2023: Our review of the year

👶 A brief history of hyrise

Since we founded hyrise, we have obsessed over a single purpose: empowering people to pursue careers they love.

We believe everybody should be empowered to pursue a fulfilling, rewarding career, regardless of their background. 🤍

Tech sales careers have the potential to offer all of these benefits to anyone with the right motivation and mindset. Unfortunately, many talented individuals do not have access to these opportunities.

We founded Hyrise in 2020 to help people enter these careers and provide them with the necessary skills to succeed in them. Here’s our brief history 👇

• 🐣 In 2021, we launched our tech sales bootcamp. We trained and placed 50+ happy students at top tech companies like Hubspot, Zenloop and Wayflyer.
• 🪴 In 2022, we evolved our model. We started placing people first and training them after. We experienced huge growth (400%) and placed and trained 100+ people.

So how was 2023? Check it out!

💃 How it went: 2023

2023 was a tough year for the tech industry in general, and we noticed the headwinds.

Big Tech went on a hiring binge during the pandemic, and a rough economy and missed revenue targets resulted in one the biggest waves of mass layoffs in tech history.

As a result, this year we encountered tighter budgets, longer sales cycles, and a generalized weariness in the market. Placing and training people was harder than ever.

But we like a challenge. Here’s how it went 👇

• We placed and trained 280+ happy people at great tech companies. Despite the economic climate, we managed to impact many lives this year.
• Our Training product achieved 200% growth with a 4.9/5 satisfaction score. Last year we decided to go back to the drawing board and build the most effective sales training program in the market. Our program focuses on personalized, continuous learning paths with 1:1 coaching. The results speak for themselves.
• We helped 60+ new hiring partners find and hire exceptional sales talent. Early in the year, we decided to forego our platform to provide a more tailored approach for each partner, resulting in higher satisfaction and recruiting efficiency.
• We completed our seed round and transitioned to a subscription model. To ensure financial stability and continue making a lasting difference in people's lives, we secured funding from two new investors and shifted our business model to subscriptions for maximum recurring revenue.
• We continued to build a great place to work: 100% remote. Our employee satisfaction score (4/5) and confidence in our products and leadership (4.9/5) remained high even in turbulent times. We had the opportunity to meet in person twice this year in the beautiful cities of Barcelona and Mallorca.

We take great pride in our team and culture at Hyrise, and it’s the main reason we achieved growth in 2023. Throughout the year, we remained adaptable to the circumstances, driven by the belief that empowering individuals to pursue and succeed in tech sales careers is a mission that goes beyond market conditions.

🚀 Our fuel: stories and feedback

One of the perks of working at hyrise is that we truly get to experience firsthand the impact we have on people’s lives. These stories and feedback are our fuel to keep going. They’re hard to capture in a blog post, but here are some of our favorite messages and feedback from this year 👇

✉️ From people who found new jobs...

✉️ From companies that hired new salespeople...

✉️ From people that experienced our training

🙏 Farewell and thank you

A tough environment also led to some tough decisions this year. We decided to restructure our team to become more efficient, which inevitably resulted in downsizing our team.

Michael Land is stepping down as MD at hyrise from 2024 onwards, emphasizing our focus on the 2 product lines recruiting and training. Mike is part of the soul of hyrise and one of the remain reasons we exist. He will always remain a founder of the company, and we cannot thank him enough for taking us to where we are today.

Hyrise is a close team with a unique culture, and this has been one of the hardest decisions we have taken in our short history. To everyone who parted ways with hyrise throughout the year: all we can say is thank you. You have all contributed to changing hundreds of people's lives and will always be a part of our DNA.

💭 What’s next?

We face 2024 full of confidence and stronger than ever. We are one of the main thought leaders in tech sales in Germany, and we will continue laser-focused on finding people great jobs and training them so they can excel in their careers.

• On the training side, we are ready to grow. The feedback from our program is excellent, and we can’t wait to help thousands of sales teams improve their performance. We will focus on improving our product by offering our service natively in both German and English and adding new cutting edge learning modules as well as trainers on topics like AI in sales, account management, leadership and mindset.
• On the recruiting side, our challenge remains to find and prepare the ideal candidate for each company at scale. We will explore new ways to attract and prepare talent and become more efficient in the process of matching the ideal candidates with each of our hiring partners.
• As a company, we will continue to build a great place to work. When we founded Hyrise, one of our priorities was to build a culture where we would love to work. We will continue to build a healthy work environment where people can flourish both personally and professionally.

Onwards!