In August of 2017 I picked up the mobile phone, opened up LinkedIn and started scrolling through the newsfeed. We were still in the middle of one the worst downturns we had been through in my 26 years, of course this was pre-covid, little did we know.
As I scrolled through the newsfeed, I saw multiple job posts from recruiting companies, major oil and gas companies and even some smaller networks all advertising jobs. I thought, how could this be? We are in the middle of a downturn and all of these people are hiring, I soon realized what was actually happening with these posts and it was also happening across Facebook, Twitter and every job board that was out there.
It wasn’t that they were looking for active roles, they were preparing for the upturn, which basically never came and all of these people that had hopes of finding work that had been through the thousands of posts all were losing confidence in networks that used to give useful information and now they found themselves being the cattle for these networks instead of being useful, they were the opposite.
I opened up my Skype and sent my friend a long message about how frustrating it was seeing all of this and basically nothing that anyone was really doing about it.
We did something about it…
On November 28th, 2017, we launched Rig Lynx to a email campaign of 30k people…
If you don’t know what Rig Lynx is then let me catch you up to speed. Rig Lynx is a niche social media networking platform for people in the oil and gas industry, not only does it connect people you are commonly connected to on other platforms, but it came fresh out of the box with a true open network facilitator called OutLynx that allowed for a dual newsfeed, one of the first of its kind. It offers much of the same functionality as other networks, photo sharing, video sharing, inbox messages, newsfeed, ability to reach out to people you don’t know on a business playing field and connect. It is not Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram but it is unique as it is tailored suited and tooled up for oil and gas. It has a company listing of over 6,000 oil and gas services and a map full of pins. If you are in a location, you can pull up the map and locate services nearby that you may need.
We did not have thousands of followers on social media, big advertising budgets or a load of cash in the bank, we bootstrapped, found the right team and did it ourselves.
It took us months to gain attention or attraction to the application, in fact it took us almost a year to get our first 1,000 registered members, slowly but steadily we gained traction and membership.
On May 16, 2019 we signed our first office lease…
My 11-year-old and 14-year-old spent the week with me sorting out furniture getting things moved in and setup. To look at something that was a message on Skype to what it had come to at that point was something that was breathtaking for me, we talked about cost and at that time we were at a point where we wanted to jump or back up so we jumped.
On May 2020 we launched the Job Foundry which is a hub for people looking for work with its dual feature for the person looking for a job and the person looking for a candidate. Either way it is 100% dedicated to finding you work, if there is a job in there then as a person looking for a candidate you will be served up with suggested candidates, if you are looking for work there will be suggested jobs, vice versa.
November 28, 2020 was our 3-year anniversary…
We are now up to 4,161 registered members and will be launching a full suite of new tools and a facelift to the newsfeed with many new features by the beginning of quarter 2 2021. To say we are excited about our future would be an understatement.
Collectively we have over 350,000 readers and followers across our social media accounts, website and monthly newsletter and generate over 300k impressions monthly.
Kicking of our 3-year anniversary we are launching two new live digital series, Overtime with Ryan Ray and Talk The Tech, both of these are a contribution of the Rig Lynx team hard work and nonstop attitude to get you every possible tool to connect with people that can get you where you need to go.
We are moving at lightning speed and have just signed a partnership with two new clients, one we will be utilizing our Connected Community feature where we facilitate a tighter nit team across our application for the company’s employees, giving them tools to communicate more efficiently as a company and our other client is a long-term marketing and software development agreement.
Also, happy to say that we have no debt and are jumping hurdles getting to the next milestone which is allowing the tools that we used to be available to the public where we step in, take your social media accounts and start driving you traffic.
If there is one thing that this industry has taught me is that resilience is the way, even if it looks like it may break you, stay with it, keep inventing.
Happy 3 Years Rig Lynx!
Greg Williams has been in the oil and gas industry for 26 years, currently a Rig Manager, an Author and the founder of Rig Lynx, a digital media company where he works with bridging communication gaps, connecting people every day and creating killer content for clients around the world.
You can contact Greg for any other information about this article or just to have a chat by downloading Rig Lynx on your iOS or Android device and connecting with him today!
