Founders Arm

Most founders think great offshore talent is impossible to find. We've built our entire company, proving them wrong. This is a night we spent with our contractors in Egypt. A yacht on the Nile. People from all over the country. Faces we'd only ever seen on a screen, finally together in one place. These are the people we place inside fast-scaling startups every single day. The ones who take real work off a founder's plate and own it. We don't just fill roles. We find people worth building around, and we treat them like it. That's why they stay. That's why they perform. If you're scaling and tired of hiring that falls apart in a month, let's talk. Book a call: https://lnkd.in/eUv_SZV2

Offshore hiring sucks. When I started Founders Arm, I had never done any form of recruitment. So picture my situation. Our first clients are offering me $2,000 a month to find them the best talent in another country, and I have no idea how to find a good candidate. Insert my first ever campaigns on Linkedin trying to hire people from other countries. Everyone looked good on paper. Then I'd get on a call and the profile came apart in about four minutes. Three years of experience that turned out to be six weeks of a task. English skills that were subpar. Tools listed that they had no idea how to use. I knew I couldn't pair these candidates with any clients. Not because I couldn't, but because I knew it would fall apart in a month - After I'd made the intro and the client could see through the smoke. This is why most founders try offshore once and never again - because they tried it, got burnt, and they never want to do it again. Pan back to me - I was still getting the occasional great fit though. One or two a week, placed with our first clients, working out well. However, I knew one or two good candidates a week would not build a company. I needed more volume and a way to screen candidates BEFORE they ever reached an interview with me. So I changed my approach. Instead of interviewing everyone who came across my desk - I introduced a video filter as our recruitment campaigns scaled. Gauge english skills and culture fit before the interview. Today we screen around 40-50,000 candidates per month, and we're truly optimised to find the top 1% of talent. It all come from the one step I added in our funnel that changed the perception of offshore hiring. This is our funnel: 1) Campaigns. 2) Video submissions. 3) Culture fit interview. 4) Availability and a test. 5) Placement. Offshore hiring never sucked. My net was just too small.

Meet the team behind our first program - the VA factory. When I wanted to launch cohort 1, I had nothing. No cirrcuculum. No applicants. No launch video. No idea about anything. I just told myself that we were going to launch in 3 weeks and it would start on July 1st. I might've overestimated my abilities because I realised pretty quickly that I needed help to put this together. First came khulud hassine, our head of recruitment and first employee. She'd overseen our candidate pipeline for 100k+, helped build most of our internal team, and been with Founders Arm over the last 2 years. She helped put the cirriculum, applicants, and the skeleton for the program together. Next up, Yousra Mehyaji, the marketing wizard. One of our earliest hires in the company, who started off as a Marketing Assistant at Cal AI, and now a Project Manager at the same company that has 22 marketing assistants through us. She knows more about influencer marketing than most people who start a consumer app today. Fast forward to the end of the program..... It worked. We've placed 2 candidates last week with our consumer app clients and are considering 4 more actively. Our 2nd cohort starts September 1st, and we're expected to double the program size. If you're from the MENA region and want to join, applications are open for another week. https://lnkd.in/esNFu3XD

Hosting a fireside with Alif this monday - Scaled my first company to 7 figures in under a year with 0 funding - Helped some of the largest startups (cal ai. myfitnesspal. pam. and other $10 million+ companies) build teams of 20+ - Entire team is just 8 va's Sharing the whole playbook. How to use va's for growth. Where to source. Systems for GTM. Monday 4pm pt See you there :) https://luma.com/alif-cakn

I gave a workshop to 200+ founders yesterday on how to use offshore talent for growth with Imran M.th with Imran M.. After working with 100+ companies (Cal AI, MyFitnessPal, Playkit, Turbolearn, Pam, Alif) and scaling my own company with a team of offshore talent, a lot of this was advice I wish I could have given myself on day one. 1) Your company is always in one of two stages. Know which one you're in. You are either searching for your ICP/winning channel, which means you need more volume. OR You have something that works as an acquisition channel, and making that the only priority should be your entire job. Founders confuse the two constantly. In search mode they hire one expensive senior person to go and find the answer. What they actually needed was more shots. Forty attempts yourself gives you more data than anyone else could. Then they find a channel that works and immediately go looking for three more. An omnichannel funnel that looks impressive on the surface, while the one thing that was printing gets a quarter of the attention it earned. 2) Hiring offshore is a lot better than you think. Virtual assistant is the term everyone uses. Based on what I have watched companies actually use these people for, they do not deserve to be called assistants anymore. - Pam is a $20 million AI company that uses offshore talent for customer support/success for enterprise clients - Cal AI is a $50 million consumer app that has 20+ marketing assistants to source influencers and the engine day to day - 8 figure healthcare companies that use offshore project managers, BDR's, to help generate more leads at scale. These are US companies building entire functions with offshore talent. 3) AI raised the floor for everyone. - Humans are the only ceiling left. AI 4x'd what one person can produce. That part is settled, and it is also why it is not an advantage anymore. Your competitor has the same models, the same prompts, the same 4x. Nobody is winning on access to intelligence. What compounds is a person driving it. The model produces forty options and a person picks the one that fits this customer this week. And the market has moved in the exact opposite direction to the tooling. In a feed full of generated slop, contact with an actual human became the scarce thing. Customers do not want your automated sequence or your support bot. They want a name attached to the answer. Consumer works the same way underneath. The UGC programs that actually scale are not scaling the content, they are scaling the relationships. Sourcing creators, onboarding them, chasing the trial video, knowing which ones deliver and which ones ghost. If you're a company that has ever tried hiring offshore but it flopped, I'll help for free :)

We just placed two people with consumer apps in our portfolio thanks to our first program, the VA factory. Founders Arm has always been a filter. Applications come in faster than we can read them, and almost all of them get a no. That filter works. Really damn well. But it also throws away a lot of good people for one reason. Experience. Candidates who had the perfect english and culture fit, but just didn't have the skills to work with our clients. Luckily, skills are the only thing on the list you can actually learn in a short amount of time. khulud hassine and I had wanted to fix that for two years. It stayed an idea until we finally sat down together in Morocco this summer and put dates on it. Five weeks. Three instructors (including us) alongside Yousra Mehyaji from Cal AI, who taught marketing end to end. We made batch 1 extremely simple: Explain the concept, hand over a real task, then give honest feedback on what comes back. That turned out to be the whole answer, and we built the rest of the program around it. (Working with founders / Marketing / How to land a Role) Two graduates are now inside US consumer apps. Yousra is back for the next cohort in September, alongside more instructors and university partnerships across the region. If you're early in your career from the MENA region and want in, shoot me a DM. Excited to turn this into a core offering of Founders Arm over the next 10 years.