How We Grew Jooble To 1 Billion Yearly Visitors

Roman Prokofiev

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Published: January 3rd, 2023

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Roman Prokofiev

Founder, Jooble

Founders

300

Employees

Jooble

jooble.org

from Kyiv

started October 2006

Founders

300

Employees

Discover what tools Roman recommends to grow your business!

social media

Twitter

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Slack

Jira

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Similarweb

Discover what books Roman recommends to grow your business!

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My name is Roman Prokofiev, and I am the co-founder of Jooble, one of the world's top 10 largest job aggregators, according to SimilarWeb.

We are a product IT company; our main product is a job site used by people in 69 countries. In addition, we are developing an ecosystem of related products that will help people find work faster, and we invest in projects that help people get new or additional education.

In 16 years, Jooble has gone from a small Ukrainian startup with 200 site visits per day to a global employment platform with over 1 billion visits yearly.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I am from the Ukrainian city of Kherson. While studying at my hometown's physics and mathematics lyceum, I met my good friend Eugene Sobakarev. We studied in the same class for three years, sat at the same desk, and participated in mathematics, physics, and computer science competitions.

Later, we both entered the Faculty of Informatics and Computer Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. But shortly after we entered the university, we realized that we already knew the program offered to us, and not to get bored, we both found jobs. Eugene started working in one of the first Ukrainian outsourcing companies, and I – worked in the then newly established and widely known Terrasoft company.

Later I decided to create software for companies operating in the pharmaceutical industry. At that time, most of them stored data in excel sheets. There were no proprietary complex software solutions on the Ukrainian pharmaceutical market, and the price of Western ones started at 500,000 dollars. I offered alternative software, which cost 20 to 100 thousand dollars, depending on the configuration and needs of a specific company. I registered the company and called it TeamSoft.

For the first six months of working at TeamSoft, I was the only employee – I rented a two-room apartment in Kyiv and turned it into an office. During this time, I brought the company, such clients, as Novo Nordisk – the world's largest insulin manufacturer, and "Darnytsia" – one of the largest pharmaceutical enterprises in Ukraine, and this list snowballed. Very soon, 60% of all medical representatives in Ukraine became my clients, and companies from Russia, Kazakhstan, and other countries of the CIS region began to buy my software. So the need for additional workers for my company grew accordingly.

Once, I had lunch with Eugene and complained to him that selecting people for my company was difficult – it took time to find them. At that time, Eugene was thinking about creating a news aggregator. During lunch in the dialogue, we came up with another idea – to create not a news aggregator but a job aggregator so that it would be faster and easier to search for people.

Similar aggregator sites operating at the time on the Ukrainian market were very inconvenient: they did not have enough search filters, they contained a lot of duplicate vacancies, and they had irrelevant searches. So right away, during the same lunch, Eugene and I discussed the concept of our job search engine, and Jooble was born six months later.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

The first version of Jooble was created in a student dormitory in 2006. It was the classic story of an IT startup. We devised its name a day before the product's official launch. We wanted to make it similar to Google because we were also an aggregator only of vacancies, and of course, Google was a very inspiring example for us.

As soon as you write the first line of code for your site or product, as soon as you hire the first person – go with your product to a potential user and ask him about his experience.

Therefore, the first thing that came to mind was to call it Google, changing only the first letter and making the name a derivative of the word Job. Thus, in the process of brainstorming, the name Jooble was created.

As for the logo, in the early 2000s, it was trendy among major global brands to add an animal to the logo because the visual image is always remembered better than just the name. For example, Linux chose a penguin for its logo, Mozilla a fox, and The Bat a bat. And we have selected a rabbit from Eugene's submission, and the freelance designer put this idea into practice. Our logo has remained unchanged since 2006.

Jooble’s website in 2006

As a business model, we chose payment for clicks from direct employers. At that time, popular job sites had a fixed rate for posting vacancies, which we believed was unfair to employers. It was unclear what they would get for their money and how many candidates would see his vacancy: 10 or 10,000.

That's why we decided that our placement will be free — the employer pays for our service when a job seeker, our website's user, clicks on the vacancy posted on Jooble. IT companies liked this model: they needed to not spend the allocated budget on hiring people but find people in the team, and Jooble effectively helped them to do this.

