What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of,
so the rest of us can do the same. I'm here with Chris Bucky, the founder of Lasky.com
and also the founder of Interviewed. Chris, welcome to the show.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
You popped on my radar basically a month ago, maybe a few weeks ago. You did an AMA on IndieHackers,
and the title of it was, built my last company to two and a half million dollars in annual
recurring revenue, became profitable in two and a half years, and sold it for mid eight
figures, which you clarified to be around $50 million. And then you said, and going
even bigger this time, ask me anything. First of all, how do you sell a company that's making
two and a half million dollars for $50 million?
I think that there's a lot that goes into that. I mean, I think clearly it has to be
some sort of strategic initiative by the acquirer. I mean, there's many ways to get to those
multiples. I think sometimes if revenue is growing crazy fast, you can get there. If
it's a really hard market, you can get there. I don't think either was necessarily true
for us. I mean, revenue obviously grew fairly quickly to get to two and a half, three million
and about two and a half years from zero. But it wasn't one of these stories you hear
companies today occasionally who are just growing it, like they're doubling revenue
month over month or whatever. That was never the case for us. It always kind of felt like
when we were in it, it felt like a slow and steady grind growing 10, 20% month over month
in a lot of cases, and it just compounds quickly. If you don't have a churn issue, stuff like
that. But in terms of the acquisition and the outcome, it's a long story and happy to
go into it. But indeed, it was actually one of our early investors. They then became a
customer and then they became our acquirer. And so it was really almost from day one,
I think over two years of getting to know the team, working with them. And it just so
happened that that business, which was running non-technical assessments. So as all of these
technical assessment companies, HackerRank and whatnot, were coming up, we saw an opportunity
in 2015 when we started interviewed to say, all sorts of people applying for entry level
customer support, sales, financial analyst positions, operations positions. And right
now those interviews mostly suck because the interviewer doesn't know what he or she is
doing. They're untrained. They don't know what questions to ask. And so if we can put
some structure on this interview and make it a really good experience for both the candidate
and the team, the recruiter, the hiring manager to interviewing, then we can sell this product
into big companies. And that was an area, I think, certainly that indeed, and a lot
of other job boards were all trying to figure out around 2017, 2018.
Cool. So we'll definitely go into that story. I want to ask another question that came up
during the AMA. This is my question. You sell your company for $50 million. That's a huge
amount of money. And obviously you didn't get like 100% of that. You had a moderate
amount of investment. You may have had equity that had gone to other founders or employees,
but it's still probably a life changing amount of money. Why are you going even bigger this
time? What's motivating you to like, you know, throw your hat in the ring and start another
company and go through the pain and the challenge and all the time and heartache that goes into
building another big company?
I don't know what else I would be doing is the first thing. It is challenging. It is
definitely painful. I respect founders who have done companies many times, whether they
turn out to be successful or not, because the first year, the first couple of years,
I think in every case, it's just it's always a grind starting from zero. And so I enjoy
it for the most part. I think that, you know, I've worked at larger companies, indeed was
about 12,000 people. I worked at Zillow around the time at the IPO. And I've worked at the
handful of really, really small companies. And I enjoy aspects of both. I think the chaos
I first and foremost, like I thrive in. I like working with friends. So working with
like a small group of people who now I've actually worked with this small group of people
for about nine years, my co-founder and I have worked together for three companies.
And so I really like working with Daniel. He's a great co-founder. He's a great friend.
We get along, we have very different interests and personalities, and we split up work, I
think, well between the two of us. We're a lot of things that would probably be big co-founder
fights just sort of go unsaid between us. So that part makes it easy. It's almost like,
at this point, I don't have to worry about the co-founder fit. We're just simply worried
about like the product fit, market fit, stuff like that. I loved making money for our investors.
Many of them are angels who I think in actually like three cases that interviewed, we were
three different angels, very first angel investment ever. That turned out super great for them
and for their families and for our team's families. And so even with a small amount
of money going to early team members, it can definitely be life changing for them as well.
Whether that's buying their dream condo or house or putting their kids in better schools,
buying the right car, many people ended up moving after the acquisition.
I like that you mentioned that you've got a co-founder who you've worked with on three
different companies. And like that whole part of your business is de-risked. And you actually
have like the squad of like, I think you said nine people, you guys work together and you
work really well together. And I think this is something that people underestimate the
importance of, which is that your company, your job, whatever you start in life, that's
a project that's going to suck up eight, nine, 10 hours a day, is a huge chunk of your life.
