. Our clients are eventually the one who are paying our bills. We are lucky that the job board is more or less running smoothly. Well we run the daily business of course by reviewing listings and answering support requests and there is always one person of our team which is on duty. We sometimes switch responsibility so everyone on the team knows how to run the daily business. Which makes us more flexible. Constraints forces us to focus. Which means that if we manage to work on fresh jobs we try to work on things that matters. And we are lucky that we work as a team very well. One reason why we work so well together is because we share the same attitude towards work and life. Only do what you do best. That's why we would focus on the things we are passionate about and won't take on projects nor clients which didn't share the same passion or mindset. Because we truly believe if everyone on the project is passionate about it everyone gets the most out of it. That's why we do UX design front-end and PHP development. Either custom or with WordPress. If a project isn't fit to our skills or to WordPress we refer it to another service provider. Which is giving us more space to focus on what really matters to us. Working on our passion. The takeaways and what we've learned. The best product has a vision. When someone uses a product they're not just looking for features they're looking for an approach. Decide what your vision is and run with it. In the case of fresh jobs it's the dedicated job results. Less is more content over features. They didn't come because of the design to fresh jobs. They came because of the content. That's why the feature didn't matter which were missing actually. Let limitation guide you to creative solutions. Constraints, drive innovation and force focus. Use them to your advantage. Since we didn't have much time besides the client work we worked only on feature which really mattered. Focus entirely on your existing customers. Treat them well and they will become your friends. We get engaged with our customers by personal trust. We answer support mails in person. People can sense it when something is built for profit only. We never put money over our passion. Never ever. An idea by itself is worth absolutely nothing. It's the team that executes on the initial idea that makes the difference. We are a great team and we support each other while respecting our individual lifestyle. Fall in love with a problem everything else will follow. Because people who are passionate about solving a problem are the ones who eventually find each other and make it happen. We are still an awesome team and are slowly growing. Thank you for listening to our story and many thanks to my team. You can ask in German if you like as well. Your question was we are growing slowly and what's our approach to grow in general? We have no plan and we don't have an approach. We just go step by step. We were the four of us in the beginning and we had last year the opportunity to have Pascal on our team. We knew that we wanted to have a little bit more manpower and since each climb project is a maintaining project as well because the work is going to be more and more. It would be cool if we could just have each year one person on top of our team but it doesn't have to. It has to be a fit rather than just growing slowly as we can. How exactly did we integrate with each other? I don't know. I don't know. On a development thing or yeah. Stripe if someone doesn't know stripe it's like a cool payment process which can be integrated very easily. It's not only cool for developer for integrating with each other. We know that there is something different. With PayPal you always get redirected to PayPal and come back. With Stripe it's just an overlay. You type in your credit card information and then it's done. That's actually the answer. We have both integrated. Stripe is just paying with credit card or paying with PayPal. We notice that since we have this button paying with credit card everyone is just paying with credit card through Stripe because PayPal sucks. Yes. And now PayPal requests and signing and login. Before that it hadn't had so we noticed that people were like distracted with PayPal because they thought they had to have a login and we had so many support requests they said oh I don't have a PayPal login can I just pay with credit card and we had to send them a screenshot. Yes you can do this on the very end of the corner you see paying with credit card only. So it was not really satisfying for our customers at all for the payment process and I think that's a good thing about Stripe. It just makes paying much easier. Therefore it increased with whatever they just pay. Yeah. Is that an answer to your question Yeah. One is do you have any tips or experiences about how you juggled issues or conflicts linked for partners of the agency and the question is how has first jobs benefitted or the opposite to your other business? The first question was if we start struggling to be partners with the four of us no we didn't have any struggles there were discussions there is always the discussion when money is involved but we actually changed our concept how we would be involved with our partnership every year because we knew our plans weren't really working out so we have we are really lucky that we are such a great team so we always try to find a good solution for everyone so no I have no tips yeah well my tip would be find great people to work with and don't put money on top of it money is always a show stop and the other question was I forgot it benefit or disadvantage of running a drop board with having an agency benefit all our customers or our competitors so it's like we got how can I say that while running a drop board for web agencies they got no test of us they didn't thought ok we are an agency as well so we were like they posted their jobs on fresh jobs and sometimes they ask us if we would freelance for them and we thought no but just put it on fresh jobs and when we are on a briefing or when we are on a pitch with a new client and we see that they have drop openings we come with vouchers and tell them ok by the way we saw that you have drop openings here you can have a drop on fresh jobs for free yeah that's the beneficial of it and the disadvantage is is there a disadvantage no time to work on fresh jobs yeah anything else cool then thank you thank you