mycrowdspace: Building a Recruitment Marketplace from Zero
A two-sided B2B recruitment marketplace I co-founded and led as product founder in India. I owned P&L, pricing, product, and go-to-market from zero to one. It reached early traction, I eventually wound it down, and it taught me more about business judgment than almost anything else I have done.
- Role
- Co-founder and Product Lead. Owned P&L, pricing, product, and GTM.
- Market
- India, for Indian roles
- Timeframe
- 2016 to 2019
The idea
Recruiting is fragmented, and most recruiters are entrepreneurial people working inside agencies that cap what they can earn. mycrowdspace was a marketplace where independent recruiters competed to source the best local talent for enterprises and earned profit-sharing on every placement. Recruiters did what they do best, recruit, and the platform took care of everything else: sales, marketing, finance, account management, and compliance. For employers it was free to post a role, and they paid only when they hired.
I modelled it on the crowd platforms reshaping other industries at the time, the same logic as Uber and Airbnb applied to hiring, adapted for the Indian market.
What I owned, and the calls I made
As co-founder I owned the whole business, not a slice of it: P&L, pricing, product, and go-to-market. The hardest and most useful work was getting the supply side right.
I pivoted the model twice before landing on an insight I am still proud of. Stay-at-home mothers, many of them experienced professionals who had stepped out of the formal workforce, made excellent independent recruiters when given a flexible platform and a real share of the upside. It solved my supply problem and gave capable people meaningful work on their own terms. On the back of that, we reached 10 enterprise clients across 4 cities and a network of 20+ recruiters within the first year.
What happened, and what it taught me
The business reached early traction but not the scale or the unit economics it needed to sustain itself, and I made the call to wind it down rather than keep pouring effort into a model that would not stand on its own.
What I carry from it is concrete. I have owned a P&L and set pricing with real money on the line. I have lived the two-sided marketplace problem of balancing supply and demand. And I learned to tell the difference between early traction and a real business, which is a distinction a lot of people never have to make. That judgment is the reason I read a roadmap the way an owner does, and not only the way a builder does.
Building something and then having to end it teaches you which numbers are real. I read a business differently now, because I have owned the outcome, not just the roadmap.