Portland entrepreneur Brian Forrester is back with a new startup. This one is aimed at helping companies translate text job postings to visual video postings that appeal online and on social media.
The new company is called Lumina, and Forrester can already see that it is on a very different trajectory to his last company, BuddyUp, which he started in college and eventually wound down. We documented that story in 2018.
“I didn’t really understand product market fit the first time around until I experienced it firsthand,” he said. “It should feel like a current pulling you in. I thought people taking meetings or writing checks was product market fit. It wasn’t until I felt the pull where I realized that I hadn’t had it before but I have it now.”
Lumina was started in 2019. It’s a mostly automated platform that takes information from a text-based job listing and turns it into a short video. From a user perspective it is as simple as logging into a dashboard and pasting in a job URL from a careers page.
The video is created using software that is then quality-checked by a person. The process takes what was a manual filming process and cuts it from days or weeks to a few hours, said Forrester. The product isn’t generative AI — the buzzy tech behind tools like ChatGPT or DALL-E — but is AI-adjacent.
The company does plan to take advantage of AI integrations as it develops its platform further.
Lumina has about 50 subscribers, and customers include FedEx, Amazon and Banfield Pet Hospital. It has a large percentage of customers in health care, Forrester said.
The company is generating significant revenue, and has hit the $1 million annual recurring revenue mark. It has a full-time team of four plus three regular contractors.
Customers are reporting huge bumps in applications once they start using videos, Forrester said. One health care customer saw its apply rate more than double and a staffing agency saw applications from social media jump 30%.
Layoffs at big tech companies are dominating headlines, but the jobs picture is broader than that. Some tech and IT interest has waned but Lumina is seeing increasing demand in other areas like health care and retail that are still seeing tight talent markets.
Rebound from failed startup
Following the demise of his first startup BuddyUp, Forrester went to work at nurse staffing startup NurseGrid. It was there that he got a feel for the needs for modern talent acquisition. Forrester was ready to start something new and by the end of 2019 he thought something in the talent acquisition world would be a good place to start.
“I had a (note)book of ideas and things to build. When I set out I was looking for something at the intersection of extremely scalable and feasible to test,” he said. “This concept met those.”
He zeroed in on an idea and then started talking to potential users to get feedback to develop the concept. To start he was producing videos manually, but once it became clear that customers wanted more than what he could produce he set out to build the product.
He teamed with fellow Portland entrepreneur and technologist Huston Hedinger, who came on as the founding CTO for two years. Hedinger built the product and hired the first engineering team. That initial code base is still used.
Hedinger’s family investment company, The Hedinger Group, is also an early backer of the company.
To date, Lumina has raised $1.2 million from angel investors and family offices. Forrester does not plan on pursuing venture capital investment.
Instead, he is looking toward strategic partners to help grow. This could be through an investment from a company in the hiring or talent space, an acquisition or private equity looking to build a category leader. He expects an event along one of those lines to happen this year.
“BuddyUp was a project that turned into a product that we tried to build a company around. Lumina is a company that we built with the product simultaneously,” Forrester said. “We focused on the market first instead of (focusing on) a cool idea and then building a thing around it. This is a more pragmatic and methodical approach.”
“This is the opposite of what I did the first time,” he added.
