Seite - 79 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

3.3.1 Electry: The Linkedin for Skilled Blue-CollarWorkers JulianLindingerandKonradGeigerstarted theirventures’ journeyasstudentsof the WHU in 2018with the objective to solve a big problem ofHR departments—the attraction of talent for their company. In addition, the founders observed that they frequently recommendedothers for jobs,but that therewerenofinancialbenefits for themtodoso.Theywere thusdoing the jobofheadhunterswithoutbenefiting from the value they created. The idea of amical.io asUBER for head-huntingwas born. The idea can be understood as an e-attraction businessmodel,where job offers are aggregatedandusersare incentivized to recommendothers for the jobs.Withahigh level of excitement and great support from family and friends, Julian andKonrad decided to build the platform and launched the service at the end of 2018. They intuitively chose to build a Wizard-of-Oz MVP, where they mocked the B2B-processes. After launching the service, they soon realized that the platform missed the required traction from theuser side.Thiswas in conflictwith oneof the riskiest assumptions they had at the time—great jobswill attract talent to our plat- form.The business did not show traction although it had very attractive vacancies, e.g., fromQuoraandZeitgold,on theirplatform.Manycompanieswereattractedby thesolution,but it turnedout that thepotentialemployeesandrecommendersdidnot choose the platform. After several interviews with users, the amical.io founders identified that the most important component is to attract talent because jobs will come anyway. Thus, they decided to pivot to future employees and developed a conciergeMVPforadigitalcareerassistant—amical.io/assistant.Every timeatalent signsupforcareerassistanceandexpresses the interest to takeonanewopportunity, the amical team starts to search for potential jobs. They are thus reversing the recruitment process from a head-hunting to a job-huntingmodel. Simultaneous to testing the amical.io/assistant in general, the team tested attractive verticals in the recruitmentmarkets, where specific job profiles are highly demanded. After expe- riencing the costly pivot from the recommendation platform, amical.io tested its criticalbusinessassumptions inamore leanandrigorousmanner.Basedontherigid experimentation, the teamdeveloped “Electry—theLinkedin for skilledblue-collar workers”. In 2020, Electry has been accepted for theYCombinator acclerator pro- gramme and is now receiveing seed funding. 3.3.2 Acomodeo:ServicedAppartments forCorporateTravelers Acomodeowas foundedbyDavidWohde andEric-JanKrausch andwasnamedas one of Europe’s Top 100 Proptech Startups in 2018. Today,Acomodeo is leading themarket of long-stay apartment stays for business travelers andworkingwith a goodmajority of German and international corporates. But that is not what Aco- modeo started as. Acomodeo was born out of the market need for long-stay apartments for journalists during major sports events like the Olympics or the SoccerWorld Cup.Working in the travel industry, David first served this market need by searching, acquiring, and connecting apartments with journalists looking fora long-stayapartment.Thiswas theirfirst conciergeMVPthat existedbefore the companywas actually founded.Following thedescribedprocessof businessmodel discovery, the first three pillars of the venture pyramid were already covered and 82 L. Göcke and R.Weninger