Why We Introduced a Freemium Model

When you think about a “freemium” product, your first thought is the conventional approach to a freemium model. Build a bare bones product, make it free, and then charge users as you build more features into it. But that’s exactly what we’re not doing at Instahyre. We spent last two years building a powerful algorithm and a refined, profitable product. We served over 500 companies from startups to MNCs (check out what they say!), experimented with pricing models, and tweaked things whenever the numbers didn’t support us. And finally along the way, we found our sweet spot. A spot that was just the perfect balance of customer delight and a steady revenue. So you see, we’re not looking for beta users or early adopters. In fact, with a solid, tested product in hand, we want to let more companies try it out.

We picked a niche and focused on user experience

As a tech founder, product has always been the number one priority for me while building Instahyre. We wanted all the focus on building and refining the product, no matter how many iterations it took. And it’s not just because I’m a tech guy. It’s also because we, at Instahyre, believe that you can’t acquire users, whether paid or free, unless you build a great product and provide a great experience. That’s exactly what we did for over 2 years: we picked up a niche, became the preferred platform for tech-hiring and built a profitable, sustainable business!

Now that our algorithm has proved its mettle among tech startups, the timing seems right to open ourselves to other domains and more companies. Hence, freemium.

But why freemium?

So, freemium is a pricing strategy where you offer a version of your product for free. This free version is limited in terms of features or usage. In contrast, free trials end after a time and you either buy the product or let it go. And then, you have the premium version of your product with full features. Ideally, your goal is to make your users fall in love with the free version so much so they can’t wait to get their hands on the premium product. Before we decided to go down this route, our customers would either pay us for each hire, or purchase a yearly subscription. What we found was that companies who opted for a per hire option fell into two categories: those who didn’t use the platform actively, and those who used it very actively and made successful hires. The freemium plan now allows companies who don’t use us actively to simply go with the free version, while companies who hire actively can now reduce their cost drastically by opting for a plan based on their hiring needs.

A gift for early stage startups

Importantly, with the free plan, many early stage companies can now benefit from our platform. Despite the so-called funding slowdown, India is expected to have over 11,500 startups by 2020, second highest in the world. Since a small startup typically just need to hire one or two folks, our free plan offers a great source of high quality candidates without taking away precious budget. And what’s in it for us? Well, the more companies who use Instahyre, the more feedback we get to improve our platform. Moreover, the majority of 400+ companies currently using Instahyre came to us through referrals from other companies who love Instahyre. Now that’s what I call a win-win!

Free plan for unlimited duration

As part of our 100% free plan, we provide a limited number of tech (Engineering, Design and Product) candidate profiles every month, along with unlimited access to non-tech (Sales, Marketing, Operations and HR) candidates. You still get access to the high quality, curated profiles churned out by InstaMatch, our machine learning based matching engine (to start hiring right away, click here).

A plan to suit everyone

Once a company has our free plan, they can now pick from various options based on their projected hiring needs:

1. Premium Job Postings – Don’t have plans to hire many people? Purchase a single 30-day premium job posting, or buy a pack of 5 or 10 postings to avail a discount.
2. Subscriptions – If you’re looking to hire throughout the year, we have 6 and 12 month subscriptions, which cost less than a large number of job postings, plus provide you access to various additional features like our Advanced Search page and our Interview Scheduling offering.

Wait..there’s more

In addition to our amazing freemium plans, we dived under the hood to tweak a few things so you get the best Instahyre experience ever. Here are some huge improvements we recently made:

1. Improved InstaMatch – Our matching algorithm is stronger than ever. It factors in your every requirement before fetching you an exceptional candidate.
2. Social Profiles – To lend more authenticity to the candidate profiles, we added social accounts to all profiles. Check out a candidate’s Github account or their LinkedIn or Twitter profiles to learn what a resume won’t reveal.
3. Advanced Search – Looking for very specific candidates with niche skills? No problem, you can now search complete resumes, and apply various filters like colleges, companies, locations, etc. More power to you!
4. Interview Scheduling – Short on resources? We will schedule interviews for you for a small, additional per-hire charge. Our account managers are here to assist you from the first call until the candidate joins your company.

That’s it for all the updates this time. We’ll keep on working to bring you an amazing hiring experience. Finally, the success of our pivot to the freemium model totally depends on feedback from you folks – our existing users and the future customers. Feel free to comment below 🙂