Our product's main advantage was that we collected all the vacancies from the different digital sources in one place. It opened another excellent opportunity for us to earn money – to sell traffic to other websites. By going to our site, the user went to the vacancies of our partners.

Describe the process of launching the business.

Before the launch of advertising on the Jooble website, there were about 200 visitors per day; after the launch of advertising – about 3,000 visitors per day. The first users came to our platform after the advertisements on university stands. In addition, we bought advertising in the subway. We spent approximately $5,000 on one banner. Quite a high price for those times, but we decided to work exclusively directly with subway or through an advertising agency that deals with the legal placement of advertisements in subway.

Jooble’s first ads in the Kyiv subway

The budget for website construction and development was solely ours with Eugene. I earned money at TeamSoft (my first own company that developed software for companies in the pharmaceutical industry and which I later successfully sold), and Eugene was engaged in electronic document management and sold the CRM system from Microsoft.

I invested about $50,000 in the company during the first years. Until 2014, we had no investors and financed the project exclusively with our funds. In 2014, a minority investor appeared in Jooble – the Horizon Capital fund, whose assets include such well-known global brands as Creatio, Ciklum, Genesis, Intellias, and Ajax, as well as local Ukrainian brand leaders in their niches.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

We launched two major advertising campaigns – our Facebook campaign reached more than 3 million users in a few months.

Jooble's significant growth occurred after we realized that the largest source of the audience on the Internet was Google. We learned that we need to know how to rank in search engines because when users want to find a job, they do it on Google. After that, we started looking for ways to get into Google's ranking system and establish ourselves there.

After this happened, Jooble began to proliferate – the traffic volume on the site increased four times yearly. At that time, 12 people worked in the company; it was 2008. The global economic crisis began when the hiring of personnel was reduced in a matter of months.

We were on the threshold of a fateful decision for the company and understood that there were only two ways for us: to close the business, fire all employees, and leave only one to support the servers, or try to enter other markets – beyond the CIS. We chose the second option, and in the two following years, we launched in 14 new countries.

Jooble’s first office

Shortly after the job aggregator launch, we came up with the idea of creating aggregators in other niches – internet shops (we had a "Chekkit" project), auto (a "Carvester" project), etc. But in practice, we understood that it was challenging to develop a few projects simultaneously, and to reach success in our primary one, Jooble, we had to focus on it. So we stopped the other aggregators' elaboration, focused all our attention on Jooble, created the company's mission, and went on.

We had to quickly adapt to new markets, and successfully attract and retain customers, we've learned a few lessons, that I'd like to share:

1. To research the market and its volumes before the product launch on the specific market. As engineers deeply in love with our idea, we plunged into its implementation without sufficient market analysis. Because of this approach and lack of experience, we made wrong decisions and made mistakes that significantly slowed down our development. We devised an idea, believed in it, and created a website. After the launch, we saw moments that should be paid attention to.

2. Carefully analyze the competitive environment. See how similar companies work, their decisions, and their tools. For example, we didn't do that, so we wasted much time on things that could have been adopted from similar solutions.

For example, a year and a half after our launch, we learned that a large job aggregator had been successfully operating in the US market for a long time, with which it took much work for us to compete at the product level. Because of this, Jooble could only enter this market for a short time. Therefore, competitor analysis is mandatory for anyone who wants to avoid a mistake that could slow down your company's future growth. Observing how competitors change their products and adopt their experience is also essential.

3. Do not perceive the product separately from the market. A product is not only a visual form, an interface, and a backend but also a reflection of the market it enters.

4. Go to customers as soon as possible and offer your product. Gather feedback on their needs and how they solve the problem without your product. It is the most important source for your development. As soon as you write the first line of code for your site or product, as soon as you hire the first person – go with your product to a potential user and ask him about his experience. Venture funds often use research, and in one of them, I found an explanation of the frequent reasons for many startups' failure: the first is no market fit. Startup entrepreneurs often think their product is game-changing, but it usually isn't because they need to communicate with customers and understand their needs enough to perfect the product.

