Shaping Your Online Presence to Your Advantage with yourself.online
Xoogler.co Founder’s Stories: James Chance of yourself.online
We live in a time where anyone can draw a complete conclusion about a person’s professional and personal life based on what is available online. Therefore, a person’s online footprint is just as important to their professional opportunities as it is to their personal relationships. When James Chance was working in consumer data at Google, he noticed that many consumers were being assessed by companies based on what was available about them online. It became clear that each person’s online presence was becoming increasingly impactful.
“I saw this whole world of companies gathering this information and using it to assess people for jobs, credit, insurance, and more. Consumers’ old accounts and posts were affecting their opportunities today. My friends from business school were starting to see that people were not getting jobs because of their social media posts from 8 years ago when they were in college. My co-founder and I talked about it and realized this is a huge problem. The importance of people’s online legacy is out of control and a lot of times people don’t realize what they leave behind. Seeing this injustice is what made me want to start the company to help people understand what is out there and what they can do about it.” -James
Empowering People Through Social Media
yourself.online is on a mission to give its users the tools to manage their social media and online accounts so that they are empowered — rather than disadvantaged — by the information they share online. yourself.online does this by scanning a user’s social media and online information to find information that is potentially damaging or embarrassing. Then, yourself.online presents the user with a score and recommended actions. These actions are tailored to the goals of the user. A job seeker’s actions would help them create a job-friendly, professional persona. An athlete’s actions would help them create a persona that is friendly to teams, sponsors, and fans. Through these actions, the user can create an online persona that not only prevents negative impressions but also creates opportunities.
Getting yourself.online Off The Ground
James began working on yourself.online in 2018 while pursuing his MBA at London Business School. In 2019, James put a team together and based the company in Austin, Texas. He started working on the startup full-time, and the team launched a free beta product which grew to about 1,000 users. In April 2020, the team launched a paid product. Their go-to-market strategy involved selling directly to consumers and selling in bulk to companies, universities, and partnerships. Companies use yourself.online to create a better overall online image and universities use it to help their students land jobs and opportunities. Following this launch, yourself.online grew to over 7,000 paid customers. Many customers use the service multiple times.
Impact of the Pandemic
The uncertainty of 2020 has had a mixed effect on the startup’s growth. Since the world switched to working remotely, people became more aware that they would be searched online. Now more than ever, a good online image is important for first impressions to teams, companies, clients, and even dates.
“The pandemic has been interesting. People applying for jobs, graduating college, or entering the job market want to use this as a tool to help them get the job. We’ve seen a rise in people who are job seekers or professionals between jobs from the pandemic who are using the product. Also, people are more online and aware that they are going to get searched up more often. People are more conscious about maintaining a good online image.”
One challenge is that some conversations with companies and universities have been disrupted. Many companies and universities were focused on adjusting to the pandemic.
“When Covid hit, it brought a lot of conversations to a halt. A lot of companies are treading water still on new projects as they manage the transition back into in-person work”
A Proactive Tool to Shape Your Online Persona
In 2021, yourself.online looks to evolve into a proactive assistant that helps professionals shape their online presence into the right persona for what they are trying to do. This involves guidance and education for people to learn how to fully utilize their online presence.
“Our goal for 2021 is to build a product where we are helping customers clean up the past, and we want to help them build the future in terms of being active in the right places online and curating the right online persona. We want to give professionals advice on posts and communities they should be active in, so they can build the right online persona and right presence. That is the thing I am really excited about in 2021 is being this proactive assistant to help people effectively manage their online presence and make sure they are achieving what they want online since we are in this age where this is way more important now that everything is virtual. We want to build yourself.online into a brand that consumers trust and value. We want to be out there as the company that is there for customers to effectively manage their online persona and online life. And that is the goal. And scale up to millions of customers, that’s the dream.”
More About James Chance
James graduated from the University of Bristol in 2011 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He began his career at Accenture UK as an analyst and strategy consultant. James joined Google in 2016 as an analytical consultant, and left in 2017 to pursue an MBA at the London Business School.
Xoogler.co Founder Story Series
Xoogler.co hosted the Xoogler.co Demo Day USA on December 10, 2020, which featured 16 startups who pitched to over 100 investors. The startups were handpicked for the event, and they all have at least one ex-Google employee on the founding team. yourself.online was one of 16 startups that presented. Check out James’ presentation here.
Following the demo day, we sat down with several of the founders to learn their stories. The Xoogler.co Founder Stories Series looks to highlight the journey of each founder, share their learning experiences along the way, and showcase the exciting ideas each founder pursued after leaving Google. Be sure to follow us for upcoming Founder Stories! Read our most recent story below:
