Plai Success Story - How is it Making People and Performance Management Easy?
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Performance reviews (aka performance appraisal, or employee evaluation) is a process to evaluate the employee's job performance during a particular period of time and has been proven to be much of worth. Monitoring the employee performances, obtaining the reviews of the employees, and working on them is integral to a company regardless of the place or the industry that it belongs from. Staying in a loop of continuous feedback process not helps people feel valued, engaged, empowered, and encouraged to grow, it also helps them fairly evaluated and compensated, which in turn, helps the company grow, while retaining the best of the workforce.
When done right, one-on-one meetings and collaborations, aligning teams with OKRs, 360-degree feedback and reviews, appraisals, feedbacks, and appraisals provide endless benefits for the company along with making the team stronger and helping the management build better relationships with the team members. All of them and more are now offered by Plai, which helps entrepreneurs, business leaders, and managers encourage healthy and happy offices.
Plai is a people and performance management software for forward-thinking companies. Read this article to know about Plai, how Plai works, services, products, founders, business model, logo, plai coupon code, plai promo code, revenue, funding, investors, plain logo, startup launch, growth, advisors and mentors, growth, achievements and more.
Plai - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | Plai |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Los Angeles, USA |
| Sector | Performance Management Software, HR Tech |
| Founders | Andriy Bas (CEO), Sasha Chepurnoi (CTO), Oleh Kryvytskyi (Product Designer) |
| Founded | 2019 |
| Parent Organization | Plai Team Inc. |
| Contact | hello@plai.team |
About Plai and How it Works?
Plai - Target Market Size
How was Plai Started?
Founders of Plai and team
Plai - Name, Tagline, and Logo
Plai - Business Model and Revenue Model
Plai - Startup Launch
Plai - Startup Challenges
Plai - Growth
Plai - Funding and Investors
Plai - Advisors and Mentors
Plai - Recognition and Achievements
Yash Gupta
About Plai and How it Works
Plai is a simplified performance management software. It helps early-stage companies grow and create high-performing teams with OKRs, performance/360° reviews, real-time feedback and recognition, weekly 1:1s, and check-ins. The company is on a mission to help organizations align, stay in sync, and perform better together.
Plai is free and easier to use than spreadsheets. Compared to complex enterprise solutions, teams adopt Plai from day one and employees are willing to use it. Customers say that Plai is “just the perfect match of features to roll out OKRs and reviews in the organization”.
The combination of the feature set, the pricing, and monthly billing makes Plai ideal for early-stage companies. The startup's goal is to build Workday for SMB.
Features of Plai Products and Services
Some of the main features and services offered by Plai are:
OKRs - Monitor your team and focus on them with effective Objectives and Key Results as offered by Plai.
One-on-ones - Get to better maintain your team with the facilities of conducting one-to-one meetings.
Reviews - Conduct prompt and hassle-free 360-degree feedback and reviews for and from the employees.
Praise - Indulge in rewarding and praising your employee well to build a promising workforce.
Feedback - Provide constructive feedback regularly to the employees to watch your team grow.
Integrations - Maximise employee engagement with effective notifications and tips directly from the Slack and MS Teams. Â
Plai - Target Market Size
Grand View Research previously estimate that the HR Management Software market was worth $14.68 Bn in 2018, and Employee Collaboration, Engagement, and Talent Management (our field) - is $2.44 B. This market is expected to grow 11% annually by 2035.
Exclusive for our readers: Use the promo code "plai-startuptalky-15" to get a 15% discount for the first year for Plai Pro subscription. Email at hello@plai.team to redeem the code for your workspace.
How was Plai Started?
While working at their previous company (Uptech), founders Andriy Bas, Sasha Chepurnoi, and Oleh Kryvytskyi faced the need to align the team around common goals (OKRs), share feedback, conduct performance reviews, etc. They didn't find any suitable solutions to meet their needs. Almost all performance management software is designed for enterprises (with annual contracts) and is too complicated and too expensive for smaller companies. And most importantly - employees don't use them unless forced to.
So, Andriy, Sasha, and Oleh bootstrapped a solution for their needs with the combination of Google Docs/Spreadsheets/Notion. And this gave them the idea for Plai. They did some research, and over 20+ companies confirmed their hypothesis. Most early-stage companies have similar problems with performance management and struggle the way the co-founders did.
Andriy, Sasha, and Oleh quickly created a landing page and launched it in 2 weeks. They posted about it on social, BetaList, BetaPage. After receiving positive feedback and 500+ beta sign-ups, they started working on the solution.
Rishabh Rathi
Founders of Plai and team
Andriy Bas (CEO), Sasha Chepurnoi (CTO), and Oleh Kryvytskyi (Product Designer) are co-founders of Plai.
Andriy and Sasha worked on multiple projects at work together and have known each other since 2016. Oleh also worked in the same company as Andriy and Sasha since 2018, and they all 3 worked on several projects.
