Oh wow. This feels unreal. I never doubted the idea once, but having actual customers getting their hands on something that you've built - the feeling can only be described as surreal.
This week, from the 14th of February, we start onboarding our Alpha customers. And you guessed it right, we're doing it on Valentine's Day for that exact reason - because we love our tribe, the recruiters of the world.
These Alpha customers are our earliest believers. They are the folks who have helped shape the product to be as close to the recruiters' everyday real-life workflow, as it can. And we can't wait for them to use Kula, love it, and also help us make it perfect for the other awesome folks waiting to be onboarded.
The parts that I (a recruiter) simply loves
As a founder, I absolutely love every nook of the product and every line of the code. I couldn't be prouder. However, there are certain parts of the product that just overwhelms the recruiter inside me. Let me show some of that to you:
The Circles Talent Goldmine
Are you kidding me?! Access to all the connections that my entire company has and a way to get an intro to any one of them, without the endless email threads and Slack reminders. So proud!
The Kula Everywhere Extension
All through my recruitment years, I have used a script to extract emails from GitHub profiles. Yes, I used to run a script. And don't even ask about LinkedIn. The download-upload charade was endless. Building Kula Everywhere was the earliest and easiest decision we made at Kula. Now you can source candidates in a click from, wait for it, Everywhere.
The 'I Vouch for her' energy
We have all worked with people that we'll take with us in every damn company we work at. But there wasn't any easy way to do that until a job posting comes us, and you create an email package of their resume, LinkedIn profile, phone number, preference of sandwich, and whatnot. Well, not anymore. You just have to click a button. You 'Vouch' for someone on Kula, the recruiters in your company would have priority access to those Circle members of yours.
Love it! What's next?
We are working very hard to make the platform available to as many folks as we can. In fact, we doubled the size of our Alpha phase, just to accommodate more recruiters. But the interest and enthusiasm have been overwhelming, and we are undeniably grateful.
However, we don't want any of our customers to have a less than perfect experience on Kula, and that would mean going slow in the Alpha and Beta phases. Listening to each and every feedback our design partners have to share and improve on that.
It would also need more hands on the deck. We hold ourselves to the highest standards of onboarding and support. And that would need doing things that don't scale. It would need more people with empathy towards recruiters and their challenges, and we're looking for them.
It feels unreal. It really does. This is the real Day 1 for us. Our palms are sweaty, there are butterflies in the stomach. We're nervous. And it's perfect. Because we know, we have created something that comes from a place of honesty and empathy, and things like those are always loved.