And a huge part of that is the people you spend that time with. And like you don't want
to put that on the back burner and like have that be the second or third thing you think
about. Like that should be almost the first thing you think about. Who are you actually
going to work with? It's kind of like, like I'm moving into a new apartment, as you can
see behind me. And it's like, well, where am I going to spend most of my time at my
desk? And so I got like a really nice desk and I bought a really nice chair to sit in,
because I don't want to skimp on those things. My bed, so I bought like a really nice mattress
that's like folded up in the other room. And then like at work, it's like the people that
I talk to. And so I want to make sure that I'm working with really good people. And I
think that's, you know, I'm not sure how you were able to find like this awesome squad
that you really get along with. But I think more people would benefit from thinking about
that being like an essential part of how they structure their business.
Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. Yeah. In terms of like how we met and how we kind of fell
into this, we were, we were all employees at the same company many years ago. And so
almost nine, 10 years ago, we were all employees at a company that had gone through YC in 2012,
pulled 42 floors. And I was an early employee, Daniel, my co-founder was an early employee.
And we were never like told to work together. I think a lot of it was just like, you know,
kind of cultural, like friendly gravitation toward one another. I at the time was sort
of running operations. He was a product guy. And so we were never actually working all
that closely, deliberately on stuff. Or at least in terms of like our OK, ours and stuff,
I think it was just, we ended up getting along and we were able to chop up work really effectively
between the two of us. And so it was nice being able to rely on somebody to handle just
a lot of the stuff that I didn't enjoy doing. And sort of like finding that sort of genius
for both of us has been really, really powerful over the last decade.
Yeah, I worked with my brother on Andy Hackers. And it's funny that we're twins. And we just
grew up basically always doing the opposite things. Like he was super good at sports.
He's an athletic freak. He's like five foot nine. He could dunk a basketball. Like he
jumps and it's just like he keeps floating up and up and up to the air. Like, I'm never
going to be that athletic. So I'm like, all right, I'm gonna be good at school, you know,
and then he just didn't try his heart at school because like, I was super good at it. And
so as kids, we were very different in every way because like, we just wanted to define
our own selves the way we could. And now we work on Andy Hackers. And it's kind of the
same thing. Like the things that I work on, he's like, Oh, I'm not gonna do that. Like,
I'm not gonna be as good of a software engineer as you. So like, I'm gonna work on the newsletter,
etc, etc. And then we just don't really butt heads. We don't have, you know, co-founders
squabbles or fights because we're just not doing the same things. And we're both super
proud to work on kind of our own areas of expertise. As a solo founder, it doesn't matter
what you're good at, what you're not good at, you kind of have to do all of it. And
a lot of people like just never really get over that hurdle. You know, I was talking
to somebody in the podcast a few weeks ago. And what he did was basically he would alternate
he would do one week of software development, and then one week of marketing, one week of
software development, one week of marketing. And like, that was the only way he could motivate
himself to do marketing because he hated it. And if you have a co founder, and ideally
you've divided up your responsibilities, well, like you don't have to have like these kind
of tricks, or strategies, like, it just kind of works. And it feels super easy. And I'm
sure you feel super grateful for the other person who's doing all these other things
that like, you don't even want to do, you know, it doesn't even feel like work to them.
But it does to you. The other thing you mentioned was that you are a hardcore capitalist, as
am I, we're on the Andy hackers podcast, it's all about building businesses and making money.
I want to talk to you about this a little bit, because I just feel like capitalism has
gotten such a bad rap in recent years. And I can kind of see, I have my own theories
for why that is, but I'm curious what your thoughts are, if you don't mind going into
it. But I think any system has its positives, and its negatives. capitalism clearly has
issues, there's clearly negative incentives that cause people to do all sorts of horrible
things. And I think it's really easy to sort of latch on to those bad news is what spreads
the fastest. But also like just running this podcast and seeing like the life changing
outcomes that so many people have had that have just made everyone's life better, like
their life has gotten better, their customers lives has gotten better, their employees lives
have gotten better, their partners lives have gotten better, and they like, I don't know,
just like improve their communities as well. It seems to me that like the positive sides
of capitalism just don't really get talked about all that often, you know, it's this
incentive that like promises that you can basically make money and improve your life
if you are willing to work really hard to help other people. And there aren't that many
systems that basically reward you for helping complete strangers. So I'm a huge fan of capitalism.