Andriy Bas
Andriy is a Bachelor of Science graduate from the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. He has been the CEO of Plai since July 2019. Starting as a Lifeguard at Kalahari Resorts & Conventions, Andriy has served numerous designations like Software Engineer and Senior iOS/Android Developer at many different companies like Netspace, Explain Inc. and Softermii. Bas has also been the Cofounder and Team Lead of Uptech. He was then the Co-founder and CPO of Teamroom, after which he founded Plai. Andri is currently also the Cofounder of No Code, No Problem. Â Â Â
Sasha Chepurnoi
Sasha has a Master's degree in ML and is currently operating as the CTO at Plai. He is also a part-time, backend engineer at Uptech. Â He was also a student at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Sasha was earlier a professional soccer player, who started off his career on the field, but unfortunately had to leave the sport after a serious injury that he suffered.
Oleh Kryvytskyi
Oleh is the Cofounder and Product Designer at Plai. He was previously the UX/UI designer at Uptech, where he worked with Andriy. Â
They're a small team, and it's kind of easy to split the responsibilities. Andriy is the CEO, defines the product vision, and does partly sales/marketing. Oleh is responsible for the product and the UI. Sasha is responsible for the technical implementation, the tech stack, stability, and availability of Plai.
There are somewhere between 11-50 employees of Plai as per its Linkedin profile. The team members are all based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Work sometimes from the office, sometimes remotely.
Plai - Name, Tagline, and Logo
Plai means "path" in Ukrainian.
"We believe that Plai is a path forward for small teams to become successful companies. We didn't argue much about the name, nor did we have long meetings to agree on the name. It was one of the options that we came up with initially, it was short and concise, there was no much competition on the internet for this short name, all the team liked it, so we adopted it from the beginning", says Andriy Bas, CEO of Plai, about the selection of the name.
Plai - Business Model and Revenue Model
Plai offers a freemium business model (like Slack). Customers can use the Free package which includes OKRs, teams, Dashboard, and Slack integrations. Pro plan (that includes 1:1s, reviews, praise, feedback) — is a monthly user-based subscription for $7/user/month. Here's a look at all the available subscription packages for Plai:
- Free - $0 | Supports up to 5 users
- Starter - $55 | Supports up to 30 users
- Pro - $4 / user per month | Supports unlimited users
- Enterprise - Custom pricing
Rishabh Rathi
Plai - Startup Launch
Plai launched the landing page in July 2019 before any product development. By promoting the product idea on BetaList/BetaPage websites and social media, the team collected over 500 beta sign-ups. These were the original users. Then, as they started working on the product, they were writing regular blog posts, and the traffic was also attracting subscribers and early users.
That way, by the time the startup launched in October 2019, it had over 2000 email lists to notify. These were the users of the free version of the product. By March 2020, when Plai launched the Pro version of the product, it managed to convert 5 users to paying subscribers. And have been growing almost 50% month-over-month in MRR ever since.
Plai - Startup Challenges
One of the first major challenges — was to identify what exactly customers need, and thus how the product should look like. To understand that — the founders launched very fast, gave their product in the hands of users, and asked for feedback. Based on that, they iterated many times and every time gave a better and better understanding of what the customers needed.
For example, the team initially planned to build the "Reviews" feature last. But customers were asking for this feature almost immediately and were willing to pay for it. Thus, Plai prioritized it and delivered it much faster than it initially planned to.
Rishabh Rathi
Plai - Growth
Plai started in 2019 and has come a long way now in terms of popularity and user acquisitions. The user base of Plai boasts of 300+ companies that are using Plai software and services. The one thing that has supported PLai all the way is its freemium model, which gives the users a chance to explore the software and see what difference it makes for free. Â
The users are from almost all countries in the world. In total, they have over 5,000 registered users. In terms of MRR, the startup is growing almost 50% since March 2020 (when launched the paying plan).
"We plan to attract 100 paying customers by the end of the year 2020. Our long-term goal is to be #1 People and Performance management solution for small and medium companies all over the world", says CEO Andriy Bas about future plans.
Plai - Funding and Investors
Plai didn't raise any external funding and is self-funded for now. It is going the bootstrap style.
Plai - Advisors and Mentors
The company doesn't have any formal advisors or mentors. However, many of the co-founders' friends share their valuable advice and suggestions.
Plai - Recognition and Achievements
- Plai became a winner and takes part in the online accelerator Pioneer.app.
- Also, Plai was invited to the final stage of the YC Winter 2020 batch, for the on-site interview in Mountain View. But they were not invited to the batch.
FAQs
What is Plai?
Plai is a people and performance management software that helps companies and individuals track and monitor the performance of the employees, smoothen the workflow and empower and acknowledge the employees to help better the work culture.
Who are the founders of Plai?
The Plai founders are Andriy Bas (CEO), Sasha Chepurnoi (CTO), Oleh Kryvytskyi (Product Designer).
How many employees work with Plai?
Plai has around 11-50 employees working with it now. Â Â
When was Plai founded?
Plai was founded in 2019.
Where are the Plai headquarters?
Plai headquarters are located in Los Angeles, USA.
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