Happy Birthday us! We're now 5 years old
It's now been 5 years since we started the company. It's been a long 5 years growing from 0 visits to the site to over 100,000 a month, and from 0 employers to over 160.
Back in 2008 myself, Dan and Mike all left our full time jobs to start GradConnection. Back then we thought that starting a company was a lot easier than it turned out to be, in fact we didn't know why more people didn't start companies!
A few factors we didn't consider before we quit our jobs and started were:
- Economic conditions - the GFC had just hit, graduates didn't have nearly as many jobs available to them as there were in 2007.
- Moving to Australia (from New Zealand) with zero connections in the industry would make it difficult to build a company.
- $0 in investment and not much more in our personal savings accounts made it hard to pay rent.
- Not having a website to show employers what they were buying would prove harder to sell than first anticipated.
However had we considered these factors back in 2008 before we left our jobs we may have never started, so in hindsight it couldn't have worked out better.
The turning point was 5 months in when we exhibited at the 2008 AAGE conference in Melbourne. This was the first time we'd been in front of multiple employers in the industry and as the website didn't exist we could talk to them about what exactly they would want in a website. This gave us our initial requirements as to what we needed to build and promise before the launch date of the 1st of March 2009.
GradConnection V2 launched in December 2009
Quickly after the conference we scratched together some non functioning web pages that we could show employers, booked in as many meetings as we could, and on Christmas Eve 2008 - 6 months since we started - we had our first sale!
Although the sale equated to us being paid less than $100 a month each since we started it gave us the confidence to hit the New Year hard and by the 1st of March 2009 we launched GradConnection version 1 with 20 employers on the site.
Now celebrating our 5th birthday we're very happy to be in the position we're in, and what we've achieved over the past 5 years. However we've still got a lot that we want to do and hope to continue our growth over the next 5 years.
Thanks to all our clients over the past 5 years!