What are your thoughts? Why are you a big fan?
Yeah, I don't know why it feels controversial to say it. I think it does like even when
you know, in mentioning it on this podcast, five minutes ago, it's sort of like, you know,
do we want to go down this rabbit hole? Is it something that I want to like fight about
today? I don't know of another system as effective as bringing kind of like joy and, you know,
gratification for rewarding both yourself and your employees and your customers, like
you said, so it might be out there. I haven't, you know, found it. I haven't heard of sort
of what that other system would be. There's all these like weird permutations now of anti
capitalism. There's like, you know, the CEO guys on Twitter who it's like, well, I reduced
my salary from $100 million a year to $1 million a year, and I'm still like worth tens of millions,
but I kind of hate capitalism. And so I don't know, like I think a lot of these things are
done for attention. And there's there's always personal reward and personal gain from growing
your Twitter following or your podcast or selling more books because you are this kind
of anti capitalist. And so I think in many cases that the people at the forefront of
these movements, the leaders of these movements are actually being rewarded pretty generously
personally from being anti capitalist. I again, I don't know the motivations. I try not to
think too much of it. I also think just in general, you know, disagreeing with people
on the internet is a one way ticket to pain. And so I try to avoid that at all costs and
just, you know, mostly keep my views to myself. And, you know, I think we generally through
the hiring process of saying like, we try in all of our companies to give, I think,
outsized equity, we try to be as fair as we can with salaries, we try to do things like
bonuses and commissions and treat our employees and our friends really fairly. And I think
that that generally attracts people who are mostly aligned to those views. And I don't
really care if you know, we have somebody who's anti capitalist who works for us, I
think, as long as they're working hard. And if they want to go take 100% of their money
and you know, give it away or give it to the government or something, that's totally fine
with me. It doesn't bother me at all. I don't lose sleep about it. But I think certainly
in my own personal experience, I don't even think it needs to be that much money, but
just coming from a background where watching my parents and my parents friends never make
$100,000 and getting my first job shortly out of college where I was able to do that
and just that amount of money, I think anything that any company can do or any person can
do to try to get to even that level is massive.
So I also came from a family that was not super financially successful. Like there were
no like rich people that my parents knew or the no rich family members or people in my
neighborhood. And it was kind of like weird to be an entrepreneur growing up right it
like not very many people did that. How did you you know, it seems like you came from
a similar background. How did you get into this? How did you get on this path?
Yeah, my my mom was a public school teacher. My dad was a civil engineer in like project
management at a very, very large construction company. But I think in both cases, you know,
neither were ever an executive neither ever were kind of a founder. Other people in my
family had small businesses they had started and I had seen them be, you know, mildly successful
or very unsuccessful in those business ventures. I learned I think at an early age that to
kind of be risk adverse to sort of like go and get the college degree. My parents between
them I think have like three advanced degrees. My grandparents both had PhDs. And so it was
like this family of sort of academics who came from that world of like, if you study
hard and you get good grades, you can sort of get to the next level of academia and that
degree will, you know, buy you this like very successful, extremely stable, extremely risk
adverse lifestyle that you can then buy a house and do all the kind of things at the
bare minimum that you want to do. I don't know, I was never particularly interested
in that. I don't know where it came from. I think there's plenty of people like me that
come from that situation. And I don't know if it's like a minor rebellion against your
parents or your family where it's like, I don't want to be in the same job for 40 years.
I love the idea of like working on something in a, you know, in a sprint and like putting
my all into it and just like, right for a few years and just seeing where that goes.
And then after three or four years, in a lot of cases, I just get super bored. And I couldn't
imagine just like waking up to work and sort of not enjoying what I'm doing just to get
the paycheck just because I had gotten, you know, this degree in that, in that field or
whatever it is.
Yeah, I think it's kind of a testament to the fact that the world is getting better
that it's an option to even live this way. You know, like there are people who are digital
nomads who just like hop around and they don't have to commit to one particular place. It's
just like, yeah, I'm going to, you know, sample a little bit of the best in every place in
the world for as long as I can. And now, you know, sort of the millennial generation. I
don't know. Are you a millennial? Millennial? How old are you?
