Invest in Onboardly

The idea behind Onboardly came around when I was working at Flutterwave as Product Manager. I realized the way the onboarding process for many individuals was different from department to department and separate processes are thrown together by the authorities in each of these departments without the others knowing. Essentially, each department had its own way of doing things without a singular database. 

Onboardly's proposition is that businesses should have a single solution to manage and share employees' information across the whole company.

Overview

Modern internet-enabled businesses are responsible for maintaining over a dozen disparate systems to keep track of employee HR data, and for the most part, none of these systems talk to each other.

Sometimes, these business systems only need to know a little bit about each employee — maybe just each employee’s username and a password. Another system might need to know each employee’s: department, manager, salary, home address, and more.

If an employee is given a raise, promotion, gets married, or experience any other change during their employment, many of these systems need to be updated. Unfortunately, because none of these systems talk to each other, everything needs to be updated separately and by hand.

This leads to fragmented employee data across all of a company’s systems and tools.

There should be one platform where companies and their employees could come to and make changes to employees' data, and that system would handle the propagation out to every other system.

This is what we are building with Onboardly.

Without Onboardly, onboarding is a flurry of paperwork, electronic signatures, contact gathering, and more. The odds are high that your new employee is going to spend their first weeks overwhelmed, and confused all the while uncertain if their first paycheck will even make it to them.

We're able to collect all of the data that makes up an employee record in a one-time quick and painless process. Once an employee clicks submit, they can be sure nobody is going to come around again asking them how to spell their last name, or where their mother was born.

This data makes up an employee record and will be used across multiple systems and departments to identify the employee.

Being the central store for all this data gives us the ability to send up-to-date information about an employee to all other systems across the company, making us the de facto source of truth.

This is why we are fanatical about making the onboarding process at organizations as automated and seamless as possible. Onboarding is our core offering: We believe the first step you take with new employees is the most impactful part of their journey.

Our Strategy

Leveraging Integrations. We know the tools that modern companies use, and with the click of a button we can instantly sign up their employees with correct access control, account settings, and configuration.

Companies know the tools that work best for their employees. We make their existing tools work for them pain-free. And, if they're interested in trying out a new solution, we can get them set up immediately.

Onboarding is not just about HR: Onboarding tasks cut across many different departments - typically, 30% of a company’s onboarding tasks are HR-related, 40% are IT-related and the rest require the involvement of facilities, legal, and finance to get an employee ready to work.

Many companies use informal checklists to keep track of these tasks. We are focused on automating the company's new hire checklist into a repeatable process.

P.S: Some bigger companies have built project management apps for HR that assign out tasks and track completion whenever someone joins the company; these apps can tell everybody what to do, but at the end of the day, they leave you and your new employees copy-pasting their information into every app.

Why now

Rise in the number of software tools used by organizations: Three years ago, an organization uses an average of three software tools (Gmail or Microsft Office for email, Salesforce for sales, and Trello for task management). Today, an organization is using an average of 10 software tools(Gmail, Slack, Calendly, Intercom, Okta, Trello, Zoom).

Someone needs to add new hires to each of these platforms. When someone gets promoted, their access needs to be reconfigured across these systems. When someone leaves, you need to shut off their access immediately or risk leaking sensitive information.

Without Onboardly, every piece of software that is adopted by an organization requires months of planning, and updates to HR checklists.

New Technology: Many software tools provide APIs that we are able to plug into, to get integrations live without the need to get into a partnership.

Market evolution: The HR software stack is starting to get unbundled with rising of new companies focused on a specific part of the HR value chain. Welcome and FigureHR focus specifically on compensation, Humaans focus on HRIS, Zenefits, and Gusto focused on Payroll and benefits administration.

So we believe onboarding is the most important step in the employee lifecycle.

This is the point where you generate their paperwork for electronic signatures, specify all the necessary information such as their salary, reporting line, department, locations, what tools the employee will be using, what documents they will have access to, what benefits they get, ask employees for information such as their next of kin, personal details.

This data is what makes up an employee record and it is what will be used across multiple systems and multiple departments to identify the employee.

Being the place where all this data is stored gives us the ability to send up-to-date information about an employee to all other systems across the company, making us the de facto source of truth.

This is why we are fanatical about making the onboarding process at organizations as automated and seamless as possible.

Competitive Landscape

On the employee onboarding side, we compete with HRIS platforms such as BambooHR, Personio, Workday, and many more. What these platforms refer to as onboarding is a checklist of tasks meant to be performed by the HR personnel and the new employee with little to no automation.

As a system of record for employee data, we compete with Rippling. Many companies already use different tools across the organization such as HRIS software (e.g BambooHR), payroll and benefits administration software (e.g Gusto), and identity software (e.g Okta).

Rippling requires that organizations migrate all these services to their platform which disrupts the business and requires more time and money than most organizations are willing to spend.

What we have built is a platform that collects all employee data and syncs it across all the different services and tools already being used by the organization. There is no switching cost because employees will continue to be able to use the best tools for the job.

When a new employee starts at a company that uses Onboardly, the company's HRIS software(e.g BambooHR) is updated with their personal data, the company payroll software is updated with their salary and bank details, and the benefits administration software is updated with their next of kin information.

Milestones

We've onboarded 88 companies between March 2021 and October 2021. Most of these companies are YC alumni such as Mono, Aella Credit, Float, Aboki Africa etc.These companies are onboarding an average of 10 employees every month.

Use of funds

We are raising a pre-seed of $200,000 to achieve the following goals:

Product

• Launch department onboarding.
• Continue to improve on our core technology so that we can build a globally competitive product.
• App integrations
  
  
  People
• Hire a VP Engineering
• Hire two engineers to work on Integrations.
• Hire two people in sales and growth to reach our target of $50k MRR by end of 2022.