Cheeky CV Ltd was born
It all started when Big Nige had a big idea; to create a new type of CV. One that could be kept on your phone and updated when you had new and exciting career achievements to share. However, we quickly realised that that type of thing already existed… It’s actually called a normal CV.
And so Cheeky CV Ltd was launched. We know, thank goodness we didn’t stick with that.
Money
Big Nige needed cash to launch this thing so spoke to his mate Rupert who’s got loads of money having recently sold his baby (not an actual baby, a business he started himself 30 years ago).
Rupert was bored of retirement. He took up golf and as you do bought a golf club (nope, not just the things you swing, an actual course). He quickly realised he was rubbish and wanted to stick with what he knows. Business.
Power Rangers Assemble
Rupert and Nigel assembled a team of specialists and brought in our not so glorious leader and MD, Gareth Peterson. Gareth, a bit of a tech-geek and obsessed with user experience.
We like to imagine this part of the process was a little bit like a cross between the team up scene in Ocean’s 11 and the bit in every Power Rangers where they form the big robot. In reality, they probably just made a few calls
Starting again
When Gareth took over he didn’t like what had been developed, so he had the unenviable task of going back to Rupert and the board and saying, “I know you’ve built something but I hate it. Can I have another £250k to build a proof of concept and you won’t see me for 10 months?”
They gave him the cash and he bought a Ferrari which he drove around the world. Only joking, it was a Lambo..
Creating an experience people actually wanted
Gareth spent a full week stalking people outside of a café offering them free coffee and cake in exchange for 15mins of their time to test the app and give their feedback.
A lot of post-it notes were harmed in this process.
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Selling the dream to BIG Brands
Gareth also, somehow, managed to convince HR and talent specialists from companies like Adidas, BBC, The Hut Group, AO.com, Gymshark, Dentsu Aegis, Boohoo Group and half a dozen SME employers (such as Radio.co) to help design the ideal hiring process.
We think he bribed them but he says free lunches do actually work.
Into the wild…
Caroo launched to a closed community of 30 employers and 250+ professionals (largely tech & sales). Beta was successful and the platform worked. Time to release this thing into the wild.
Starting again, again.
Caroo is now open to the public and we’re spending to get users.
Three months later and with 100+ employers and 4,000+ candidates Caroo had enough data and feedback to make some important changes to improve things. Except, we decided to rebuild everything.
#ProjectPie
While the tech team are beavering away behind the scenes, Gareth was hard at work with new marketing partners
After a few months of further design and development, Caroo relaunched and to celebrate this, we delivered 267 pies to some of our employers in what would become our first guerilla marketing stunt. We give you, #ProjectPie
Growth phase
We then rapidly grew the candidate and employer communities placing candidates across a variety of skills at big and small businesses.
At this point Caroo has reached over 300 employers and 15,000 candidates.
Marketing & Monetisation
Caroo had remained completely free of charge at this point. Yep, that’s how serious we are about changing recruitment. We had set a date to start to monetise the platform, April 2020. This would give us more time to get feedback and create a platform worthy of charging for. In the meantime, we did some pretty bonkers marketing.
You can see our stunts here: https://blog.caroo.co.uk/projects
Covid, Platform Development Continues
Well. That was the plan but then Covid hit so like most businesses we conserved cash to weather the storm.
But unlike most companies, the cash we did save went into building a new feature.
Job descriptions aren’t enough any more and brands want to post content but in order to reach the right people they have to pay huge advertising fees. Not on Caroo, this is part of the platform proposition so now you can get your content in front of the right professionals based on skills and experience.
Time to scale
Coming out of COVID, it was time to define the sales approach and start to build the team required to help the business scale rapidly.
This team has ensured the business has grown to over 650 employers and over 160,000 downloads of the candidate app.
Well done everyone, but they’re a greedy bunch and won’t stop until every employer is using Caroo.
£3m invested to date and we’re investing further into the platform to build the recruitment process you want and the marketing to grow our community of employers and candidates.
Want to see what we built?
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