As the new year begins, I look back on our journey – from our humble beginnings to the current state of our company. Doubtlessly, there is much reflect on, many triumphs and struggles we can look back on and consider with the benefit of hindsight. Please, do permit me a few moments of your time, as I explore the history of our company.

When we first started the company back in July 2021, we had certain expectations of what we wanted to create, and the impact we wanted it to have. Our goals are still the same, but experience and reality have made us change our vision of how to reach that goal quite a bit. Our original plan of a multi-faceted app spanning from jobs to financial tools in one go proved too ambitious and had to be scrapped. Instead, we decided to start out with a more focused product, one intended to cater to one specific purpose – recruitment.

The tactic panned out. Had we continued with our original plan, it’s doubtful we’d have made it to where we are now. Instead, as we move into 2023, we begin the year with several accolades already under our belt. Over 10,500 people have already been offered jobs through our app. The app itself has over 110,000 registered users, of which nearly half of them (over 50,000 people) have been shortlisted for jobs before. With over 120,000 vacancies for jobs available, we’ve reached a point where we can look at what we’ve achieved and state that we’ve begun to matter. Our prospects for the future are promising as well – our DoD growth has shown a sharp rise from where it was before, to the point that we are ushering in 1k+ users, with a similar number of vacancies every day. This is in addition to job posts, which have seen a staggering rise from the low 10s to the mid-100s over the course of two months.

This journey wasn’t without its hiccups, however. Our earlier plans of using franchisees and third parties to bolster our user onboarding proved, sadly, to be overly optimistic. Tie-ups with large companies with a great deal of history, with major influencers and institutions, with the government itself – while they allowed us to make some inroads and onboard many users, the numbers were exceedingly lacklustre, and would not have been enough. Though in the long run the franchise partner network we created will help in physical verification of our various category of users. Thankfully, social media and digital advertising proved to be far more useful, allowing us to rapidly acquire many pertinent users willing to match to the existing jobs and the existing partnerships did prove useful in other ways, but we learnt an important lesson, nonetheless.

In addition, there were issues with the community section of our app, which we’d developed to help encourage user engagement and interactivity. Many users would directly ask for jobs on the community portal, sharing their contact information as well. We’ve currently addressed this issue by streamlining the moderation of that section of the app and having someone delete these posts as they come.

Blue-collar recruitment is an immensely scalable field, with 500 million potential users with a high attrition rate of jobs. As such, it should surprise no one that there are many players already vying for a slice of the pie – companies which already have a foot in the segment and have made inroads across the country. However, what OTU offers is rather more –our app is designed to be more convenient and easy to use, and offers a number of quality of life features as well. In addition, we have made sure to establish our presence through Facebook Live events and in online media articles. The rising number of users in our app speak for themselves, especially as they show no signs of slowing down. With such a huge market, and our various uniqueselling points, I truly believe OTU is the future in this field – and we’ll stop at nothing to make that future a reality. Especially as 2023 is the year when we truly begin to use our revenue model and explore the possibilities in including credit among our offerings – let’s consider this the year where we truly come into our own!

Thank you for listening to my words, and I wish you – and all those part of the OTU India community – a great 2023.

Regards,
Pratik Maheshwari,
CEO, OTU India