#8 How Working in a Big Bank Led to Founding a Startup JobDone…with Lucky Bassi[Escape Your Boring Job Stories]
By: Ivana Mitrović
Tags: Life Purpose, Entrepreneurship Journey, Entrepreneurship, Career Change, Purpose Driven Life

Today’s guest is the co-founder and CEO of JobDone App, Lucky Bassi. I met Lucky last year at an entrepreneurship training in Zurich organized by Venturelab which we both attended.

Tell us more about yourself and your current business?

My name is Lucky Bassi. I was born in Thailand but grew up in Switzerland. My career story started at Credit Suisse in 2010. I did an apprenticeship in Credit Suisse and worked there for a while. Now we have a small company here in Switzerland called JobDone. We are a B2B SAS, and we deliver software services for businesses, mostly apps. We incorporated in mid-2018. Our goal is to make teamwork between employers and employees easier. Most of our customers work in gastronomy, retail, and healthcare industry. Our app is mostly for businesses that employ people in shifts. It’s what we love to do on an everyday basis; to create beautiful user experiences and work on mobile apps, work with our customers, with our team, and it has been a fun ride so far.

How was it to work in Credit Suisse?

I have a lot of good memories from Credit Suisse. My father and my uncle worked at banks before, so that’s why I thought I’ll also do an apprenticeship at Credit Suisse. I always loved technology, programming, and design, so I applied there. One thing that stood out was the excellent education part, we had many good classes with great teachers, many good programs, and events. I had an IT apprenticeship that lasted for four years, starting in 2010, till 2014. I was able to complete the whole apprenticeship as one of the best young talent of Credit Suisse, the best apprentice of the Canton of Zurich. It was fun throughout the program to get to know all the people there. After the apprenticeship, I worked in service management, and afterward, I got into project management. I stayed in project management until the time I left.

What is the difference between a Swiss apprenticeship and a regular internship?

In Switzerland, there are two models. One of the models is, you go to a gymnasium, it’s like a traditional high school. And there’s another model called the apprenticeship, which is quite popular in Switzerland. That’s where companies educate or train young people for three or four years. In the beginning, you have some learnings to do, but then you get to work fast. You’re working in productive teams, and you also earn money. You don’t learn a lot, but by working there you can get work experience. That’s what I liked about it; that I could already work at a relatively young age. I was 15 when I started at Credit Suisse; it was quite eye-opening.

How did you get the idea of starting your own company?

I think I always knew that I wanted to create something. I liked my job as a project manager quite a lot, creating new products and then rolling them out. Credit Suisse was great and had a lot of great people there. But it’s slow, things are slow there. You spend hours getting approvals to do things in the first place. I didn’t want to waste time with bureaucracy. I wanted to do something… I wanted to move fast, and be close to the customer…see the impact. That’s how I got to my business partner, Sam, who is also one of the co-founders. We were always bouncing business ideas back and forth with each other, and some were good, some werenot that good. And the JobDone is one that we felt a connection to.

How did it all start with your app?

I’m not sure where it all started, but one of the key catalysts was my brother. He worked for one of the biggest gastronomy chains here in Switzerland, and he told me about his shift plans, his schedules and how frustrating working with these plans is. I wasn’t entirely sure if he just liked to complain about things or if it was a real problem. I asked him to show me his schedule, he showed it to me, and it looked like coming from the 2000s or 90s, there were scribbles all over it. Things were strike-through, and nobody had a clue when to work or what to do. I showed it to Sam, and we wanted to improve this space and do something about it.

Which steps did you take to create the solution?

I started with some mock-ups. I created some of them together with Sam and found the pain points, the things and the areas where we can improve. We put our heads together and created some mock-ups and showed them to some people, we just asked what do they think of it. They gave us feedback. We also talked to some people from the same field, and they liked what we did. We incorporated it quite quickly. Afterward, we started with a GmbH. I’m thrilled to have Sam there. He was helping me out on all the legal stuff, he has a strong legal background. I was quite lucky to have him there.

Validating your idea is very important

That’s one of the essential points. Just because you think you have a great solution, you don’t have it validated. In the end, customers are paying for your products. When you get people excited about your product, when they give you great feedback and would pay for the service, you’re on the right track then.

How did you meet your co-founder Sam?

I was already working at Credit Suisse, and he was already working there for 13 years. I was one of his first apprentices. He had more apprentices, and I was one of the firsts. We are great friends since then.

And how is your company doing now?

We have a team of around ten people. Most of them are here in Switzerland, but we also have some remote workers. We have over 150 active users of our app on a daily basis. After incorporating, we took around two years to get everything to work and get all the details worked out before launching the app. We tried to launch before, but with B2B, their expectations are relatively high. So we needed to take some time to get most of the things right. The app was finally launched around two months ago.

How do you see working with B2B compared to B2C?

The most significant difference when dealing with businesses instead of customers is that most of them are familiar with a solution. They have some expectation of how it should work or what should be there. Also, they are more willing to pay for services. One of the key things that we work on is time-tracking, which defines people’s salary. The expectation is that the time-tracking needs to work…there’s no room for errors. When time trackings are wrong and the wages get calculated wrong, it is critical in the entire process. This taught us a lot about what we need to be careful with because it could impact a lot of people.

Pros and cons of working remotely.

