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Case Study: Mawla

Intro

Start the questions Tonia: what made you look for a company like Boundless? Like, which was the need that you were trying to solve?

Dan: One of the main needs was that I wanted to hire, I wanted to expand the pool of talent when I was recruiting. And so I was recruiting for, um, uh, senior technical roles. And, the technologies I was recruiting for as well were sort of niche, so I couldn't find as much talent within Ireland. And a lot of, even the recruiting platforms and stuff that are within Ireland are a quite old school, so it was difficult to do just a pure Irish, and salaries in Ireland as well were a little bit higher, for people that had less experience than I needed. Um, and I wanted to hire with a bit more diversity. I wanted to expand the team beyond just Ireland. So. The pool of potential candidates, the cost of the roles, and the diversity. Those were some of the big ones I think And the tax and stuff didn't hugely come into it or being able to like finding better. More favorable, like employer contracts or anything because we, like the Netherlands were one of the first countries we hired in and they're way stricter than Ireland. And so that, it would've been nice to get something that was a little bit more employer-focused, but that wasn't, a huge driver.

Tonia: So what convinced you that Boundless was the right choice for your company?

Dan: I'm not rich enough to be able to make a decision to like just support companies I've invested in. I have to make the right financial decision. Um, a big part of the reason I chose Boundless, I originally looked at Remote, and remote I think was offering. For a year or something like that. Or they had like some crazy low offer and it seemed suspiciously low. When I looked at it, um, and I spoke to Dee about it and I think I Googled about it, but it was pretty new at the time.

I think this was like, this was like, 12 months ago. Fair bits that I was looking at it. And it seemed like there was a lot more, there were hidden costs beyond just free. Um, and that was one of the one, one of the reasons that I wound up going with Boundless was that the costs were quite upfront. And that there weren't gonna be any other hidden trap doors once we went through. Um, that was really much the fact that the country that I was looking for, which was wind up being the Netherlands, um, was supported. And the fact that I knew what the costs were gonna be upfront, um, those were two of the biggest ones. And as well, like, I think having pages that describe the onboarding process or the laws in the Netherlands are important. And then, um, some of the back and forth with Anthony, he, before we decided to go band list, like he did some back and forth and ransom numbers for us about like what it would actually cost us.

So I think that's super pop and powerful. Like if you could ever, I don't know if you guys have calculators on the site or anything like that, but. Knowing what will this role cost me over a year because Netherlands has like the 13th month and there's like, obligatory payroll, contributions, pension contributions and that stuff

Tonia: what makes you happiest about working with our company?

Dan: I really like forgettable software or forgettable services, um, things that you just set up once and then you never have to log in again. And this is sort of like that. Um, we get a monthly, and then there's also, um, this, like if you've ever heard of like an REI chart, response book accountable, that sort of thing.

Informed is one of them, and we just get informed every month that you need to pay. At this point, payroll's gonna be processed. At this point, you don't actually need to do anything. Um, as far as I know, that's a big thing for me just you set it up once, and the setup process was really good and really clean. Didn't encounter any issues or bugs. I think the CO as well, I think it made the set of processes as well, which made the potential candidate feel a lot more comfortable because they had some back-and-forth on some of the contract points. Um, and it just makes us look like we're a very small company and if I was to do any of this hiring myself, I would've been sending them like a really.

Low-quality employment agreements that I probably had written some of by hand and it was just, it would be a crap onboarding experience. I think the onboarding experience for new staff looks a lot more professional. Um, you know, asking for emergency contacts, um, knowing where to go to see their pay slips, all of that sort of stuff just adds a lot more, legitimacy to a business.

Um, yeah. Yeah. So forgettable legitimacy. Um, what else do I like? I like that I know that the product is getting better, you know, like the benefits thing being developed. Um, I like that. I know that like I potentially could lean into it further in the future. That's cool. Um, yeah, I think that's, that's all I've got for you so far.

Tonia: Tell me more about the story of your company.