5. Make product update iterations as short as possible. Only make drastic and global changes to the product after studying users' needs. Made slight changes to the product – showed it to the user. From our experience, sometimes the benefits of small step-by-step changes, but with user feedback at each stage, will be more significant. In the process, it may seem like a too long and slow process – agreeing on every, even seemingly insignificant, change with the user, but in the long term, in this way, you will create something that is needed and valuable to the market.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

In 2022, more than 400 million people visited our site, spending 4 minutes on it on average if we consider the average numbers of all countries of our presence. We currently operate in 69 countries, but the headquarters and most of the team remain in Ukraine. At the same time, we continue to develop and maintain a global product in 25 languages.

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have become a remote-first company – our offices are open to all employees who’d like to work from offices, but working from home is preferred for the health of our employees.

Another situation to describe how Jooble is now – we are going through difficult times because on February 24, Ukraine was subjected to a full-scale military invasion by Russia, and our business priorities have changed somewhat in the direction of ensuring the safety of our colleagues. However, we will continue to work and provide quality employment services to millions of users worldwide, except for Russia and Belarus, which support the invasion.

For instance, this year, we launched a big project called Jobs For Ukrainian Refugees, which aims to help people from Ukraine who had to move to neighboring European countries because of the war in Ukraine to find a job there quickly. In terms of this project, we gathered all the vacancies around Europe available for Ukrainians in 20 countries. Also, we launched two major advertising campaigns – our Facebook campaign reached more than 3 million users in a few months. Even on such volumes, our CTR fluctuated between 4 and 7%. Here are examples of ads:

In addition to reaching and CTR, there are other metrics: purchase amount, click price, conversion rate, and CPM price. But all this data is confidential.

Generally, Jooble has a vision based on which we build plans. It sounds like this: we create a world where every person throughout his life has the opportunity to get a job that meets his life aspirations and makes conditions for a sense of personal self-worth. We plan to provide job seekers with the best selection of vacancies and offer career opportunities for a person based on their existing skills and talents.

For our customers among job sites, ATS systems, and recruiting agencies, we plan to improve our product to meet the specialized needs of each segment of our partners. Today, more than having all the vacancies on one resource is required. We strive to create an entire ecosystem of products for users to help them look for a job, develop professionally, and fulfill themselves. For example, in some countries, we are testing features that help people improve their CVs.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Creating and running a business from scratch with your forces and sometimes limited possibilities is quite a good thing. Essential lessons we learned with Eugene through the starting the company are:

Choose the market for the product launch carefully because such a launch requires much effort.

I will make an analogy with the game of poker: you have many different chips, you make decisions about which bets to make or not to create, to raise them or not, etc. – there are hundreds, if not thousands of decisions. At the end of the game, you exchange the chips remaining in your hands for money. It could be one cent or $100. The amount of money you will receive at the exit depends on which market you play.

You make this choice even before you sit down at the poker table. It's the same in business: you can put in much effort and make your product perfect, but if you take it to the wrong market, you'll get the same one cent, and your effort will be wasted. Therefore, we would advise carefully choosing the market for product launch: where there is competition, there is money.

Have a clear mission for the company and gather and unite the team around it.

When the company has a formed mission, each department can drag the initiative to its side to argue about different aspects of the work and the final result. Therefore, the task unites the entire team and is a straightforward guide to where it is moving together, what it does to meet the job seekers' needs, and how satisfied they are with what they get in the search results on our site.

Hire people in line with the company's values.

Over time, we realized how important it is to accurately describe which people are suitable for us and whom we want to see in the team – this significantly facilitates inter-team communications and the process of doing business as a whole.

After all, when all colleagues are on the same wavelength and understand each other, business processes happen faster. In Jooble’s case, we have five core values we implement into all business processes, including hiring:

Internal locus of control: I am the cause of everything that happens to me.
Passion for work: when its presence is the primary reward.
Openness to people: the ability to look at things through the eyes of another person.
Development orientation: the desire to become better every day than yesterday.
Owner’s thinking: if not me, then who?

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

As a company, we use various tools and solutions in our daily routine, and we do not limit Jooble's teams in choosing them. Each of our team can buy and use solutions for their needs.

The teams have complete autonomy, and we budget all the necessary tools for a specific department. I will name a few of the main ones that every Jooble employee uses: Slack, Paser, Tableau, Redmine, Jira, Vista Create, Confluence, Outlook, and Google tools. But generally, there can be hundreds of tools that we use day by day.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

I spend less time listening to podcasts, and I find my inspiration in communicating with entrepreneurs who create new exciting products and develop business ecosystems around them. It is always very precious to hear their way of creating the product or service, live experience with live mistakes, and people's real lessons learned from launching and running a business – this inspires me the most. Talking about books, I like reading, and here are some of the books that have influenced me the most and that I recommend to others.