Yeah, I'm 32. Okay, cool. I'm 34. So it's like our generation
is like, I don't know, we're sort of infamous for being entitled and wanting to have our
cake and eat it too. And we can't just like have a job that pays the bills, but we also
need a job that's going to like make us fulfilled and happy, etc. And that's kind of looked
down on but like, why should it be looked down on? Like shouldn't like we all want the world
to take us to a place where we can be happy and fulfilled in what we're doing. And so
I think that obviously being a startup founder and having the opportunity to create not only
the job that you want, but then to also sort of exit from that after a number of years
and then try something else. It's almost like you get to live a bunch of different lifetimes
and one lifetime. And like, that's a super fulfilling, cool, cool thing to do.
Right? Yeah, there's this kind of meme, I don't know if it's a meme, or if it's something
that again, is talked down upon all the time on Twitter and other places, which is, you
know, this statistic, I'm not sure exactly what it is. But I guess, you know, Gen Z,
when they're interviewed, I think our generation, you know, when we were six, 10 years old,
we wanted to be astronauts or teachers or firefighters or, you know, scientists or whatever.
And now, you know, six and 10 year olds, they want to be youtubers or, you know, tick tockers
or whatever. And it's like, this is terrible, you know, America's over. And it's like, I
don't know, man, like, I met, you know, a 25 year old who lives in Los Angeles, who
is basically behind the scenes working with, you know, Mr. Beast and a bunch of these famous
YouTubers and his life seems awesome. Like he seems super fulfilled creatively. He makes
incredible money for his age. It's like, why do we not want more of that? I think if that's
where the attention is going, if that's where eyeballs are going, if that's how people are
choosing to spend their time, and you can actually make decent money, then why should
we hate that?
So what was on your mind when you started your sort of first big successful company
interviewed? Were you thinking like, I want to live a great lifestyle, I want to be financially
successful? What was what sort of motivating you?
At any company, there's the revisionist history of like, oh, you know, we had this like great
mission, and we banded together. And there was like this company that we hated, and we
wanted to go like fix that, or we wanted to go save the world or whatever. I mean, in
this case, and I think that there are maybe founders who go out on that journey and fight
that fight. The reality of it for us was that it was it was purely accidental. And it was
it was a large chunk of luck. So the story of interviewed was basically, we had built
a lot of these internal assessments for our own use case at 42 floors, the startup where
my co founders and I all met. And we were basically doing I think what a lot of companies
did back then in 2015 and still do today, which is, if you have a non technical hire
for let's say a sales position, you want to know if that person is good at sales, you
have them write some cold emails, that's commonly done in like Google Docs, you sort of review
the results as a hiring committee and make a decision. Obviously, with other factors
baked into that throughout the interview, we entered a hackathon, while we were all still
full time employees. In March of 2015, we ended up winning that hackathon, we got I
think, 150 or $200,000 from the judges of that hackathon, which included like cyan Bannister,
who was that founder's fund, Jason Calacan as a bunch of people. And so they were like,
Great, like your company won the hackathon, you know, where can we wire the money, we
were called pre hire at the time, they thought pre hire is going to be big, they wanted to
invest even more money, sort of up to $300,000 into our company. And it was like, hey, we're
all like employees at this other company, we have a hard decision to make, literally
in 24 hours, which is do we quit our jobs and go work on this thing that we were doing
like as a very sort of jokey side project full time? Or do we reject the money and just
continue working at 42 floors? Luckily, the CEO of that business at 42 floors was super
supportive of us. And even though we were three senior people on the team, he was like,
I want to invest to I want to become an advisor, I'm going to help you guys get into YC. I
think that there's this whole cycle, like he had gone through YC as a YC founder, I
think you're a YC founder. And so he helped us apply, he helped us, you know, get connected
with with Michael Seibel. So it was like this like split second jump that was literally
made like entered the hackathon on a Thursday, did the hackathon Friday, Saturday, one Saturday
night had to make a hard decision Sunday to leave our jobs. By Monday, we had like incorporated
set up a bank account and we're sort of off to the races.
What did you think about the YC experience?
I thought it was incredible. One of my two co-founders Darren had gone through in 2011.
