Underdog Founders - Jasmine turns down VCs and still builds a 30,000 strong global impact community
How do you beat industry benchmarks with no previous experience?
How do you build an impact community of 30,000 members?
As a kid, Jasmine felt the sting of domestic violence at home. She saw how vital it is to protect our essential human rights.
She studied law, to be able to jump in the trenches and fight for social justice.
The idea to start The Bloom came when she was an unpaid intern at the UN in 2018.
Making it to the United Nations was a dream come true.
She rejected paid positions, took out a loan, and moved to Switzerland.
During the first three months, she thrived at her job - the gamble paid off.
She saw how most people got there with the same motivation - to make a difference in the world - but also out of a lack of credible alternatives.
The UN is great, but if we want to tackle the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, talent needs to go downstream too.
Less PowerPoint, more frontline innovation.
Meeting regularly with impact leaders looking for talent, she felt compelled to close the gap.
Jasmine chose the newsletter format as her MVP - highly scalable, no upfront investment, perfect to test her thesis.
The Bloom was born.
A newsletter to connect talent looking to use their skills to do good with impact leaders ready to scale.
She signed up 20 of her closest friends without telling them, to surprise them and see their reaction.
Time flew by, and 20 friends back then grew daily until today’s 30,000 members.
Zero cents in paid marketing or growth hacks.
Her experience fundraising is useful for founders on the fence about VC.
“The highest stress period for us was when we were considering raising a 650k pre-seed to hire a full-time team.”
They were offered the full round in Nov 2022, but decided to turn it down.
Then they felt haunted by a natural VC question:
“What is the product that you’re really going to build?”
You see, macro disruptions affect Bloomers every year.
Jasmine wanted to meet their needs instead of sticking to a single product and obsessing about MRR.
She was only raising capital to be able to rely on a team to do things that she wasn’t good at.
Once the lack of fit became obvious, she realized that what she really needed was collaboration with like-minded talent, not VC capital.
She has since built a small team, and is set on the bootstrapped path.
Today, The Bloom has an insane open rate of 80% and CTR of 40%, about 4x industry average.
A different path led to different results.
They curated 10,000 job offers in the last two years, for job-seekers looking for purpose.
Follow Jasmine to see the journey unfold.
If you’re an impact employer looking for talent, contact her to get featured.
If you want an impactful career, subscribe and read Sunday’s newsletter here.
Underdog Founders 06 - Jasmine Anouna from The Bloom.
If you know underdog founders winning against all odds, we’d love to meet them.
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