Dan: So, um, I have two employees using Boundless at the moment. Um, One of them is in Edinburgh, in Scotland, and one of them is in the Netherlands. So like most of the reason I was looking to employ was, you know, I needed somebody in a niche skillset. Um, the employee in question was eight years with their existing company. So they were, you know, hesitant. They were nervous, they wanted to seek contracts before they made any big decisions.

In the Netherlands, you need to give a full calendar month of notice, you know? From the first date to the end. So even so, we were very like conscious to get, um, things done by a certain date and Boundless just was able to move fast on it. So that was important. Um, I think seeing the contracts was good for them. It gave them a lot of confidence. Being able to sign online and everything. They actually wound up giving their notice early before we had everything done because things looked so legitimate and looked so far progressed because they already had access to the portal. They'd already read their contracts back and forth with Alannah and Anthony

I wound up hosting the job on, We work remotely on a few slack groups on workable. Um, I actually wound up finding the first engineer through the, uh, through slack which was great, and they looked at the job posting, then unworkable. They read, some of my blogs I think as well. Um, so that was some of their journeys. I think what really made them interested in working with us was working with a company that wanted to try these technologies (NextJS, SanityCMS, TailwindCSS, Typescript, Jamstack, Headless CMS) Wanting to sort of change the way websites are made. Marketing websites are made by agencies. So inspiring them with my blog post and the stuff that I write about is just sort of like how we want to try and do things differently. We're a remote-first company, how, uh, you know, we're engineering excellence is important to us. Shipping fast and shipping often is important to us.

Because he was working in an agency that does great business and they're like a very established agency, but he could be working on a project for like a year without shipping it. Whereas within the first two months of working with us, he'd already shipped the full project himself.

Tonia: what would you say is the main reason why you would recommend our product?

Dan: I think like the main reason would be to try to like, to anyone that I was suggesting it to would be to try to centralize all of their employees within one platform. And you want to make sure that that one platform covers lots of countries and that one platform is evolving. So that would be one of the reasons, the number of countries, the fact of have a stable product, the app, the fact that it's expanding.

And it's just, I guess, like, it, it works. It just works, you know? That's what I'd say is, you know, it's, it's different than like an app or anything. It's not like it's so fast or anything like that. It's just that it works reliably, and consistently. The costs are fine. Um, yeah, stable.

Tonia: So what do you think we could have done differently?

Dan: I probably would have tried to start with a free month or two, something like that, because realistically, nobody's going to go through all of that pain and then change payroll or platforms afterward. So that's, that would probably make it easier to get them through the door and make it a no-brainer. Do calculators and stuff are great as well, but you're already on top of that. There's definitely other stuff, um, as well, like you were like getting maybe first employee free for a year is actually a good idea or something like that for, for some amount of time. Because realistically, once you get up, an organization into the platform, they're gonna bring all of their other employees in there. So you might not even look to make money on the first employee, but you make money after the third, fourth employee and then on the second, third year, that sort of stuff. But that's funding based and that stuff's a little bit harder. Um, I mean like the product is just like, most of the challenge I think with a product like this is getting somebody onboarded. You know, once you're in. That's probably not gonna make or break the decision. Um, so it's all about getting, getting companies onboarded and making it really easy for them from a financial, from a logistics, from a legal point of view to get things done. Um, yeah, some money stuff is probably a big chunk of that.

I think lots of calls or lots of having like account managers or stuff available, especially if it's like a high-value company, you know, having people available to answer those questions. Like, um, Alana and Tony were both very available for us by email and stuff, and I think we did have a few calls as well, but we were a very low-value customer at the moment, at the time. Um, and I don't think their time would scale very, Like I don't think I could get that now if I was a new customer starting, you know, they're probably too. Um, but that was a good experience and probably was important to me in getting it over the line. Mm-hmm. . So having some sort of customer success or account manager or name I think is good. I don't know if you want to go, if we want to go into like the Bamboo HR or anything like that space, but like my company right now has other tools it relies on like we rely on time tracking tools. We rely on paid time-off trackers. Mm-hmm. , and we may potentially start using something like Bamboo in the future. But trying to make money or trying to see if you can open up revenue with existing employees as well as comp employees that are true boundless could be interesting. Uh, you know, the whole like benefits thing potentially applies to people who are still in not even boundless users. Um, Yeah. But other jewelry stuff.

