BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

Recruitment Referral Platform 💼  

A hire power

Available Domain: Hirearn.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: If you’ve been on LinkedIn lately you may have noticed something. And no, I’m not talking about the usual crazy posts.

Nowadays on LinkedIn it seems like more and more businesses are offering straight up cash as rewards for referring in good people. But there’s a problem. The reach of these campaigns is tiny, limited to the number of connections the person has on LinkedIn. Why not combine all of these requests into a single platform for referrals? Think of it like decentralized recruitment. Here’s what we have in mind.

Market Size: The global recruitment market is worth $500bn annually

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A public job referral platform where anyone can earn thousands by referring friends or contacts to open roles

How it Works:

• Companies post jobs on the platform with public referral bounties (e.g., "$10k for Senior Engineer").

• Users share referral links with friends, ex-coworkers, etc. (via email, text, LinkedIn).

• The candidate applies and lists the referrer.

• If the candidate is successful and stays in the job 90 days, the referrer gets paid.

• The platform holds the cash reward in escrow, takes a % fee.

Go-to-market: Start by monitoring social channels for companies offering these rewards, onboard them, then push traffic to the site

Business Model: Success fee model where the platform takes 10–20% of the referral bounty

Startup Costs: You could start this for basically $0

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Get acquired by a jobs platform like Greenhouse or Lever

Exit Multiple: Marketplaces typically exit at 4–10x revenue.

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

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• WorkWatch™: turn your Slack off and slack-off in peace

Vote

• ✅ Yes this actually exists

• ❌ Nope you totally made this up

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Whop

• Whop (not to be confused with WAP) seems to be everywhere these days

• In case you haven’t heard about it, Whop calls itself “the make money app”, or basically a platform where which lets anyone create and sell access to a wide range of digital products, from exclusive courses to sports betting tips

• Earlier this month Whop raised $18m in their Series A, so clearly whatever they’re doing is working

Business Ideas

• Product Hunt for Whop: A tool that allows Whop users to launch their products and get feedback, similar to Whop

• Whop Review Sentiment Analyzer: A dashboard that uses AI to analyze customer reviews and feedback for trends, pain points, and suggestions.

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THE MONEYSHOT

How One Founder Built Two Unicorns

They say that lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice.

Well for this founder, who managed to build two billion dollar businesses in the same sector, it did.

This is his story.

Tom Blomfield is something of an anomaly.

He was born in Hong Kong and spent his early years in Asia before relocating to Buckinghamshire, England.

Tom was interested in technology from an early age, teaching himself to program, but despite this he pursued a degree in Law at the University of Oxford from 2003 to 2007. But while at University Tom still followed the founder path.

While at Oxford, Tom co-founded Boso.com, an "eBay for students." The platform expanded to 50 UK universities but faced challenges in securing investment. Eventually, it was sold to a Canadian company and transformed into Auctomatic, a tool for eBay power sellers.

After college Tom went to work in law, however in 2010, he reunited with two of his old college friends, Hiroki Takeuchi and Matt Robinson, with the shared ambition of building a startup.

Their first project was GroupPay, a tool to help friends split and manage group payments. However, they quickly realized the real problem wasn’t the group coordination, it was getting money from people’s bank accounts reliably. This led them to start GoCardless in 2011. The business went through YC in 2011 and raised millions of dollars, but Tom left the business in 2013. Why? Details are sparse but what we do know is the GoCardless was last valued at $2.1 billion following a $312 million Series G funding round in 2022.

Then in late 2014 Tom made his next big move, joining a challenger bank called Starling Bank as their CTO during the bank's formative stages. But Tom disagreed with how Anne Boden was running the company, so much so that he and several colleagues departed the business in early 2015 to start a competitor.

They started Monzo.

Monzo (initially named Mondo) quickly gained traction, raising £1 million in just 96 seconds during a crowdfunding campaign in 2016.

The business offered a prepaid debit card linked to a mobile app. Its user-friendly app, real-time notifications, and fee-free spending abroad contributed to its popularity, especially among younger demographics.

By 2017 Monzo had received its full banking license and reached one million customers by October 2018. In the same month, Monzo achieved unicorn status with a valuation of £1 billion following an £85 million funding round.

By 2019, Monzo had over 4 million customers, with no signs of its growth slowing. However despite all of its success in May 2020, Tom stepped down as CEO and transitioned to the role of President. Personal pressures and the challenges of leading the company during the COVID-19 pandemic took its toll, and he decided to step down.

His next move? Well he went back to where it all started. Exactly 10 years after going through YC, Tom became a visiting partner in late 2021 and a full partner in 2023, advising the next generation of startup founders on what they need to do to win.

But what can we learn from Tom himself? Market matters. If you pick and stick with the right market, like he did with Fintech, you can win big again and again and again.

You just have to choose.

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