We grew ~10x last year, and are now planning for the next 10x
Hey folks! We’ve recently done an internal impact assessment and thought it would be helpful to share its highlights. (Due to capacity constraints, we opted to share the current post rather than wait for a longer and more polished one, but we’re happy to answer questions.)
For context, our goal at Probably Good is to help people build careers that are good for them and for the world. We focus on getting the right people working on the right solutions to the right global problems, and also support people on other valuable paths to impact, like effective giving and community engagement.
The last ~1.5y have been exciting for us. In late 2024, we got an ambitious grant from CG to scale. Our co-founders (Omer & Sella, who built and led PG from the start) moved to our newly established board and, after an extensive search, selected a new Executive Director (Itamar, our former Head of Growth).
Since then, we’ve helped 85+ people transition to impactful careers, representing 17x growth compared to our previous evaluation period (with a few months still left). We’ve also helped 190+ people change their career plans, and 380+ people take 1,100+ positive career actions (like volunteering, donating, attending events, and acquiring new skills).
In terms of specific programs:
Advising. We decided to stop our previous program and restart it (almost) from scratch. We’ve since hired two advisors, set up a more robust advising system, and scaled to 500+ calls. We’re currently working on improving and expanding this program in a range of ways, including streamlining the advising process to increase our capacity and extending the types of support we provide to advisees.
Headhunting & workshops. We’ve experimented with both these programs, headhunting for 11 roles (sharing 240+ referrals) and running 18 workshops (with 380+ participants). Since both programs were being run by advisors on a very part-time basis, we’ve decided to pause them to focus on advising, though we think the ambitious versions of these programs are likely worth pursuing.
Job board. We’ve grown to 150k+ annual clicks on roles (38x growth compared to the previous period). Our initial focus was on increasing our coverage of impactful roles, but we recently also launched a new version of the board, to significantly improve functionality and facilitate further scaling. We’re now focusing on scaling again, although we’re also continuing to improve the board’s systems following its launch.
Content. After overhauling our key content, we’ve focused on scaling the newsletter since late last year, and have grown it 29x to 13k+ subscribers (while also growing our LinkedIn 20x to 9k+ followers). We plan to accelerate its scaling using both organic and paid channels, and are experimenting with new content, audiences, and platforms, among other things.
There are lots of nuances to all this, such as that we’re mindful to keep growth focused on increasing positive impact, and there’s also lots more we’ve done, like collaborations with 80K, CEA, AIM, and many other great orgs. But we think this should still give you a quick high-level overview of where we are and where we’re currently headed.
As always, please let us know if you have any comments, suggestions, or questions! We’re excited for what comes next, and your feedback could help us figure out the best path forward.
Hi! Congratulations on the growth. A few questions from a fairly interested outside observer:
1. How do you think about counterfactual impact? It seems quite difficult to separate outcomes that would likely have happened anyway from outcomes meaningfully attributable to your interventions, particularly in a tough market. I don’t expect that’s fully solvable, but I’m curious about what methods or heuristics you use.
2. What do you see as the main differences between Probably Good and other career advisory organisations/services such as 80,000 Hours or High Impact Professionals? Where do you think your comparative advantage is emerging?
3. You mention an extensive search before selecting an internal hire for the ED role. Roughly how many applicants were involved, and how much staff time did the process consume overall? I’m generally sympathetic to internal hires/closed rounds in most cases because of the potential time/cost savings, but I’d be interested to better understand the level of those potential savings in practice.
Thanks for sharing, I’d definitely be interested in reading a longer retrospective at some point.
Thanks, Siobhan!
We try to assess this type of counterfactual causal attribution through several approaches, including asking people how likely they were to make career changes without our services, looking at other information they provide (like qualitative notes they share), and looking at other information we have on them (like which of our services they used). This is very much a work in progress though.
Mainly, being broader in who we can help and with what, in terms of causes we touch on, audiences we engage, and services we provide. As one example, this sometimes involves doing 1:1 advising with people who are interested in career impact and want a broad perspective across a range of causes, including ones that are underrepresented by other orgs (though we might then refer them to a specialist org). As another example, this involves aiming to offer a broader range of impactful roles on our job board than other organizations might.
(Answering this question from a generalizable hiring perspective, which seems more helpful and appropriate here, though note there’s significant variances across orgs and roles.) While internal rounds sometimes make sense, that’s not the case for a tiny org with only 1-2 potential hires. Closed rounds can also make sense sometimes, but only when you’re confident you’ll get the right candidate pool from this, given how important and hard it is to get hiring right (particularly for a small org, and even more so for a leadership role). The time savings aren’t necessarily great either, since many hiring costs are fixed (e.g., the time it takes to create a job description), and many of the seemingly marginal costs are actually fixed too (e.g., the time it takes to do interviews, if you have a cap for the number of interviews you can do).
Thank you for being the way FarmKind’s first hire found out about us! They’re excellent
That’s awesome to hear, thank you for letting us know!
How can I refer a candidate to you?
Hi Robi, thanks for asking. Assuming you mean referring someone to our 1:1 advising, the best thing to do is just send them the link and ask that they mention your name in the application (there’s a “From which friend, organization, or other source did you hear about us?” question). I’ll keep an eye out for your name in the applications. And we’re always happy to get more high-quality referrals, so thanks!