Startups & scaleups
How Bling tripled its team in four months
A Berlin fintech startup grew 333% in four months — hiring two C-level executives and five operators through Join's free tier and A/B-tested job ads.
TL;DR
A Berlin fintech startup grew 333% in four months — hiring two C-level executives and five operators through Join's free tier and A/B-tested job ads.
Bling is a Berlin-based fintech founded in 2021 by Nils Feigenwinter at age 20. The product helps families manage finances together — but the founding story is also a hiring story: at four months into the build, the team was three people and the runway to product-market fit demanded a sprint from 3 to 10.
The Challenge
Three issues hit at once for an early-stage fintech:
- Competing for talent against established employers. As a 3-person startup, Bling was competing for the same engineers and operators that bigger fintechs were paying premiums for.
- Repeatable process didn’t exist yet. The first few hires had been founder-network sourced. The next seven would need a real funnel — and the team didn’t have one.
- Employer brand had to be built into every touchpoint. Without a known brand, every candidate’s first impression had to come from the job ad and the application experience itself.
The Solution
Bling adopted Join and turned the early hiring constraints into a structured process:
- Multiposting across LinkedIn and Indeed with consistent ad copy and matching employer brand.
- A/B-tested job descriptions — small variations in the opening lines and the “what you’ll do” section, measured by application volume and quality.
- Dedicated company sections in the application flow that surfaced the mission and the why-now without requiring the candidate to dig.
- Simplified application forms that cut drop-off at the apply step.
The combination meant every cycle of every role taught the team something about which framing worked.
The Results
In four months:
- Team grew from 3 to 10 — a 333% increase that included two C-level hires.
- 5 collaborators inside Join running the hiring process together — founders, operators, and the first hires evaluating the next ones.
- Repeatable funnel established — by the end of the sprint, the team had a working channel mix, a tested job-ad template, and a process that didn’t break under volume.
For a fintech racing to product-market fit, the real win is the speed of learning, not just the speed of hiring. Bling’s team came out of those four months with a hiring system, not just seven new colleagues.
