Empowering Growth: How PowerUs Develops Its Job Platform with Customer Insight

Bringing a new digital product or service to the market is challenging. It’s even harder if you choose an unattended niche. And even more so if your potential users are mainly outside the online world. But it’s also a chance to create a meaningful platform to help a yet unaddressed audience thrive.

That’s precisely where PowerUs ventured with their novel idea—a career platform for skilled blue-collar workers. 

Learn how they develop their unique career portal using continuous customer feedback to boost business growth. 

What is PowerUs?

PowerUs is an up-and-coming Berlin startup building a career platform for skilled blue-collar workers. Professionals such as electricians, installation mechanics, or refrigeration mechanics can join the career network and explore various career opportunities.

The platform aims to empower these workers and help them find better jobs, bridging the gap in the job market for this underserved group. In addition, they offer a community where users can connect with other professionals and free educational courses. PowerUs aspires to become a one-stop destination for skilled blue-collar workers to find their next career move and achieve more in their lives.

PowerUs, formerly known as Electry, was founded by Julian Lindinger and Konrad Geiger and started operations in 2019. In 2022, it raised $10 million in a Series A funding round.

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Managing a new product for an inexperienced audience

PowerUs operates in an HR niche. People are used to looking at a traditional job board or using word-of-mouth to find a skilled blue-collar worker. Having an online platform for sourcing technical professionals is a big leap. 

To make the platform thrive, the Product team uses Net Promoter Score (NPS), and the product market fit survey, also known as the Sean Ellis test. Survicate powers both.  

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How does PowerUs use Survicate?

As a new startup, PowerUs understands well how important external validation is. You can have the best idea for a business, but if it doesn’t attract enough users—it will not work.

That’s why from early on, the Product team adopted testing the platform’s users. They use NPS and product/market fit surveys to learn how PowerUs customers and partners feel about it. 

For distribution, they send email surveys to customers and partners. Next, all the incoming responses land in a sheet thanks to Survicate’s Google Sheets integration. From there, the data is analyzed jointly with information from other endpoints, such as Hotjar recordings or Mixpanel data.

NPS as a guidepost

Developing a new product requires close contact with the audience and their sentiment. PowerUs decided to use Net Promoter Score (NPS) as one of their main KPIs for the Product team. This way, they can gauge the level of customer recommendation for a product, which is a strong indicator of future business growth.

“NPS is sent to all qualified workers based on their education and experience. We give them one week of experience in the product, and then we send the email with an NPS survey.”

PowerUs uses NPS to:

• Measure customer satisfaction: NPS provides a quick, easy-to-understand metric to evaluate how satisfied customers are with a product.
• Provide an overall view of customer experience: NPS is not just a single point of data but a continuous measurement of customer sentiment over time, giving product managers a comprehensive view of the customer experience.

It helps see the platform's general “health check” and accelerates pinpointing any issues. To make acting upon feedback easier, PowerUs uses the Slack integration, so the Product team gets a notification each time a new response comes in. 

“We're trying to interview every user that has a score lower than seven or eight, and also every worker that gives a response that makes sense or that we want to investigate, even if it's a high score,” explains Tom Haas, Product Manager at PowerUs.

Some of the received feedback simply confirms what they already know —

"Basically, the more jobs you receive and the better they fit, the happier you are. It's straightforward but also good to have that confirmation."

The NPS insights PowerUs receives are not only roses, though. 

"We've also discovered that sometimes the companies take a long time to respond to the workers, which makes for a bad experience. Something that we can not control very much. But maybe, we can just make the process clearer or inform the worker better about what's happening and why there's yet to be a response" - says Tom.

Continuous customer feedback helps detect the exact friction points that need to be improved—even if they’re external. Some details, though, can be quickly fixed. As Tom recalls, 

”Sometimes our respondents tell us we're sending too many messages, which is also a good insight.” 

With this input, the Product team can better plan their activities and focus on the user experience. 

Does the product fit the market? 

PowerUs also measures the product/market fit to identify gaps or misalignments between the product's features and the target market's expectations. 

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Apart from the obvious market validation, the product/market fit survey helps in: 

• Getting more customer insights: The feedback received from the test can provide valuable insights into the target market's needs, which can inform future product development
• Improving product development: The survey provides insights into what features and functionality are most important to the target market, which can inform product development decisions
• Increasing customer satisfaction: By understanding the target market's needs and expectations, companies can improve their product offerings and increase customer satisfaction

Collecting such insights in the early stages of product development is a quick and cost-effective way to gauge how the product resonates with the market or how to adjust it to what the target audience expects. 

Takeaways

PowerUs fits perfectly into the idea of a startup. It’s bringing new and unique ideas to the market by providing a career network to a niche audience. But apart from the exciting sense of disruption and breaking the status quo, much analytical work is going on.

The potential for success is one thing, but without continuous customer feedback to validate your product and business plans, it can still be a flop. That’s why the Product team uses the NPS score as one of their fundamental metrics. 

To ensure the business idea aligns with the market, PowerUs started asking their partners: How disappointed would you be if you couldn’t use our service anymore? 

The product/market fit survey or Sean Ellis test is one of the powerful tools that Survicate offers to get to know your audience, their needs, and their sentiment. 

It all puts PowerUs on the right track to succeed. Fingers crossed! In the meantime, start your own survey with Survicate (for free!).