Imagine it’s your first day at the company you’ve always wanted to work for. You’ve heard that your colleagues are great, the job is exciting, so you can’t wait to start. And your first assignment comes with no further ado: As you sit down, your boss hands you a several-hundred-page manual with all the company rules, codes and frameworks you need to familiarise yourself with before you start. Onboarding, he says, and skips off. Now imagine something completely different. You go to work and instead of a thick booklet, you are given a URL with the request to log onto to an online platform, and learn all about the company in the form of a social quiz game.
“People like to socialise,” Igor Cenar, co-founder and CEO of JollyDeck, told inventures.eu. “They also like empathy. If you package things in a way they can relate to, they’ll respond.”
JollyDeck is a B2B e-learning solution, which uses elements of social gaming, and allows managers to turn onboarding and sales training, among others, into a light and fun experience. Originally from Slovenia, the startup is now based both there and in London, as co-founders Cenar and Matija Hiti are entering the second two-month coaching session at the Wayra UK accelerator.
Work turned leisure
“The biggest companies usually have the biggest problems, as they do onboarding more or less on a weekly basis,” said Cenar. “Our goal is to make this process as painless as possible.” JollyDeck’s tools are designed for managers. Once they create a campaign, employers can upload any type of document – from WordDocs and PDFs to presentations and YouTube videos, and add questions at any point to test their employees. (Watch their promo video here).
“JollyDeck is nothing close to a working tool,” Cenar explained. “In fact, our statistics show that most people use it in their leisure time – during coffee breaks or in front of the TV.” Also, some 80% of all users join in voluntarily. The platform supports a leaderboard in real time, where employees themselves can see how they’re progressing compared to their colleagues. Every challenge, Cenar said, should come with a reward. As he demonstrated how JollyDeck works, he apologised shyly, “the backend is not very well developed yet. We know we had to focus on the frontend first, as that’s what matters most.” And they seem to be doing it right.
Onboard JollyDeck
Cenar and Hiti bootstrapped JollyDeck with the revenue from their previous companies – none of them is new to entrepreneurship, and officially launched it in November 2012. Since then, the core team of four have attracted one major paying customer – Petrol, the leading energy company in Slovenia, and have “more potential clients in the pipeline”.
“If we exclude the [40K] Wayra investment, our revenues at the moment are fairly low, however, our goal is to become profitable by this coming autumn,” said Cenar. “By then, we expect to be able to sustain both our Slovenian and UK teams.” The startup is currently active in the Balkans, and is expanding its network in the UK. On the agenda for the following months is also the rolling out of a JollyDeck mobile version, while in the long run, Cenar and his team are looking to reach out to sectors including training, insurance, automotive, mobile, and R&D. The priorities are set – stay tuned!
