Building Scaled is a long term project. There's enough to build for a lifetime's work.

We will build Scaled in stages. It will often be messy, and the stages will overlap at times. Nevertheless this document attempts to put some order to the chaos.

Stage 1: Find product-market fit

We spent the first ~18 months of the company’s life standing up the company, building company infrastructure, and finding product-market fit.

1a: Standing up the company

We started Scaled as a generalist recruiting agency — we would help anyone hire any role at any level in any department in any geography at any stage of company.

The first 6 months of Scaled's life were answering the following questions:

• Can Sander hire good people to work for him?
• Can we find clients who want to work with us?
• Can we deliver something of value to our clients?

The answer to these was a resounding yes:

• Sander was able to hire good people to work for him.
• There turned out to be far more demand from clients for our services than we could handle; we regularly turned down new clients.
• Our clients found value in much of our work.

1b: Company infrastructure

During months 6-12 we really started to invest in core company infrastructure.

• Brand: With the help of an outside brand design agency we articulated our value proposition, our brand look and feel, and our logo and brand design system. With these assets we built our website and professionalized all of our marketing collateral.
• Product MVP: ****Ambroise joined Scaled to lead the building of our product. We built an MVP of our product with an outsourced Bubble development agency (Zeroqode) and an outside design firm (Maxim). It took about 7 months to build the MVP, which was designed for use only by Scaled at first. The product’s purposes were to a) improve the efficiency and productivity of the Scaled team, and b) centralize all our data and information. The core features of the MVP were an internal ATS, an Asana-like Task management system to structure engagements for scale, a Talent Cloud built by Alek to house a community of candidates, Gem-like sourcing tools including a Chrome extension and email validator & finder, a tool allowing candidates to submit video applications to roles, and automations that centralize candidate data from multiple application sources, such as LinkedIn or AngelList. We were still heavily relying on RecruiterFlow for standalone features, such as email campaigns, and were therefore operating on two different products for several months.