Growth hacking. Robert's team realised blue collar workers in Vietnam were already finding jobs through Facebook groups, so they started buying up Facebook groups, consolidated them into bigger ones, became admins, and moved job postings into their proprietary app.
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Robert says the first version was a TikTok-style upskilling app that "no one really wanted" because they hadn't actually talked to customers. The breakthrough was going to where workers already were: "when we realized that actually a lot of the workers were already using tools like social media or silo groups to find jobs, we could actually go to where they were and we started to buy up Facebook groups." As admins of the consolidated groups they approved or denied job postings and moved them into Nook's app, while keeping the Facebook community as a way to keep their ears to the ground. That growth hacking is how they quickly grew active users to 50,000.