Last year, around January 2025, I made a promise to myself. I decided I was going to start sitting down in front of a camera at the end of every single quarter to record a diary update.
The goal wasn’t to go viral or become the next big recruitment influencer. If it was I’d be pretty disappointed with the numbers, those videos usually only get about 150 views a time. But getting thousands of views was never the point. A massive part of the plan behind Giig Hire has always been about building in public. We want to give you, the user base, the agency owners, and the solo founders complete insight and access to the people who are actually building the software you‘ve decided to run your business on.
We want you to know how we are getting on, how we are tracking, what we are struggling with, and ultimately, what is coming further down the track. When you buy into a bootstrapped tech company, you aren’t just buying the code; you are buying into the team behind it.
So, with the first quarter of 2026 officially in the rearview, I wanted to put everything down on paper. Here is exactly how Q1 went for us, what we delivered, the things we had to fix, and where we are taking the platform next Q.
Let’s start with the growth. If you compare where we are sitting right now at the end of Q1 2026 to where we were this time last year, we are officially 170% up.
As part of that 170% growth, we have just crossed a massive milestone: we now have over 300 different recruitment agencies actively paying for and utilising the Giig platform.
Now, I know exactly what some people might be thinking. Compared to the big dog ATS and CRM systems out there, 300 agencies might sound like a drop in the ocean. But for us? We are a small, tight-knit team bootstrapping our way to competing with these systems. Hitting that 300 mark feels like a step in the right direction. I definitely would have taken it, if you had offered it to me when we first launched this thing back in 2023. It feels like validation that the market actually wants an alternative to the clunky, overpriced software that has dominated the industry for years.
Tying in nicely with that milestone, we have seen a massive surge in the type of agencies moving over to us. Over the last three months, we’ve seen a huge spike in agencies within the 3-to-5 consultant bracket, and increasingly, the 7-to-9 consultant bracket as well. Agencies with up to 20 consultants are now running their desks on Giig.
But honestly? While the revenue and the paid user growth are great, there is another number that I am also chuffed with.
When we first entered the ATS and CRM space, our singular focus was to support solo founders. We wanted to build a completely free recruitment system for the recruiter who was just stepping out on their own, trying to build a desk without crippling overheads. We built a Free Forever system where you don’t even need to hand over your credit card details to get started.
That is still live today.
At the end of Q1 last year, we had about 800 solo recruiters globally running their business on that free tier. Today, that number has jumped to nearly 1,400.
We have seen an almost 100% increase in the number of recruiters utilising our free system, building their pipelines, and making placements without paying us a single penny. Seeing the paid tier grow is fantastic for the business, but seeing that we are still delivering that core, fundamental value to the people who are just starting out?
That proves we haven’t lost sight of why we built this platform in the first place.
When I look back at the videos I was doing a year ago, it felt like I was sat in front of the camera rattling off ten different features every time.
This quarter, the volume of individual feature releases might look a bit smaller, but that is because the features we are tackling now are significantly more complex. They take more time to engineer, but they add a disproportionate amount of value to you as the end user.
Here are the three biggies we shipped in Q1.
If I wear my heart on my sleeve, one of the biggest gripes I had when I looked at our platform as a founder was the lack of reporting. I always thought Giig was a great little system, but if there isn’t a way for an agency owner to track the activity of their staff and the consultants working in the business, that is a fundamental flaw.
But when we built this, we didn’t want to build a corporate “Quarterly Business Review” dashboard. We all know the type the ones built for micromanagers obsessed with pointless KPIs that don’t actually move the needle.
We built a survival sheet. A place where you can sit down, take a hard look at the data, and figure out what is actually happening on your desk.
The new reporting feature gives you the raw, unfiltered numbers on your outreach. You can see exactly how many calls, emails, and meetings have been booked by anyone using the platform. You can see the leads added, how many of those converted into live jobs, and your exact conversion ratios. And crucially, it tracks the delivery: candidates submitted, interviews booked, hires made, and the actual revenue generated.
It also includes a leaderboard. You can organise your team by whoever is driving the most interviews, making the most calls, or bringing in the highest revenue, so you can clearly see who is pulling their weight from top to bottom.
But raw numbers only tell half the story. It is one thing to see that a consultant made 100 calls this week, but if 90 of those calls were just logging “didn’t pick up,” that isn’t driving the business forward. So, we built in the ability to drill down. With one click, you can expand any table and see the exact notes attached to those calls, emails, and meetings. You can audit the quality of the activity, not just the volume. I genuinely believe this reporting suite is the main reason we are seeing that surge in the 3-to-5 and 7-to-9 person agencies.
