Hey!
This is Nick, CEO, and co-founder of FirstHR.
If you write your first blog post for your company, you should definitely write about how your company was born. So it’s time to tell why and for whom we created FirstHR, what goals we want to achieve, and why we believe that the most important thing in a startup is not the idea, but the team.
Let’s go.
How It Started
Stories about how a startup began often start with a revelation or insight that struck the founding team one day. In our case, there was no such moment. Our path to HR Software was very long, but it allowed us to gain the necessary experience.
FirstHR has two founders: me and my friend Oleg. I can be called a “business founder” since I started launching various projects at the age of 15, while Oleg is a classic “technical founder” because he codes a lot and has been doing so since childhood.
At 18, I launched my first business related to advertising, and back then, HR topics only interested me for the development of my own team. At 21, I started a new company where we developed VR courses for training, and at this point, I had to dive deep into Enterprise HR because our clients were large companies, and our projects were managed by their HR leaders. Gradually, the development of VR courses grew into a full-fledged VR training system, and quite casually, our team became well-versed in LMS systems, corporate HR systems, and other software related to HR processes.
Our business grew, the team grew, and gradually, we needed tools for hiring and developing our team. Moreover, communication with HR managers of large companies, as well as working with their HR systems, showed me how much team management affects the effectiveness of the entire business. However, our clients’ solutions were, to put it mildly, out of our price range. And the affordable solutions for us usually represented only a one-feature tool, which didn’t suit us. Therefore, our set of HR solutions for internal tasks eventually turned into a complex interconnected scheme where one defective integration could break the entire system. We endured and suffered, but it worked. We decided that sooner or later, we would need to create a solution that would be useful to us, and then we could offer it to our current clients. This plan was soon shelved because our primary business was VR courses, and we only thought about growth, so there was no time or resources for side projects.
At that time, Oleg and I were not partners as founders, but we were partners on various projects. Oleg was developing his business, but some of our projects required his deep involvement as a developer, so for several years, we worked side by side, which greatly helped us when we started working on FirstHR.
In February 2022, everything changed, the war started, and I left the country with my family and closed all my projects; I no longer had time for business. Part of our team also left, and after some time, I had to think about what to do next. There was a lot of experience in working with HR, our ideas, and a desire to do something useful, all of which led to the conclusion that we needed to try to create something related to HR Software, but this time we wanted to create a product for an audience we understood, one that we had recently been a part of – small companies where business owners want to develop their team and move forward.
So we sat down to explore the market. We checked global and local solutions, looked at micro-projects, and looked at everything available. And despite being told that HR Software was a blood-red ocean, it was obvious that the market would change drastically soon. It wasn’t just about AI but also how teamwork models have changed forever in recent years. It’s not for us to judge whether that’s for the better or the worse; it’s just a fact. The existence of a large market and intense competition only motivated us to move forward, and we decided to take the risk.
How It Continued
The name for the product also came spontaneously, and we didn’t even come up with it, it was just always on our minds. At first, we gave the project the code name FirstHR, but it stuck, and later, we decided to keep it. The name FirstHR came from the idea of creating a product for the first HRs – for founders who are just beginning to tackle HR issues and thus become the real first HR in their company, as well as for those actual first HRs who join a young team.
What will be inside the product? We solved this very simply – we highlighted a list of problems and processes that we had in our team earlier, and that could be automated and digitalized. Then we contacted HR managers we knew and asked them to describe the tasks for which they already use various HR Software and for which processes they would like to implement solutions. Finally, we conducted a small survey where we asked startup founders about their main problems. After all this, we compiled a list of everything that should be in FirstHR.
Did we research competitors? Of course, we did, but we already had a list of everything we wanted to add to FirstHR, so our research aimed to understand what people definitely don’t need and what people love and value in existing solutions. Therefore, we didn’t focus on competitors but looked for ways to differentiate ourselves from them. Very quickly, it became clear that despite the popular opinion that the HR Software market is very competitive and challenging, each HR solution on the market is unique in its own way. Almost every HR software is a solution to a problem in different ways. Since HR Software has to solve multiple problems, HR products represent a combination of approaches to solving different tasks, making each platform unique. All of this gave us another boost of motivation to move forward because, as small business owners, Oleg and I understood how we would like to quickly and easily solve our problems, meaning we were the first customers for our product.
Once we decided on the name and functionality, we needed to understand who we were doing this for and why.
What’s the Point?
Over many years of starting projects from scratch, I have understood that you can’t do business without a specific goal or idea. Businesses that exist solely for money rarely succeed because when profit is the only goal, decisions are often made in favor of short-term gain. Paradoxically, businesses that pursue goals beyond profit are far more successful in the long run and far more profitable. I don’t have analytical data to back up my theory, and it’s unlikely anyone else does either because business philosophy is a very subtle matter. Therefore, before starting the creation of FirstHR, we asked ourselves, “What’s the point?” And I can say that the answer didn’t come to us immediately because, at first, we tried to encompass too many goals and purposes, and I think this is typical of any new project. But after a week of discussions and reflections, we came to the following conclusions:
Why we exist:
FirstHR connects organizations and talents and transforms them into solid teams to achieve extraordinary results.
Our mission:
Our mission is to help entrepreneurs unite like-minded people and turn them into superhero teams who create fantastic products and change the world.
We have derived the following formula that describes what FirstHR is:
FirstHR is an HR platform for small businesses focused on recruiting and team development with a pinch of AI. With FirstHR, you will significantly reduce the risk of hiring mistakes, save time and money by digitalizing routine HR processes, and start managing your team based on data, not feelings.
During the discussion, we realized that we must also define the team’s core values, which we should use when working on FirstHR. Without clear values, it will be difficult for us to move forward; we need our guiding star.
Values
When people start talking about company values, employees and customers often smile because these values are usually just a bunch of pretty words written by marketers that have no real meaning behind them; no one believes in them, and no one follows them. That’s why, when we decided to identify the core values that matter most to us, we focused on what real matters to us, the principles we believe in and are willing to follow. Most importantly, these principles will serve as guidelines for doing business.
We highlighted the following principles:
Meritocracy
Career growth should be based on a person’s talents, hard work, and achievements.
Always Learn
The sages say that you can learn even from the wind. We agree with this and are confident that the learning process should never stop.
Trust
Trust is one of the most important elements of any successful team. Many will not agree that the HR platform is about trust, but we are still trying to implement the basic principle of trust in FirstHR to not turn our platform into a tool of total control and surveillance.
Respect
Respect is not about specific people but about behavior patterns. We are sure that respect should be within the team and towards clients, partners, competitors, and others.
We Are Together
The desire to help those in need is very important to us as a team. FirstHR was born from the idea of helping entrepreneurs assemble a team of superheroes.
The Pursuit of Excellence
We are sure there is nothing wrong with wanting to achieve the perfect result. There is no pleasure in being mediocre.
We are confident that these values will help us make FirstHR better.
The Goal
To achieve any goal, you must first create this goal.
Where do we want to get to:
We are committed to making FirstHR the best choice for entrepreneurs building their dream team.
We want every founder or HR manager to have access to a simple and understandable set of HR tools that can solve their daily tasks without costing them tons of time and money.
We understand that we cannot do this without your help. Just as we cannot do everything perfectly, there will be mistakes, problems, and maybe even disappointments, but we are ready to endure all this to achieve our ultimate goal. We are confident that together we can do it.
So, let’s do it!
Nick and Oleg, founders of FirstHR.