Faisal Memon Founded SuperApp. He did his computer science from Mumbai university and used to build mobile and web apps that solved real world problems. He got placed in an IT firm and was working in the industry for close to three years. He decided it was time for him to move on to another job and began making his resume and found that he was a bit lazy to build his own resume because he was not comfortable using MS word and he found that many of his friends took a lot of time in making their resumes. He knew that the smart phone penetration is very huge in the IT industry and decided to make it easy for him and his friends to apply. He built an app on the Android platform and distributed this amongst his friends and made them give him the feedback to refine the app. Based on the feedback, he developed a good version of the product and found that lots of people showed interest. He was still working on this app in the evenings and in the weekends because he was in a job. He finally got traction and this lead him to believe that he had built something that was needed by the world. He finally quit his job by May 2014 and started working full time. With continues enhancement and iteration super became top rated resume builder on Google play across globe and went on to acquire half a million users.
On the differentiation with job sites or apps with similar functionalities, Faisal says that the other job sites were merely listing sites and it takes an inordinate amount of time to create a profile and upload ones resume. In this world, one runs behind the other thereby complicating the match making process and companies get many resumes that they are spending so much of time on even candidates who show disinterest later. He built the app where it shows the candidates a lot of rich data about the prospective company such as culture, jobs, skills they are hiring for coupled with some videos and the candidates swipe right to show interest and swipe left to show disinterest and the employer does the same thing and the two of them gets connected to each other immediately. He found that many of his users export their resume to their mobile phones and then upload it on job sites. Faisal says that everyone today thinks about the desktop only for resumes and he is changing the behaviour of the users to use mobile to land new jobs.
After creating resumes, users wanted to start applying for jobs right from phone. So thus, he transformed Super resume builder to Super – Tinder for jobs in india. Super is reimagining jobs on mobile. From a sales perspective, Faisal says that he had also spoken to many startups who used it as beta and gave him valuable feedback and they were happy to continue their job posting when he demonstrated the final app and convinced them that there will be a lot of users who will sign into this because of the frictionless way to register and the companies will also get only the serious candidates and will not be inundated with resumes. Faisal says that he was able to convince both sides of the marketplace because one can build resumes from mobile, recruit from mobile, it was a mobile first and mobile only app.
Because he had an option for the candidates and the employees to swipe and select candidates, he was able to get so much of valuable information from those decisions and understood both the company’s and the candidates likes and dislikes and the system provides only the jobs that the candidates like.Super’s job was to show the people how easy it is, make them use it and believe it and companies have now changed their behaviour to use mobile for recruiting and they are extremely happy with the ease of use. The mobile version will also allow the companies to create multiple users and enable them to collaborate.
Faisal says that he did not spend even one$ on Marketing. The new customers came in only by Word Of Mouth. If someone likes the app, he refers the app to the others. When the candidates got jobs, they were so happy with the quick way to get jobs and have referred the app to their friends. He also tried a few Growth Hacks like “Invite Your Friend” and unlock a feature for free. Faisal personally used to send welcome mails to each user to understand how they got to know about the app and will interact with them to understand the customer. Faisal says that he did not spend anything on Digital Advertising and SEO but focussed on building a good product that people wanted and they took care of the marketing for him.
Faisal’s Suggestion to early stage startups: Be persistent. Sometimes , what you build may not get you the traction you desire in-spite of the product being so great. You should not quit if you believe in the product.
SuperApp currently has 250 companies and 500,000 candidates who have posted their resumes. They have around 20 employees. SuperApp also bought a company called Crunch Commerce to augment their offerings in the mobile recruitment world.