I will hold my hands up on this one. Our Chrome Extension, which is essentially a little widget that sits in your browser and lets you pull candidates and clients straight into your CRM is by far one of our most popular features.
But it had gone stale. It had become buggy. People were complaining about it, and rightly so. If you rely on a tool to source candidates, you need it to work flawlessly. It was one of the biggest burdens of Q1 for our team, so we made the call to completely pull the thing down, rip it apart, and re-engineer it from scratch.
It is now significantly better than it ever was.
The old version used to work almost exclusively on standard LinkedIn. If you were paying a fortune for LinkedIn Premium, Sales Navigator, or LinkedIn Recruiter, the extension would struggle. Now? It works across all of them.
But we didn’t stop there. You can now use it practically anywhere on the internet. If you are on a potential client’s website, you can click the extension to extract their company info and pull them straight into your database as a lead. If you are on job boards like Indeed, CV Library, or Total Jobs looking at the candidate database, you can pull those profiles in. If you see a live vacancy online that you want to target, you can drag that straight into Giig as a live job.
It is a simple, one-click extraction that actually works exactly where you need it to.
We are incredibly open about the fact that the data you put into Giig is your data, and protecting it is our highest priority. As a solo founder or small agency owner, your CRM is a goldmine of highly sensitive information. It is your entire livelihood. If a hacker gets in and wipes your data, you lose your pipeline, your future deals, and your business takes a massive hit.
On top of that, if you are looking to win large enterprise clients, they are going to put your business under the microscope. If you cannot prove your data is locked down, those big corporate clients won’t even engage with you.
That is why we launched Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) across every single package we offer. Whether you are on the Free plan, Giig Starter, or Giig Plus, you can head into your security settings, scan the QR code with Google or Microsoft Authenticator, and lock your account down. It takes two minutes to set up, but it ensures that even if someone manages to get ahold of your password, they are going to hit a brick wall at the 2FA stage.
So, that is what is currently live. But we aren’t slowing down. Looking ahead to the second quarter of 2026, here is exactly what we’re going to be focusing on.
This is the big one. The most frequent request we get from growing agencies is the ability to connect other tools directly into Giig.
We are currently working on a job board multi-poster so you can distribute your adverts natively. Alongside that, we have a lineup of tools we are looking to integrate, including data enrichment platforms, sourcing tools, website builders, and VoIP phone systems.
The goal is to ensure that when you are working inside Giig, everything communicates smoothly. If you make a call on your VoIP system, we want it logging in the CRM. If you find a candidate via a sourcing tool, we want it flowing directly into your database.
I will be totally transparent: integrations are a beast. This isn’t something we are going to finish in a few weeks. This is a longer-term project that will drag through Q2, Q3, and likely Q4 as we continuously add new connection partners to the platform over time.
Ever since we moved into the ATS and CRM space nearly four years ago, we have been continuously building out our Giig Plus tier. This quarter, our goal is to finally box it off, finalise the feature set, and put a bow on it before we move our attention to the next major package.
To finish it off, we are tackling three major updates:
I want to be completely upfront about this. When we launched the Giig Plus package three or four years ago, we priced it at £40 per user, per month (or $52). In all that time, as we have added massive features, reporting suites, and rebuilt extensions, we have never once touched that price.
To allow us to keep building at this pace, we are going to be implementing a small price increase this summer (around July/August).
We are only lifting it by £5, taking it from £40 to £45 per user, per month. We have always prided ourselves on providing an affordable solution, and even at £45, we are staying true to that. We don’t intend to hike prices yearly like I said, it took us four years to make our first adjustment.
However, we want to look after the agencies that have been supporting us on this journey. If you are an existing user and you want to lock in your current £40 rate for another 12 months, we are giving you the option to pay for the year upfront before the increase hits.
That’s your raw insight of where Giig Hire stands today. We are growing, we are serving more solo founders than we ever thought possible, and we are fixing the things that break along the way.
I’ll be back again in a couple of months to share the highs and lows of Q2, update you on the integration progress, and start talking about our plans for Q3 which, if everything goes to plan, will finally include the sequencing and automation features everyone has been asking for.
Until then, get your 2FA turned on, test out the new reporting dashboard, and let’s keep getting after it.