Tonia: 3 words to describe Boundless

Dan: So stability, stable, reliable, will be one of the buzzwords. I dunno, pick one of them. . Mm-hmm. . The other. The second buzzword I probably wanna lean into is that I want to use something like this to [00:24:00] expand my entire operation. You know, we have two people. We have me and another employee in Ireland. Manually employed or not employed through Boundless. And that's annoying to me. I would like everything in one tool if I could. Um, but the future of having like an European group employed through one tool, you know, the fact that I can grow with the tool where a tool that grows with me, what's the right buzz word for that? I dunno. Elastic, No. Uh, dynamic. Yeah, you can say, you can use dynamic book that can be interpreted in many ways. Um, yeah, that's right. Does it have to be a single word? I can grow into something like that, knowing that mm-hmm. , there's more doors to unlock inside the tool. Know, knowing that there's further to go, essentially is the buzzword. And then buzzword number three is, um, like the reassurance both from my side and from the employees side during the onboarding. It's like that we knew that we were legally covered. It added legitimacy and reassurance to both my side. It made my company seem more legitimate. Um, legitimate reassurance.

I think that's super important, especially for companies that may not have had it before. Yeah. Those are my three. Thank you so much.

Other suggestions:

the sign-in screen then isn't mobile optimized. Um, which I see pretty much every time I go to like, change something from my phone, I will plug, hit this page.

I have no reason to come back to the tool. Actually, maybe that's another thing that could be considered. Um, there are no metrics, there's no analytics,

BENEFITS: I've only, I've heard about benefits from emails and marketing emails and stuff, but I'm not, One of the things that really annoys me about the marketing emails on this is I still don't know what the fuck this is. Yeah, because like, and I've, I emailed once or twice to sort of be like, Is this for like coffee subscriptions? Is this for laundry? After Tonia’s explanation of what that is. Yeah, I don't think that's the way I would want to use it or the way I think my employees would want to use it. Maybe they would, but the way I think I would probably want to use this and the way I think my employees would probably want to use it. Like they keep bugging me for a better coffee subscription. You know, like everyone wants a coffee subscription. Um, we all generally buy and want to buy the same coffee from the same company. I sort of wanna go in and just choose coffee company, a coffee subscription and just press start. I don't wanna, like if I was them, I don't wanna have to every, every month, every five, six months or whatever, have to upload receipts and stuff. Um, that's probably more management than they probably wanna do. If Boundless could own the relationships with some of the suppliers, then you could add markup and get bulk prices was one of the things that I was thinking, you know? Mm-hmm. So if you like a managed Spotify thing or managed Netflix thing, Yeah, that would be cool. Um, managed coffee suppliers was the one, one of the ones I mentioned. Um, most places I think would be interested in coffee-branded swag and stuff. Actually, an onboarding thing could be a thing that you could do as well. Um, When, like we did, we organized a manual onboarding swag sort of package thing for our employees when they started.

But that would be something I would tick a box, 250 euro or something like that easily, um, when onboarding somebody to have like a jumper and pens and notebooks and stuff sent with like an SVG logo or something like you upload. Um, Maybe a contract, copy of the contract, just some of this stuff to add a bit of legitimacy. I think that would definitely be a thing that would put something physical into the remote working thing. That's very good feedback. Yeah. Um, I dunno if you wanna go far on like laptops and stuff, but that's one of the biggest margin things that pretty much everyone's gonna need to buy during this onboarding thing. You potentially could go, here's our affiliate link or something like that. Um, Yeah, that was some of that stuff. Um, and then the one other thing is I, I don't really love the optics of this summer sale thing, and that might just be me, is that summer sale sort of feels weird. It feels sort of like a small business thing. It doesn't really feel like a large, um, Company like this, it doesn't, if I, the time Boundless of it as well feels a little weird, you know, that it's a summer thing. Um, getting two months free to sign an employee agreement ever makes sense to me. The summer sale thing, to me, I get that it's trying to put some urgency on it, but it makes it feel a little bit like we need numbers and we need them now.

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