Start Up Characteristics
famany is an employer branding, recruiting and employer review page, focused on work-life-balance and was founded in June 2013. The young Startup enables companies to present their activities and measures to reconcile the employees’ family and working life, post job offerings and establish a sustainable employer image. Employees can anonymously write reviews based on their experiences. The famany team’s mission is to change the mindset of companies: Looking at the demographic changes and the ‘war for talents’, employers need better incentives than a high salary to attract the best employees. At the same time, for more than 90% of all (potential) employees reconciling family and the working life is more important than their salary.
famany monetizes by charging companies to fill out their employer profile. In return companies get a lot of value through registering on the platform. famany’s services contain a meaningful and clean profile that presents the company in its best way. Job offerings, pictures, videos, an interview, FAQs, information, and a contact person will be listed together with all reviews the company receives. Companies can track the traffic, see the behavior of users and can analyze their employer image. Furthermore famany honors the best-reviewed employers with its own seal, which therefore signalizes a family-friendly work environment within the company. In addition, famany.com also offers a partner networked called ‘famany+’.
Personal Background
The founding team consists of Linda Schuster, Max Roth and Bernd Kopin who already worked together on other projects. Experienced board members who especially operate in the fields of sales, strategy and PR activities support the team.
Linda finished her Bachelor of Cultural and Economic Studies (BaKuWi) at the University of Mannheim in January 2013 and instantly moved to Berlin together with one of her co-founders to start famany. She has already gained experience in the Startup sector as she has worked for Startups like SPH Music Group and an event agency. Linda is convinced that managing your own Startup brings uncountable great learnings and challenges yourself again everyday. Therefore, she specifically chose to not follow up her Bachelor with some internships or a Master, but build her own business and create valuable and sustainable change.
Business Development and Challenges
While Bernd Kopin had the basic idea for famany in July 2012, he and Linda were still studying at the time and started working full time on famany in March 2013. After having setbacks due to two developers leaving the founding team, they found a new developer and started with beta testing. Their biggest learnings during this time was that you have to work with people who believe in the idea and know what it means to start your own business. According to Linda, major challenges are finding the right team and identifying effective ways of communication to enable working together from two different cities – as the company’s developer is living in Koblenz.
famany is preparing to get seed investment at the moment, which requires a lot of time, while also facing two other major challenges: Will the companies accept their prices and will the site attract enough users?