Early days hiring in bootstrap startups are the foundation of any business. In my startup journey, I have always believed that intent to do things is more important than a bigger college degree. I always bet on the intent of my sharp employees. When we started hiring industry experts for sales & back office, then in every interview every applicants demand was out of our paying capacity. Along with this major challenge was the ambiance of the office, while we were started our journey from garage of a society which was parking area of 4 wheeler cars and of course these experience applicants was rejecting us to join because of this. So we decided to search for people who were really hunting the opportunity or they never get the platform to showcase their talent.
My initial 8 employees did not have any finance experience. Some were working as salesmen at one retail outlet. One was sharp in his college and was having all expertise to tackle the worst which he faced in his life. Our 3rd employee was working in a logistics company, and 4th was an office boy. Similarly, all 8 was from different backgrounds.
We infuse our emotions to them, we trained them to sell outcome of our products also we ask them to sell feeling of the product not the feature. Surprisingly, they all mastered in selling of supply chain finance products. They came with us to build walkfin. They puts all effort in sales to prove that they are best in doing things for walkfin and of course they have hunger as well.
Currently, we have 30 employees in the company, and we still have 12 employees who joined us in the initial years of 2021 & 22. Most of them got a 300% hike in these years, along with a jump in revenue. 3 employees are holding head positions in their respective departments. We are happy to share that we have issued them 1% equity of the company, which will be valued close to INR 50Cr in the next 8-10 years. All these started with a belief in each other and is now going well. Today, we onboarded few industry experts as well with high-paying salaries. Everyone sees that we have built a company with >350Cr in the last 4 years, but very few people know that all this was possible because of those 12 employees who put their day and night for the company, especially when no one was ready to bet on WALKfin.
We are blessed to have them at our side now, and we are grooming them for leadership roles.
This is what my journey of the last 4 years of startup with initial employees of Walkfin.