2025 was the year we changed.
Speaking for myself, the end of the year has always had special meaning; it was during such a heady time, straddling the past and the future, that I decided I wanted to build something of my own. Even today when I think back to that pivotal time, the world expands, possibilities become infinite and human endeavor seems meaningful.
So as this year too winds to a delicious close, and those brilliantly terrible holiday movies start making the rounds, I look back on the months that have flown past.
Now we founders tend to believe we are holding the sky up with our labors and given half the chance, will chew your ear off about the hundreds of things we do before breakfast everyday. But for the purpose of this article, I will zoom out, squint a bit so the millions of squiggly lines converge into arcs and broad sweeps, and I promise, I will bring to you not more than three.
#1 - We built & launched our Marketplace, got 900+ sign-ups in 10 months
If you’ve been reading anything I have written over the last year, you would probably know that something called the FlexiBees Marketplace has come into existence.
It is our existing business re-imagined through the prism of technology and automation. And in doing that, it has changed everything.
FlexiBees Marketplace sign-up page
The FlexiBees Marketplace is a self-serve platform, as we like to say - where businesses can build AI-assisted JDs in minutes, start receiving responses from pre-vetted candidates within hours, and interview and hire remote talent within days.
But this is not just a process change, as anyone who works in technology will know. It has transformed the experience for both businesses and candidates in significant ways. It is not only speedy, it is also TRANSPARENT. It gives AGENCY into the hands of the businesses, they see the impact of the choices they make while building the JD, for example, picking certain skills, or a domain, or playing around with pricing, and have the option to choose parameters that work for them.
Similarly candidates see jobs with mini-JDs and compensation details and they too have CHOICE - that gives them bargaining power too.
Case study
And with our product in beta, we have only just scratched the surface, the possibilities are endless: predictive hiring recommendations, real-time feedback loops, skill-gap analysis and others that AI makes possible.
For now we are happy and borderline amazed that we have been able to get 900+ businesses to sign-up with us in the last few months, with the last couple of months exceeding 150+ sign-ups, indicating the beginning of a scaled GTM!
#2 - We welcomed more businesses and women to the FlexiBees fold
We are a 2-sided business and the more we grow our flexible workforce i.e. our women talent pool, the more likely that businesses will come to us and vice versa. It is a virtuous cycle that is called “network effect” in Marketplace lingo.
It has always been relatively easier for us to acquire our women pool and hence we have not spent much on it in the last few years. But this year, we needed to ensure that we had enough depth in our pool to meet our demand with speed and good matching (our promise).
So we cranked up our B2C side marketing as well, with influencer-marketing, ads, a bit of partnerships and all girded with good organic content. We founders even made peace with putting our faces out there regularly, dancing for our supper!
As a result, we increased our talent pool to 1.5x of its size earlier, flying past the 100k+ mark and ending the year close to 125k+ women in the FlexiBees fold! Similarly for the demand side too, 3500+ businesses came to hire from us across both our Marketplace and Assisted business models.
And the best part is that these companies are from diverse sectors, from hard-core manufacturing and industrial sectors to advertising and digital agencies to the ed-techs and fintechs of the world, they all come to hire from our pool. As a small business ourselves, it makes us proud to stand for other SMBs and startups, partnering them in the way we know best, helping them hire with precision and speed.
#3 - We grew in presence, both in India and Internationally
From winning 3rd place at the Aurora Tech Awards, to the entirely surprising mention by the National Commission for Women - India of the work we are doing at FlexiBees, and our CTO, Sowmya Dhandapani, winning the silver medal at the Women in Tech Global Awards, this year has accolades galore.
The Aurora Tech Award in itself is a milestone we will remember for a long time - FlexiBees was selected from 2000+ global applications, with the competition being close till the very end, as 10 of us finalist startups met in Cairo to pitch in front of a jury. It was a life-changing journey, where we met tens of other female-founded businesses from around the world, made friends, and came away with $15K of equity-free cash!
Another interesting event was the collaboration with the UNESCO-backed Women for Ethical AI (W4EAI) podcast, where my co-founder Rashmi spoke with Navneet Kaur, an important name in FemTech entrepreneurship and the host of this podcast, about the many ways we use AI.
2025 will forever be special. It was the year we went from being a quick hiring platform to an AI-powered Remote Job Marketplace. The year where we didn’t just rest on our laurels, we went from building to launching to growing.
And now, onwards to the next milestone, a bigger fund-raise, so we continue to invest behind growth and technology, taking our Marketplace to business hubs across the world and helping them hire from untapped and under-served talent pools globally.
