Applying for jobs is a challenging task and having the professional resume to go with it is also a daunting prospect for a significant proportion of job applicants. That might change with a new Iranian startup offering help to present the perfect curriculum vitae and offer a platform to help find the dream job.
Financial Tribune interviewed Sajjad Rad, the co-founder at Atbox, who explained how his online business has taken off in the past few months.
Excerpts follow:
When did you come up with the idea for Atbox?
Three years ago I was in college. I presented an early version of Atbox as a graduation project. I published it and tried to get feedback from my friends to find out how I can build a business from this platform. I began to search for co-founders. Pouya, Hamed and I started building Atbox as a startup.
What was the reason for creating this new resume service?
As a software developer, I always needed a place to introduce my work and somewhere to write all my work experience.
It's essential when you work in tech or art industries. People need to know you and you must provide a profile to introduce yourself.
At the time, I tried every platform I could to build a proper resume in the Persian language but none of them was the thing I wanted.
I needed something better. I decided to build a solution for myself and everyone else.
Do you have investment currently, or do you intend to get investment in the next few months/years?
Everyone thinks they need investors as soon as they build a product, but that's not correct.
Investment is a loan. Your business must make enough revenue to return the investment. When you have investors, you have partners who are worried about their investment. You must consider this before making any choice.
You won't have the freedom to make a mistake with someone else's money. As a startup with a freemium business model, we must test everything to learn [what works and what doesn't]. We can't just waste the money on everything we test.
Currently, Atbox is working with our own investment. We'll keep it this way, as long as we can; perhaps a year from now. This will give us the freedom to test everything and the freedom to fail and learn.
What has been your company's biggest hurdle in creating Atbox?
We are a serious development team. We never got stuck in creating [our website] but the struggle was mainly marketing. At the beginning, we were not even working on marketing and we couldn't get enough attention on our great product. We started learning and we are getting better.
What is your biggest competition?
I don't really think of competition at the current stage. There are some other resume builders, or job board platforms in Iran but the market is big enough for everyone.
The goal is giving everyone an online resume, host their portfolios and find the best jobs for them. We are doing it and others are doing it, but all that is like 1% of the target market. The market potential is much more to be worried about local competitors.
On the other hand, bigger platforms like LinkedIn are not giving the Iranian market what it needs.
How much investment do you think it will take to get your service to international markets?
Currently about 5% of Atbox users are from Europe and North America. That's not much. What we need is marketing, but we can't target the world market at once. We must take one step at a time.
Where is you strongest customer base currently?
Currently Iranian programmers, developers and artists are the majority of Atbox users. They update their resumes and portfolios regularly, follow each other and connect to new people.
What is your service focusing on?
We are focusing on IT and art professionals. Currently we are hosting about 4,000 resumes and people have profiled more than 1,000 projects on their portfolios.
Do you intend to move your base abroad?
Not yet. Not until we really need to.
What are your plans for the next 3-5 years?
We are excited to see how Atbox helps people with their careers. We are improving Atbox every day and we are trying to build the biggest community of experts and the perfect platform for careers.