And so he had I think what was toward the tail end of like original YC experience where
Paul Graham was still super involved. And it was still this like very small cohort of
companies, I think there were 35 or 40 companies in his batch. We had one of the first experiments
I think as they were blitz scaling. And so Paul Graham was sort of he was transitioning
out, Jessica Livingston was still one of our partners, which was incredible. Obviously,
things have changed a lot in the last two years moving to fully remote. But yeah, going
down to Mountain View and having those conversations with Justin Kahn and Kevin Hale and Aaron
Harris and Jessica Livingston and Jeff Ralston, I think all of those people are incredible.
You know, several of them have sort of moved on from YC, some are still super involved.
But I thought it was incredible. Like I thought at the time in YC, I was like, this, I don't
know, my take on YC was at the time, it's like, this is as hard as it gets. Like there
is just no crazier time in my life. And then it just kept getting harder from there. And
so it was like, okay, fundraising is super hard. And actually now getting like the first
10 users is even harder than fundraising and getting to the first million dollars in ARR
is even harder than that. So it just never stopped being a challenge. But I think that
that was definitely a special time. How was, how was your experience?
I loved YC as well. I thought there's just something in the atmosphere of having so many
people around you who are all pushing in the same direction. It's super motivating. And
I think one of the biggest things that a lot of founders, especially today, who like don't
raise money and don't go through accelerators are missing out on is like that camaraderie.
You know, it's so easy to go from like a company where you're surrounded by co workers to quit.
And now you're like by yourself working in your basement, and you just lose motivation.
And you find that it's like, it's hard to get up and work, you know, it's hard to send
that email, it's hard to do this stuff. But when you have people around you, it's much
easier because we're social, we're social animals, like we're just motivated by wanting
to contribute, by wanting to not look bad, by wanting to not be left behind. And so I
like that aspect of YC. What I didn't like was like the sort of obsession with fundraising.
I was also part of like the tail end of like the original YC. I was in winter 2011. So
I can make one batch before your co founder. And Paul Graham was there. And the other original
YC partners were there. I think we had like 3540 companies on our batch. And honestly,
like I would have been super happy just making a company that made a living for me, you know,
basically being an indie hacker. And I remember there are people on our batch who like sold
out like they sold their companies for a few million dollars and people were like hating
on them and saying their sellouts and they quit too early. And I'm like, this person
just made millions of dollars in a few months. Like how are you gonna hate on this person
as a sellout? Like, that's incredible. And I didn't like that YC sort of pushed us to
like, only consider that as an option. But then again, like that was like 2011. You know,
back then, nobody even like attempted to charge money for most of their businesses. Stripe
didn't exist. It wasn't even in beta yet. Like it just wasn't it was a different time.
And nowadays, if you look at like most of the big companies coming out of YC, almost
all of them sort of have their head on straight, almost all of them have a business model,
they're generating revenue, they're paying customers. And it makes more sense for them,
I think to raise money because they understand like how they can use that to make more money
in the future.
Yeah, I love this like cohort of companies that came out of I think early to mid YC batches,
you know, I think Olark comes to mind zappier up until recently came to mind. These are
companies that basically only ever raised their their original, you know, I guess depending
on the batch 20 to $120,000 checks, that basically like said no to all investments since then
and built these massive successful companies with you know, 10s of 1000s or 100s of 1000s
of users, millions of users, I think in Zapier's case, it's pretty cool to see that. And I
think it's pretty partner dependent. I remember calling Jeff Ralston, who who was and still
is I think one of my favorite people of all time just involved in startups. And when we
had this offer, and it was like, Hey, we're, you know, two years in, should we sell for
50 million? He was like, absolutely not. Like, if you can sell for 50, you can sell for 100.
If you can sell for 100, you can sell for 250. And so it was like, he was a partner that
was really, really pushing, I think us but also other companies that were thinking about
taking those early exits to just like, you're already through the hardest part, which is
getting the first users building an early team of your first, you know, 10 or so people.
And so why would you want to quit now? And so I would guess that that's very, that was
very different, I think for us from some of the other advice that we got from other partners.