How to Win Friends & Influence People, Dale Carnegie

Do you want to communicate better with people and become a good conversationalist or speaker? Start with this classic by Dale Carnegie. Read his book with a pencil or pen because there are so many tips you will only remember after a while.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol S. Dweck

The initial level of intelligence and talent is just a starting point. All qualities can be developed by systematically working on yourself. Transitioning to an agile mindset enhances motivation and productivity in business, education, and sports. It enriches personal relationships. After reading this book, you will find out how it happens.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This book is for those who are interested in psychology as a discipline. Who, in principle, are attracted by the phenomenon of happiness, and for all those who lack happiness so much in their lives. The best ideas and insights come to them in a state of flux. This is a feeling of completely merging with your work, absorption by it when you do not feel time when there is a constant surge of energy instead of fatigue.

Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way, Richard Branson

The book is truly inspiring and carries a considerable charge of optimism, wisdom, and faith in the capabilities of each person. It will interest anyone who wants to become an entrepreneur, build a successful business, or learn how the Virgin empire was built.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work, Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

This book is a study of what man is capable of, a guide for anyone who wants to improve their lives radically. The authors of this book have explored over four years how groups ranging from SWAT teams and the Red Bull training centre to the United Nations and top executives in Silicon Valley use altered states of consciousness to awaken hidden possibilities and solve complex problems. We are gaining access to a hitherto uncharted territory through four fundamental forces—psychology, neuroscience, technology, and pharmacology.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

To all the entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just beginning their first own business, I would highly recommend the following:

Look at the product with the customer's eyes and sincerely give themselves an answer:

Does this product or service satisfy the client's need, or is it just an attempt for the entrepreneur to create something they are interested in? In my experience, first-time entrepreneurs often make a product they like first and foremost rather than filling a consumer's need. And this is their mistake, which determines the future fate of the product.

The second mistake is that entrepreneurs without experience often hire people to quickly close their need for employees for the growth of the company instead of spending enough time to find and hire those people who will perfectly fit the Team, match its values , and clearly understand the mission product.

Developing a product and a business with those interested in their improvement is essential. For the first year after the founding of Jooble, Eugene and I worked together until we found those interested in making a product with us that would bring income to us and a real benefit to people.

Be quick with raising investments:

As an experienced investor, I can say that many entrepreneurs, especially in the CIS region, think that to apply for investments until they break even or "to zero". The vast majority consider this an outstanding business achievement, although it is not. I believe an achievement to be the rapid growth and improvement of a product that will be meaningful and useful for users, and for this – investments and an intelligent approach are needed.

To always persevere despite all circumstances:

Even if there are better and more exciting solutions than yours, keep going. Improve the product and offer it to customers. A week before the site's launch, its very first version, we discovered we already had local competitors in Ukraine.

We saw that their product was better than ours, but we did not cancel the launch of our site: we brought the product to the market, continued improving it, and constantly made it better than competitors. Thus, after 16 years, none of those sites launched before us in 2005-2006 or parallels with us today no longer exist in Ukraine, and we survived thanks to our perseverance.

And the main advice I would give to all young entrepreneurs is the one after one of Richard Branson's books name "Let’s not screw it, let’s do it." Study the market and competitors, and learn from the experience of others because someone has already walked the same path before you.

Listen to your users and be bold and ask them for their opinions about your product, don't be afraid of criticism, but take it into account to improve the product. Gather around him a team that believes in and strives for his success. Don’t hesitate to ask for investment and invest it in improving the product. And, of course, be persistent.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

Jooble is an IT company whose product is used by more than 90 million monthly users in 69 countries worldwide. We are a remote-first company and believe talented people can create cool projects without needing an office.

This is why we are open for new talents no matter where they are – USA, New Zealand, India, or any other country on the world’s map. We are looking for those who share our purpose — to help people all over the world find their dream jobs – and have many openings. Please take a look at them here and apply if there is a vacancy that corresponds to your needs and expectations.