Our resolutions for 2021 to become better

A few days ago, Jinn celebrated its first year of existence (the company was first registered on December 13, 2019). Because of this particular period in the year, close to the new year and its procession of good resolutions for 2021, it is a good time to draw up an assessment of our situation, and how we see ourselves in the next year. So without further ado, let’s start with a retrospective of 2020.

What we have achieved in 2020

For a site that was totally non-existent before, I have to say that I am quite proud of what we did. Although my final vision is still not there, we still have built a platform for social networking, online course, job search, career database and marketplace. Technically, this platform is operational, and people can already register there. Our database is still small, but we still manage to implement about 15K articles about occupations and skills, that any registered user can modify, or even increase by adding new articles and/or categories. And after many adventures, and many migrations, we managed to settle with an efficient domain name, and a fast and reliable host.

We were somehow impacted by the covid-19 pandemic, but not as negatively as many other businesses. The advantage of being born in such crisis is that our operating cost are the lowest possible; therefore, we do not need to lay off employees, or freeze investment. Our only way forward is to recruit and invest, whatever the environment out there. As to how we were impacted, it was in a positive way: so many people were forced out of their jobs, and still struggle to resume a normal activity that they all became target customers for our business. Thus, instead of focusing on poor and emerging markets, we decided to seize this opportunity, be more ambitious and target the whole world.

Last but not least, we increased the company’s share capital, from 1000€ to 11000€, to make ourselves more credible to potential funders.

What we haven’t done (yet) in 2020

Behind the scenes, we shot video interviews with entrepreneurs, as well as videos for our first online courses. We will publish both in the beginning of 2021 on the site. We also applied to join startup accelerators, and we have only been turned down. We tried to get loans of honor, unsuccessfully. Right now we are waiting for a feedback regarding an application for a grant.

We wanted to add information about qualifications, alongside occupations and skills. This has proved to be more difficult than we thought, because we try to propose a platform that fits the needs of everybody in the world; however, education is unfortunately not something universal, so we need to consider many resources per country, making the database longer to build.

Regarding job postings, we thought we would start with postings from other job boards, imported on our platform. We eventually decided not to go on this road, first of all because some sites or job posters do not want to see their content on other platforms, and secondly because the advantage we see on a long term with our job posts is that they will be closely (and better) integrated with our career database and our course offers. For that, job categories and some keywords must be defined with the job ad, and it was too much of an effort to do it for all imported jobs.

Our resolutions for 2021

First of all, we totally understand that for many people, 2020 is a year they wish to forget because of covid-19. So our resolutions for 2021 include of course an end of the pandemic, and a return to a more normal life, without borders closed, social distancing and mask wearing. But this is something beyond our capabilities.

At our level, our resolutions for 2021 include:

• a publication of a roadmap, to give a better insight of the next features we want to implement
• a better integration of the career database, the job board and the course module. For example with a link in every article to suggestions of job ads related to the article, or courses in the skills described in the article
• the publication of a mobile app of Jinn, for iOS and Android users
• more communication with our users, via a newsletter and publications on main social media
• and of course, more content: courses, articles, videos, posts…

Our road is straight, but the slope is steep. Our resolutions for 2021 aim to bring us closer to our vision of a world in which everyone has their own personal career counselor in the pocket, to guide themselves to careers they would not have imagined (and fix the world after covid-19)