Why did we decide to sell Ubbyk?
and our journey to become a European leader…
From left to right: Alexandre Grenier (cofounder at Workelo), Etienne Retout (cofounder at Ubbyk), Mathieu Cochet (cofounder at Workelo), and Aubry Hanrion (cofounder at Ubbyk)
Disclaimer:
This piece is not an umpteenth lecture on entrepreneurship. We want you to understand our journey, why Workelo is acquiring us and how we will become a European leader in the next two years!
Our Story
The story of Ubbyk is a typical French engineer one: it started by the sale of a complicated algorithm nobody wanted to buy.
One of our founders had developed a marketing attribution model while he was studying, and that became the foundation for Ubbyk - if you are wondering, our name comes both from data “ubiquity”, and from it being one of the few last 5 letters .com domains still available.
Very soon, we were faced with several issues: technical, legal, but especially one of understanding the importance of data-marketing. Marketing teams did not understand what marketing attribution was. “It’s hard to sell what no buyer understands.”
Here are the lessons from our journey:
Be agile
Our first strategic decision was to start training those teams to digital marketing. Indeed, in most traditional companies, marketing is in the hands of employees who sometimes started working before the internet was a thing. When your last training dates back to the days of their being university students, being operational can be a challenge. This is where we step in.
After a few training sessions, exposure to companies needs, and several market studies, we finally decided to focus on employees onboarding, which we felt was the topic that most fit our assets, skills and - most importantly - our inclination.
Understand the problem
Our problem is not easy to explain if you are not a HR professional, it is best to use an example:
You have been recruited two months ago.
For two months, you experienced radio silence.
The day before your first day, you get a message with the time and place of your onboarding.
First day, first disappointment, your waste 4 hours signing charters and contracts whereas you were idle for the past month. You then learn that your manager is away and forgot your arrival.
One week later, you finally get your work computer, while your colleagues congratulate you on not having to wait for three weeks.
Three weeks later, you finally get the last of the credentials you need to use all your tools.
What’s your opinion about your new company then?
As a company, can you be less effective at empowering that employee?
How much of your time will you spend complaining to your friends and colleagues about that process?
This situation keeps on happening since the topic is a complicated one, there is a need for deep coordination between different services, who need to manage key information and share relevant documents efficiently.
You can easily manage with a single new hire, when you hire 50, 500, 5,000 or 20,000 new employees, you need the relevant technology.
Be a good listener
One of our pitfalls would have been to develop a solution tailored to our first client. We did not have enough hindsight on the topic to understand how to build a solution both generic enough to reach a large pool of customers, and adaptable enough to cater to the specific needs of each user.
We needed to talk with HR managers to better understand their needs, but how could we reach the most valuable players?
We had three main hurdles:
Company mobility is an issue for bigger corporations, which are not the easiest to reach for young graduates.
HR departments are the most solicited ones in a company.
Some of the feedback we got was not very genuine.
This is where we decided to switch to a different strategy - again, and use our prospect meetings to test out different versions of our solution. A great, simple idea, but which proved hard to implement. However, the payoff was there, we quickly built our proposition, our approach, and our technology.
Be unique
And thus the Ubbyk proposition was born: “A seamless and optimal integration for a minimal effort”. We built our solution to be as a conductor, working in the shadows, to send the right information to the right information at the right time. Our intention was not to replace human touch, but to facilitate it. “Focus on people, we take care of the rest” was our motto.
On the product side, on unique proposition was based on three pillars:
Remove all users credentials to enable the simplest and most frictionless use of Ubbyk. “The best tool is the invisible one”.
Enable HR managers to track employee integration in real time to detect all issues before they occur.
Use nudges to initiate conversations between managers, sponsors, HR, and new hires as early as possible.
This is when we started to pick up speed. Aubry joined the team as founding partner to set-up the business development of the company, after an entrepreneurial experience and ten years of sales background.
Be resilient
The COVID crisis, followed by the lockdown, was a key moment in the life of the company. Our ongoing deals were frozen overnight (accounting for 500k€ of ARR). We then forsook sales to focus on three points:
Take care of our existing customers.
Stay in touch with our prospects by conducting user studies in partnerships with HR consulting firms.
Building our product.
We had a hard time, as all entrepreneurs did, and it does not warrant further writing, but all you need to know is that those two months were long ones!
Be opportunist
Right out of lockdown, some industries bounced back quickly.
The digitisation of onboarding processes due to remote working, and the growing popularity of temp and flexible contracts were key to re-ignite our growth.
June and July 2020 were our best performing months, and we then managed to break our July records in October!
However, one of the unintended side-effects of the situation we did not expect is that big corporations trust startups' solutions even less than before. We had to face new questions such as: ”how much money have you raised?” or “we only work with companies older than three years now”. We had to grow and scale quickly.
Fundraising seemed like a logical follow-up, but that process is time-consuming and hardly guaranteed. Which is when, after discussing with Alexandre and Mathieu, co-founders of Workelo, another path opened. We started discussing an acquisition offer, and the good fit between our teams did the rest.
My two main tips to sell your company:
Master the timeline
The moment you decided to sell marks the beginning of a sprint. Every week without fail, we spent hours meeting with Workelo, to get on the same page on financial, legal, and technological topics.
Every moment of downtime will hurt you.
That phase was an ordeal, but thanks to the collaborative mindset of both sides, we managed to complete - and sign - the disposal agreement in the span of two months and a half.
Have a support structure
Never before had I been involved in an exit and in the corresponding negotiation. When faced with that situation, I first tried:
Reading online resources. Nowadays, while finding advice is simple enough, finding quality ones is far more challenging…
Creating an experienced entourage. I solicited our board for help, but expanded my search further, in particular, toward startup support structures such as the Incubateur HEC Paris which was helping us at the time. One of their main assets is the strength of their community: having a network of 500 alumni startups, they were able to put me in touch with entrepreneurs who went through the same experience, while being of similar maturity as Ubbyk. The feedback from these founders were invaluable.
Trusting my guts. Despite the similarities with others’ experiences, each situation is unique, so one must go beyond collected advice.
I was able to avoid many pitfalls thanks to these three principles. However, as useful as they were for me, I cannot vouch for their value for you. Each situation is unique, and I will not step into an advisor’s shoes, many others assume that role (much?) better than I would.
Strengthening our ambition
Why did we get acquired?
We mainly went through with it due to the synergy between our visions, our solutions, and our teams.
Workelo and Ubbyk offer different solutions. Our target customers are different; Ubby deals with SMBs in specific industries, BPO & personal care services, mainly employing freelancers and temp workers, while Workelo deals with CAC40 companies, mainly employing senior staff with permanent contracts, often with more red tape.
On the HR side, Workelo was also looking to fill key positions in product and sales, which fit with the wishes of the Ubbyk team.
It’s only the beginning
Our ambition is to become the European leader of corporate mobility in the next three years. By combining our experiences, we have achieved the best market knowledge there is. Since the past summer, our teams have been working non-stop to make the most of this asset. This is why we are today the only player able to address all the needs of the topic.
As the new CPO and Head of Product of Workelo, I will keep on growing this unique value proposition to seize all upcoming opportunities.
Right when a new lockdown starts, corporations need to digitize themselves, now more than ever. And so, we are hiring! 🚀
The future is bright, stay tuned!