WorkBuddy

In an increasingly digital world of work, WorkBuddy is leading the way towards a transparent and authentic job search. Since founding the company, the committed founding team of Andreas Almer, Daniela Rückert, Victor Rabe and Mirko Schliemann has pursued one goal: to reshape the application process. With their innovative platform, WorkBuddy gives job seekers the chance to talk anonymously to a company's current employees and gain an honest picture of its culture. In this interview, you will find out more about how WorkBuddy came about, its mission and vision, and how the company is using beel to raise capital in a modern and transparent way.

When did you found the company?

We founded WorkBuddy on 6 May 2022 in Stuttgart. The founding team consists of Andreas Almer, Daniela Rückert, Victor Rabe and Mirko Schliemann. Between us, we bring extensive expertise in recruiting, IT and digital marketing. From the very beginning, our goal was to revolutionise the application process by creating more transparency and direct communication between job seekers and companies.

What kind of services or products do you offer?

WorkBuddy is a community-based platform that allows job seekers to speak anonymously with a company's current employees in order to get authentic insights into day-to-day working life and company culture. This direct, unfiltered information helps users make well-informed decisions about their applications and find the job that genuinely suits them. Our platform offers a native app for Android and iOS as well as a browser-based version, so users can communicate flexibly and conveniently across different channels.

What is your vision and mission?

Our mission is to bring more transparency and honesty into the application process. We want to give job seekers real insight into companies so they can make better decisions, while companies get to offer an authentic view of their culture. The aim is to find not just the ideal job, but the right cultural fit for the candidate. That creates a win-win situation, improving both the application process and long-term employee satisfaction.

Who is your target audience?

Our target audience is job seekers who are unsure whether to apply for a vacancy because they are missing essential information. Studies show that 53% of candidates do not apply because crucial details about company culture or job requirements are unclear or contradictory in the posting. On top of that, according to a study by Monster, 68% of job seekers want app-based communication, and 59% would like to speak directly with the relevant department.

WorkBuddy gives these job seekers exactly the information they need to decide with confidence whether to apply. Speaking directly with a company's employees means they can gain a real understanding of everyday working life and avoid misunderstandings. At the same time, it helps companies reach candidates who might not have applied without that transparency.

What does your roadmap look like?

WorkBuddy has been on the market since September 2023 and is designed as an intelligent job messenger solution. Alongside a native app for Android and Apple, our platform also offers a browser-based version. Users can choose freely whether to chat via the app or the browser, including asynchronously. For companies, we offer a comprehensive web-based solution with plenty of helpful features that make their working day more efficient.

Our roadmap includes features such as a user scoring system based on the feedback generated on the platform, as well as gamification elements to drive user engagement further. We also place great importance on data security and data protection. More personalisation features will follow soon, so that users can control their data and profiles even more closely.

In the medium term, we want to make WorkBuddy the leading platform for job searching — whether someone is looking for a specific role or simply wants to browse. Smart algorithms and user-centred customisation will make the application process even more personal and effective.

In the long term, we want to bring the fun factor back to job hunting. By developing the platform towards a more visual, interactive job search — including the possibilities of the 3D metaverse — we want to make looking for work a more enjoyable and more efficient experience. Our goal is to free the job search from its formal straitjacket and create a process that is relaxed, transparent and fast.

How did you come up with the idea for your product?

The idea for WorkBuddy grew out of the many years of experience Mirko and Daniela gathered as founders of Aloha Talents. Working as consultants, they kept seeing the same thing: talented people were often unsure whether to apply for a role because important information about the employer was either missing or contradictory. Thanks to their extensive network, they were able to connect those candidates directly with employees at the company in question — sometimes even from the specific team. That personal contact helped candidates resolve their doubts and decide to apply with far more conviction.

Because the service met with so much interest, Mirko and Daniela decided to build a digital solution that would give every job seeker access to similar insights, even without a large network or direct connections. And so WorkBuddy came about: a platform that gives job seekers the confidence to make well-informed decisions during the application process through direct contact with company insiders.

How did you hear about beel?

We had been discussing alternative funding options that would fit our vision for WorkBuddy better, together with the innovative blockchain startup Onino. Our core values — authenticity, digital transparency and equal opportunity — are themes that also play a central role in the Web3 and blockchain community. Together with Onino, we explored various approaches to tokenisation to work out how we could reflect those values in our funding model.

At this stage, we chose to tokenise our company, as it offers an innovative way to involve our community more closely in WorkBuddy's growth. In this field, beel is not only the leading provider but a pioneer, implementing the technology efficiently and in line with regulation. Working with beel allows us to live our values in how we raise capital too, while offering a modern, digital and transparent funding solution that makes investing accessible to a broad audience.

What made you choose this way of raising capital?

One of our co-founders, Mirko Schliemann, is not only a founder but also active as a business angel. That means he knows both the challenges that come with funding and how investors think and what they expect. WorkBuddy's business model is about making the job search simpler and more transparent for a great many people and building a critical mass of community. Traditional investors often struggle with models like that, however, because they invest larger sums and expect low risk in return. Many traditional investors are also not part of WorkBuddy's target audience, which makes it harder for them to put themselves in the position of the people applying for jobs.

WorkBuddy, by contrast, resonates most with the people who have been through the painful journey of the application process themselves and therefore immediately understand the value of the platform. That is why our funding campaign focuses on the community and on smaller investments from a broader group. It allows us to include people who have not only a financial but also an emotional interest in improving the way applications work.

What we particularly like about beel is the revolutionary idea behind it, which WorkBuddy also claims for itself: giving people a stake in a great idea and its commercial success, without a lot of formalities and in an innovative way. beel offers us exactly that. Through virtual shares, we can let our community members share in WorkBuddy's growth without any complications, and give them the chance to invest in our company — digitally, transparently and with an eye on the future.

How did your investors react to the introduction of GmbH tokens?

WorkBuddy has been entirely bootstrapped so far, and we have a strong partner at our side in Polygran, an innovative IT company acting as a company builder for our software development. Polygran supports us not only technologically but also strategically as we grow. The company has an open, forward-looking mindset that fits our vision perfectly. Igor Janz, Managing Director and founder of Polygran, backed our decision to go with beel's GmbH token solution from the outset.

His assessment: "The investment market is changing, and simply sticking to traditional forms of financing is no longer enough. You have to be open to new options. What beel offers is a huge opportunity — not just as an alternative, but as an important complement to the existing investor landscape."

Both the WorkBuddy and Polygran teams see the potential of tokenisation as a way to reach broader groups of investors. Introducing GmbH tokens allows WorkBuddy to mobilise not only classic venture capital but also its own community. That way, we can bring in people who have an interest in the company's success but have had no access to investments like this until now.