Hatch is a job marketplace startup based out of Australia. Hatch’s mission is for all people to find meaning in work. In Hatch’s beta product, it is a digital marketplace that matches quality young talent to meaningful paid professional work of 3 to 12 month projects, typically taking place alongside the students’ studies.

Over the summer, Ankit (the other CBS summer intern) and I worked on the market feasibility testing for the US market. In order to arrive at our recommendations for the go-to-market strategy, we conducted a thorough competitor analysis on job sites and agencies, a legal analysis into Hatch’s business models, customer discovery interviews with the two sides of the marketplace — candidates and employers, marketing sizing for both experienced hiring as well as campus hiring, and a cost analysis into the proposed go-to-market strategy. Our work has been insightful for Hatch to understand the US market, which is a key and the largest market for Hatch as it looks into its international expansion strategy.

I would say the course I took over the summer on Foundations of Entrepreneurship with Professor Geraldine Wu has been most relevant to the work that we are doing for Hatch. It was also very timely because I was using the skillsets and tools from class and applying them in real work for the internship as the semester progressed along. Also, the Lang Center was very kind to provide me with access to the content from the Summer Startup Track program, which definitely accelerated my learning.

It all started with customer discovery — how to identify customer segments, design customer interview questionnaires, and best practices for conducting the interviews. Next, we applied the lessons learned from class on market sizing on the two go-to-market strategies that we were researching and recommending. While we put together our own templates on the legal analysis and competitor analysis, the break even analysis that we learned in Professor Wu’s class was hugely helpful in how we approached the cost-analysis for Hatch’s go-to-market strategy. Lastly, we presented our recommendations using a typical pitch deck format, which helped us to articulate the problem, our hypotheses, findings, and final recommendations in a succinct manner. As we wrap up the internship, I am also looking forward to using the toolkit from our Marketing Strategy class to do a deeper dive into customer acquisition costs and lifetime value.

A key challenge that I faced was finding the interview subjects for our customer discovery interviews, particularly on the employer side of the marketplace. This was challenging because it was outside of our control whether people would accept our interview invitations. I did some cold calling, however, to no avail, but luckily was able to reach out to my existing networking of colleagues from previous companies, industry acquaintances, and classmates from CBS. This taught me the importance of fostering existing relationships, since cold ones are very hard to make and build. Frankly, I was grateful to have had the opportunity to get back in touch with some old contacts. Another challenge that I faced was making sure that the recommendations I made on the go-to-market strategy were not biased by my personal view of the problem based on my background in human resources, but rather based on feedback from the customer interviews. A strategy that really helped me with this was writing out my hypotheses and making sure that we structured customer interview questions or research on these topics to validate hypotheses.

My takeaways from this internship are the following: Firstly, the power that businesses have to address social issues and how quickly they can move. Hatch’s product is ultimately focused on providing a fairer and faster recruiting solution. In Sydney, Australia alone where Hatch has launched, the company has acquired a student community of 12,000 and is helping them get connected to meaningful career opportunities with the 400 companies on Hatch’s platform. Hatch also quickly pivoted during the pandemic and Hatch Exchange was developed to help companies forced to stand down staff redeploy their workers into other jobs. In its first two weeks, nearly 500 workers have been redeployed, some within 72 hours of applying. Secondly, deepening my understanding of talent acquisition, its recent developments and the players in the industry. I have been working in human resources for the past 10 years, but mostly focused on talent development and advisory. So I actually really appreciated the chance to go deeper to understand recruiting, which I think will help me to be a more well rounded HR professional, but also help me with hiring talent in the future when I have my own business one day. Lastly, having learned how to conduct market analysis and put together a business model and go-to-market strategy will be very useful as I prepare for other business strategy roles.