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We met Michelle Volberg in June of 2023 through our venture partner Shani Bocian and she joined as a Venture Partner. In October, she reached out sharing she was interested in exploring an idea that would allow for recruiters to quickly and easily check references to allow for offers to be sent as quickly as possible.
But upon diving deeper, we realized that what made Michelle successful as the owner and founder of a successful boutique recruiting agency was that the majority of recruiters she worked with were formerly an expert in the function they were responsible for. Her sales recruiter was a former sales leader, and her product recruiter was a former product leader.
We asked, "What if we could scale what Michelle did by transforming the entire recruiting process to be based on references from experts who have done the job before?”
Over the course of 10 months, we worked with Michelle to validate and test her idea, launch a no-code product, recruit active members, bring on the first customers, and get funding for Twill.
Finding great talent is expensive and hard to find. In the US, there is $30B spent on recruiting services each year.
Twill allows top talent to earn $5-25k for recommending their friends and peers for open roles, transforming a universally common free behavior into a paid opportunity — resulting in better talent, better fit (increased productivity & retention), and faster hiring than recruiters.
In this phase, we aim to define the business idea and speak with a small group of key stakeholders to show enough signal that there is a real problem and opportunity.
In this phase, we would normally gut check the market by talking to 2-3 customers to see if companies would be willing to engage with and pay Twill for high quality talent. However, given that Michelle’s entire business for the last 5 years was focused on expert recruiters hiring for their domain, we spent time defining the business model before quickly moving to validation.
After getting initial commitments and learnings, we set goals to speak with more customers and to start to build a waitlist to gauge the scope of demand for all key stakeholders.
We worked to validate both sides of the marketplace: that companies would be willing to engage with and pay Twill for high quality talent and that we could recruit high quality members.
Our goal was to get:
To do this, we:
Within the first month (including the winter holidays), we blew past these validation goals arriving at 7 signed contracts (including 1 pre-payment contract) with 147 member sign ups, with 80 qualified.
From there, we also worked on the company roadmap, including our first GTM product sketch to help scale the business during a day-long in person summit.
After working with the founder and validating the idea, we evaluate whether we want to invest and build a business together. If the answer is a “hell yes,” we make an offer to the entrepreneur to go full time, incorporate the business, build traction, and start fundraising to bring the mission to life. Purpose Built acts as their founding team – supporting them through all the major functions of the business.
We officially launched Twill and incorporated the business at the beginning of February, investing $100K in Michelle at this stage for her to focus 100% of her time on building Twill.
We established a 6-week sprint cadence to stay accountable and on track to goals, to build as much traction to raise a pre-seed round.
During launch, we aligned on a fundraising strategy and helped Michelle understand how to pitch VCs and angels.
Once we developed enough traction with the business, we
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In ~10 months of working together, Twill raised an oversubscribed pre-seed round of $1.45M — we originally were seeking 900K — from Bloomberg Beta, Vitalize, Correlation Ventures and a number of strategic angels to scale operations. HR Brew covered the raise here and Inc. did here.
By the end of 2024, she had signed 50+ clients and recruited thousands of high quality members.
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"...The team does a good job figuring out where founders have strengths and where they need more help, and helping them without judgment.This is super important for any founder/investor relationship and I think rare to come by. I never felt like I had to pretend to be someone else or know things that I didn’t.” - Michelle Volberg
If you’re interested in working with Purpose Built as your founding team, see if you’d be a good fit here and send us your information here.