Remote working has its challenges, but it’s also a quite interesting opportunity for us. First of all, we can source talents from all over the world. And there is no strict requirement that a talented person needs to come from Switzerland. The other thing is when you decide to go this way, you need to be very involved. It is crucial that the remote workers are not just freelancers or people who only execute. Since the beginning, we have tried to incorporate a sense of teamwork and build a remote culture…which is very difficult. You need to make them feel like a part of your team. With our remote workers…we work and talk on a daily basis. I program with them together. We review each other’s work, so we have a tight connection. We usually have a standard meeting in the morning and go through the things for that day. For the rest of the day, we mostly chat or if there is something that we need to discuss, we hop on a call. It works quite good. It took us some time to get to the point where we work as a unit, even in different time zones. If you spend some time building a good team, then it works quite nicely.

What did you do to make them feel like they’re a part of your team?

Most of our team was in Ukraine for over a year. We kicked things off when we went to Ukraine and worked together side by side. We got some beers together and some time to know each other. Sometimes, we send presents to them, some personalized things like t-shirts. Although those are small things, they help with the remote work culture.

Is your lifestyle different now, when you have your company, compared to when you worked for the big bank?

Not a lot. I’m always working. There’s maybe one or two evenings a week when I meet some friends. Otherwise, I’m always working, perhaps even more than when I was working at Credit Suisse. Also, there’s more stress…you cannot just go home, and things will work out. It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s very fulfilling. I’m motivated to go to the office every day, work with others, and make our products better.

What was your level of fulfillment at Credit Suisse?

I had an excellent job in project management; I had a good team, it was fun. I was doing my work, but I had no contact with customers. I didn’t know what was the ultimate result of what I was doing. Now when I go to customers and see them using my product, I feel the impact. It feels great. It’s hard, it requires a lot of sweat and many tearst, but it’s a good feeling. That’ssomething I did not have at Credit Suisse.

How did you like the entrepreneurship training on which we met?

The Venturelab workshop that we went to was a great workshop, with an excellent program, maybe one of the best I have attended. They had a lot of good speakers, a lot of good teachers who went into details. I recommend it to everyone. Besides that traning, we also went to some pitch trainings from StartupInvest. We were still quite inexperienced, and we learned a great deal there.

What are the resources available to entrepreneurs in Switzerland?

Starting a business in Switzerland is quite straightforward, and the whole incorporation process is quite well known. I had Sam, who took care of most of the legal things around the incorporation. There are some events for people who want to start their own business. Sometimes it’s not that easy to get ahold of these events or to join. There are many great online resources that you can use or just meet a lot of other startup people. I learned a lot only by talking to other entrepreneurs, and they gave me some of their tips.

Do you also do sales in your company?

That’s right, we do a lot of sales. We have a sales based model. Sales is hard and doesn’t give you much in the beginning. But, when you improve your process or approach to customers, it can work out. We struggled a bit initially with sales, but then we developed some strategies, by tracking our data and improving. We are quite happy with our sales process now. We just went out to some restaurants and bars at times when they were not busy and tried to get feedback for our idea. And that’s how we got a lot of feedback. Afterward, we a lot of cold emails. I know cold emails are a bit of a hot-discussed topic, but it worked quite well for us. The important thing with cold emails is that you do not create a generic email and send it to thousands of people, but the first email should be personal. It should address the client and it should tell your story as a business. For example, we have an image of us in the signature so people can get a sense of who we are.

How to acquire customers?

One of the most important things is to be personal when approaching the sales email. Of course, having the right product help. It’s important to show something valuable to a customer. You also have many tools help you streamline the sales process or check things. For example, tracking the data of how good you are in sales can be very hard in the beginning. We are using a tool called HubSpot, it gives us a lot of value, and it tracks how many emails we send, how many meetings we schedule, what is the conversion rate, what is the open rate, click rates, and all of these kinds of things. With these tools, we exactly see where we lose customers, where we’re doing good, where we can improve things. It takes time until you create some data you can act on. In the beginning, just start with whatever you have, and try to track things along, and then try to improve where you lack.

Funding part: easy or not

Funding is a toughest part of the entire entrepreneurial journey. I was very fortunate to have some funds saved whileworking for Credit Suisse. I had some savings so I thought that I could live of it for a while without earning any money. In fact, Sam and I bootstrapped the entire first year; we paid everything from our savings. Of course, we didn’t buy new fancy things but tried to live on a budget and work on the startup. One of the best things that you can do is to save money. Also, try to get a product as fast as possible because, when talking to investors, just having an idea is not enough, it doesn’t show what you’re capable of. Ideas are great, but what matters the most is execution. That was one of the problems that we were facing. Because we were B2B, and our product required quite some time to be developed. So it was challenging for us to get some funding in the beginning. But we found some business angels, and they helped us to get everything started. They also contributed to the development with their expertise. But if you can, have some savings and try to live of that, then get a product created fast. Your chances to get funded are going to be significantly higher.

What about the fear of rejection, when it comes to showing your MVP?

One thing you hear a lot about a startup journey is that you should fake it till you make it. If you’re able to show a product or show a worked out idea or plan, that’s the best option. But for most of us in the beginning, that’s not possible. When I look at our product, I usually see so many things that could be done better. And then I think, this could hold us back. But Sam helps me a lot in those moments. He just says, ‘you know what, it’s fine, it works, it looks good. It feels right. Let’s just go with it’. You can always do better. But at some point, you just should go out, talk to investors, show what you got. It was a bit uncomfortable to show unfinished things at first. Investors, most of them are entrepreneurs themselves, and they know where you come from. So it’s a bit uncomfortable initially, but you’ll get used to it. Ultimately, they have been through the same thing.

What would be your advice on the first three steps to take to leave a corporate job and start your own company?