Refer Me

Refer Me is a marketplace that connects job seekers with employees at companies that offer referral bonuses.

Reasons to Love it

There are quite a few reasons to love the business, but a few that stand out are:

1. Brand Value

Refer Me is a catchy brand and short domain. It has SEO built in when people search things like “refer me to microsoft”.

2. Marketplace dynamics

Marketplaces are awesome because they tend to have winner take all dynamics. For example, you could clone the software behind Uber easily with AI and still be no closer to actually competing with them.

This was an especially important consideration for us, as software is getting easier to build by the day. I imagine the cost of generating software will soon be zero, meaning distribution and brand will be even more important.

Bear Case

No business is perfect, and the main area of weakness with something like Refer Me is that it suffers from the same conflict that many dating apps have - the better the product is, the sooner you are off of it. The previous owners I purchased the business from starting solving for that by building tools like a resume reviewer AI designed to create more value beyond job referrals.

Future Plans

More than any business I have previously acquired, Refer Me is really a blue ocean opportunity in terms of potential due to its sheer number of high intent job seekers and organic traffic.

One thing I am highest conviction on is a job board where companies can post open roles and source from. Many tech companies often have budgets for job boards and like to distribute roles widely.

Another opportunity is expanding the supply side of the marketplace. When I acquired the business, there were only around 300 companies listed on the platform. By creating landing pages for startups and hot companies on the demand side and doing cold email outreach to employees on the demand side, there is a ton of potential to grow the network.