Making ‘connecting’ fun | Stefan Debattista

What is 8am all about? What drove you to choose 8am as the name of your company?

"Our website, www.8am.com.mt, is all about showcasing and efficiently connecting employers and candidates. We showcase both candidates and employers by allowing them to upload videos, photos, presentations, you name it.

"The name 8am came about because 8am is a time that is very much associated with work-related activity, whether waking up for work, being at work, or driving to work. We also liked its tone."

What are the major challenges and hurdles you have faced as director of a new start-up company?

"Funding is always an issue for a start-up company, creating a website does not come at all cheap while getting the process right for users doesn't come easy either.

"We have been through many iterations of the site to get it to where it is today and still have a long way to go, with the sharing of exciting ideas and features in the pipeline."

 How have you overcome major challenges and hurdles?

"Funding-wise, we initially wrote a business plan and prepared mock-ups of what we were going to create and through this we managed to raise capital but had to also inject our own funds too.

"In order to be able to operate and build a product before generating revenue as cheap as possible we decided to reward our CTO with company shares because we always believed that the harder he works, the better our product will turn out to be, and the better our product the more funds we will generate.

"On deciding what features we should build next, we always tend to test a very basic model or version of the feature to be installed first in order to determine if visitors to the site do click on the feature after all.

"Our company's policy is to constantly listen to what our users have to say and recommend. Once we are satisfied that a feature is necessary and improve on our experience for our users, we then build it in stages and try and test it at different stages to verify our hypothesis."

What exactly makes you different from existing options, what will make your product and/or service stand out in the marketplace?

"8am allows both employers and candidates to present themselves using more than a simple text area. We also make connecting fun; employers can nudge candidates to bring a job to their attention and candidates can apply to particular jobs or follow companies creating candidate and employer networks.

"Our users data privacy is also really important to us (and them): through 8am a person can upload his or her CV and details and only share their private data (including their name, CV, e-mail address, photo) with the employers that they wish to let know, while also leaving public their general summaries and jobs that they are interested in. Likewise, no one except for the employers themselves, know which candidates are connected to them."

What do your customers/users say about your product and/or service?

Here are some testimonials that we will shortly be uploading onto our website:

Kerry - The Players Lottery:
"As a resource pool, I have found 8am fantastic.  The support, guidance and assistance received from Stefan has been an added bonus and I will continue to use 8am to post my vacancies and source candidates for our ongoing needs."

Ian - ICON
"This is a great concept, and, of equal importance, there's a great team behind it. 8am gave me results where other recruitment methods failed."

Ben Borg Cardona - Pineapple Media
"We love using 8am.com.mt, the site and the people behind it have made it easy and enjoyable for us to find the right candidate for our vacancies, with the interaction between the candidates and employer that's unrivalled to all other methods that we have tried."

Emma - Muovo

"8am has proved to be a useful and user-friendly tool for recruitment. It makes it so easy to find suitable candidates and upload several vacancies with great ease."

Liz Gatt - Human Resources Manager - HLB Falzon & Falzon

"Not even a month into our search for a qualified auditor, I found and recruited a candidate through 8am.com.mt, even when other local recruitment agencies told me it was extremely difficult to find qualified persons who were interested in a job in auditing. Luckily, the service offered to employers by 8am is also very good value for money! I would definitely recommend 8am.com.mt and look forward to working with them in the future."

What is the biggest placement you have made so far? Does the company operate in a similar form of head-hunting?

"We treat all placements with the same importance as it does not make any difference to us whether a company has hired an executive or a student, the employers fee is still a flat rate of €50. Of course we love to hear of placements taking place via our site and many employers have had various success stories to tell.

"Sometimes it is not even a placement but we learn that people have met someone or started a business after meeting through 8am's concept."

If 8am succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?

"We are keen to launch the same service in other countries but are focusing on the local market and making sure our website is as good as possible for the time being."

What's the benefit for the customer/user? Who are your major customers?

"The benefit is that a person hiring can post a job onto our website and often within minutes start making contact with the right people with as little hassle and time as possible.

"Some of our major customers are Farsons, HSBC, Brand Wagon, UniBlue, NET ENT, Attard Bros, and Icon - but similarly to the question about big placements we treat all our customers with exactly the same importance."

What advice do you have for fresh entrepreneurs?

"My advice would be to listen to everybody and learn what to ignore. I am a firm believer in sharing and talking about an idea because it is the only way to gauge people's reactions and find your team.

"I suggest one turns to reading the following books: 'The Four Steps To the Epiphany' by S. Gary Blank and 'The Lean Start-up' by Eric Reis. The Four Steps to the Epiphany is Steve Blank's course text from Berkeley's Haas Business School and Stanford University, is the essential "how to" book for anyone introducing and bringing a product to the market, writing a business, marketing and sales plan - a step-by-step strategy of how to successfully organise sales, marketing and business development for a new product or company.

"The book offers insight into what makes some start-ups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Packed with concrete examples, the book will leave you with new skills to organise sales, marketing and your business for success.

"And The Lean Start-up is a new approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products launched. The Lean Start-up is about learning what your customers really want. It's about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late.

"I post quite a lot of stuff related to entrepreneurship on the Malta Brainspotting Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/BrainspottingMalta, which is worth visiting."

Do you offer the services of CV enhancing?

"No, however one thing I wish I could tell some candidates is to focus on is their covering letter. Here is a typical example of the first line of a cover letter that so many candidates tend to use: 'The opportunity presented in this listing is very interesting, and I believe that my strong dedication will make me a very competitive candidate for this position'. Covering letters of this sort usually go on with the candidate's bragging of skills that one would expect any employee to want like being 'self-motivated and creative, a hard worker, and efficient,'

"What an employer would really want to hear is what a candidate has done before and why he or she thinks is the right person for the job. If you are applying for a marketing position for instance, it is vital to state things like 'I took over Albert Firetown's Facebook page which had only 114 likes and with my help had it increased to 3,000 within four months with a budget of €1,000'.

"Candidates need to learn how to stand out in the crowd. 'A person once thought me an expression: 'No one will ever remember the dog that bit a man, but everyone would remember the man that bit the dog.'"

Is the website self-sustainable or do you intend seeking funds to expand?

"8am is completely self-sustainable and we are not currently actively seeking funding (since this takes up quite a lot of time). However, we are more than happy to hear of new findings or the right partnership opportunities."