Editor’s note: Appraisly rebranded to PeopleGoal in March 2014 and since then has grown to support hundreds of small medium and large organisations in multiple regions of the world.
Appraisly was co-founded in the second quarter of 2013 by two passionate entrepreneurs James Strickland and Nik Lygkonis. Appraisly is all about employee appraisals and employee performance management.
Having worked in several large organisations, we have had the chance to use difference employee performance software and experienced first hand that they do not add value to the employer or the employee. Primarily because the processes used have not changed much since the Jack Welch era. As we moved towards an online socially connected society, almost nobody of the HR solution providers pivoted their business in the performance management space.
Appraisly is here to change that, our solution is data-driven emphasising in management analytics, and “datafication” of information points collected such as feedback and employee goals. As Facebook “datafied” our friend network, Appraisly is doing the same for employee appraisals using cutting edge technology. Same thing happened with marketing which became a data-centric department two decades ago where market analytics and customer scores were introduced. Now it’s time for Human Resources to take the same route, and we started with employee performance management.
The industry is growing 10% annually, and the market size is between 6Bn and 10Bn. Although big players such as Oracle, IBM and SAP are dominant in the market, there are several other smaller companies that offer employee performance management solutions such as Halogen Software, Cornerstone On Demand and Kapta Systems. Surprisingly in the past three years, there have been 59 acquisitions in the HR industry.
Our business model applies to every business with ten or more employees. It’s a subscription model where we charge companies per user per month. For small businesses with up to 10 employees, we offer our solution for free. We are completely based off the cloud, therefore, we don’t charge for integration of server maintenance. We also have a trial period where customers can try our product for free and request customizations.
Currently, we have ten companies (~1000 users) lined up to trial the product mid – October. Also, we are actively seeking angel investment that will allow us to test our assumptions and we are applying for accelerators in the UK and US. Appraisly won the “Best” B2B startup award at the Launch 48 Showcase event in June 2013, and we were shortlisted out of 1049 startups in the penultimate round of the Million Pound Startup Competition.