Glintz

Chin-Un Luy's journey to building Glintz began with his own experience as a Singaporean student deeply embedded in Asia's academic-focused culture. For the first 12 years of his life, he followed the typical Asian student success formula: do well in school, move to a better school, get good grades. But by his early twenties, Luy realized the system didn't actually prepare young people to discover what they loved doing in their careers. He saw a fundamental gap: job portals and recruitment agencies assumed the right person was already out there, but no one was actually preparing talent to be job-ready. In late 2013, at just 20 years old, Luy decided to build the solution himself—despite never expecting to become an entrepreneur.

Luy brought an impressive skill set to the challenge. Before turning 20, he'd published 12 behavioral science research papers in tier-one conferences. He'd worked as Chief Branch Strategist at a corporate training firm, founded a Google Partner Agency, and led optimization modeling for Wells Fargo at Stanford. Glintz itself was positioned as a two-sided marketplace: on one side, young graduates and students seeking career guidance and job placement; on the other, employers looking to hire fresh talent. The business model was elegantly simple: students got free access to the platform, while employers paid flat fees ranging from $100 for basic job postings to $20,000 for customized recruitment campaigns that included employer branding, social media outreach, and campus engagement.

The early days were brutally honest. In their first full year (2013-2014), Glintz generated only $7,000 in revenue. Rather than pivot, Luy doubled down on the ground-up approach. He and his small team worked directly with student organizations and university groups, understanding their needs and supporting them. Word of mouth became their most powerful growth engine. As Luy explained, "when friends just tell friends to come on board to our platform, there's been the single biggest driver of our growth." Gradually, this grassroots approach caught the attention of university administrators, who began approaching Glintz about formal partnerships.

By late 2014, Luy had raised $500,000 in seed funding from 500 Startups and East Ventures—a priced equity round that gave the team breathing room to focus on building a real business rather than scraping for survival revenue. This funding proved transformative. From $7,000 in year one, revenue exploded to nearly $500,000 in 2015. The marketplace dynamics proved powerful: with an average employer paying $1,000 per campaign and 800 employers having hired through the platform by March 2016, the unit economics worked. On the talent side, students were getting placed in 3-4 weeks on average, with 2,500 students successfully placed into jobs within two and a half years. By March 2016 alone, Glintz placed 380 students and worked with 120 employers in a single month. What made this growth even more impressive: they were spending less than $1,000 per month on marketing. Luy's only regret was spending too freely after the seed round—a lesson he learned quickly about capital discipline.

By March 2016, Glintz had grown to 12 employees (up from 5 at the close of 2015) and was cash flow positive. The company was working with almost all major universities in Singapore on direct campus partnerships. Their month-over-month talent database growth hit 15%, driven almost entirely by word of mouth and university word-of-mouth networks. At just 23 years old, Luy had built a marketplace connecting employers with the fresh talent pool they desperately needed, all while maintaining lean operations and proving that the best growth comes not from paid ads, but from delivering genuine value to users.