Yep, totally. It's cool. You mentioned Zapier. I had weighed on the podcast maybe two or
three years ago. And like Zapier kind of doing his thing. I think they raised like a million
a million and a half dollars. And then like you said, they just never raised money again,
and just kept growing and growing. And then recently this year, they announced that they
had raised like $130 million at a $5 billion valuation. And it's like they for all intents
and purposes, like bootstrapped their way there and just grew like crazy, probably resisted
investor call after investor call for years. And now the founders own like just a
massive percentage of the company. And like that's it's such a cool story. It's amazing to
me that they were able to do that. Yeah, outside of YC, indeed, who acquired my last company,
they raised a total of 5 million, they never touched most of that money. I think the story
was they used about a million of it, they sold for a billion dollars a couple of years later.
And today, I think if indeed were to be valued as like a publicly traded independent company would
be probably worth like 40 to 50 billion, they're doing, you know, $5 billion in revenue off of an
initial, you know, $5 million raise. So these things happen. I think Viva is another one out
here next to me in Pleasanton that raised 7 million, I think they're a $40 billion market
cap company. Right now, it's hard for there to be more of that. I don't know what Zapier story was,
but I think that there is just so much capital being thrown around. But if you're Zapier,
why wouldn't you want to add 130 million to your coffers if you can add a crazy valuation. So I
think it's smart for founders to wait as long as they can in many cases. And then for other
founders, it definitely makes sense to, you know, take, take the money and run with it.
So these are some obviously huge numbers. And, you know, a lot of these companies,
obviously yours interviewed, and D, like these are companies focused on people helping get jobs,
helping people hire, they're helping people find jobs. I love the sector because a lot of money
changes hands. If you think about like where companies spend most of their money, it's usually
their employees, especially in the tech industry, employees are super expensive. And if you are a
founder trying to come up with a business idea, I think one of the best things you can do is sort
of anchor on, I only want to provide value to people who are going to pay a lot of money for
what I'm doing. You know, if you're selling pencils, and people are paying you like 50 cents
for a pencil, your pencil isn't that important. They're not going to stop to talk to you on the
sidewalk, like you can kind of tell how important people think your thing is by how much they pay
for it. And almost without fail, most of the people that I know who start companies and the
hiring space who do a good job tend to have outsized returns and gains compared to people
and other spaces just because they can charge so much per customer. So I want to talk about
your first business interviewed a little bit. You kind of gave us the whirlwind tour. Why do you
think it was so successful? How do you what do you think you're able to ramp up to $2.5 million
and your recurring revenue in less than three years?
You're absolutely right is an area where you tend to see sizable budget, you know, a company's
pencil budget is not going to be nearly as much as their as their people budget. And I think that
people budget gets split out in a lot of ways where if you think about sort of the tech stack
in people operations or talent or recruiting HR, whatever you want to call it, you have your like
HR information system, you have your applicant tracking system, you're probably using video
interview software. So there's a there's a lot of budget there. And I think a lot of these companies
in that stack can get a lot of money for what they're selling. The other thing is similar to
like a salesforce on the CRM side, these are tools that are really hard and painful to rip out. And
so I think another component of it, at least in the software side of the people business is,
you don't see companies that have a lot of churn problems, because once you start using something
to track all of your applicants, and let's say you're five years in, and now you have five years
of candidate data in that system, migrating it over to something that looks prettier or looks
better is really hard. And so part of it for us was that on the assessment side, candidate
assessments had been plagued by these very old school legacy companies that were doing
like Scantron multiple choice tests for entry level customer support people for many, many years.
And a lot of these businesses, like if you go down that rabbit hole, some of these businesses
that were run and started by, you know, industrial organizational psychologists in the middle of,
you know, Oklahoma 50 years ago, are making 40 to $60 million in revenue. So it's a crazy space,
there's there's virtually no technology in the space, at least there wasn't six years ago.
And so in a lot of cases, all we were doing was trying to say, look at what hacker rank and some
of these companies are doing for the technical interviewing space. And if we can do some of those
same things, there's not rocket science involved here. But if we can just take things from being
a 45 minute pencil and paper test that you have to do to get an entry level call center job,
we can move that online, we can make it mobile friendly. Again, these are not hard things,
but there's clearly going to be budget for that, because you're already spending a million dollars
with this, you know, Scantron company for your testing. And so that was it was still this like,
very, you know, niche industry, there's not collectively, like, when you look at the total
addressable market of that, you know, assessment industry, it's not massive, I think that we were,
we were a small player in a pretty small market, but it also made it easy for us to, you know,
maneuver and I think get spend from from other companies, we weren't necessarily growing spend,
I think we were purely replacing spend from other kind of more legacy solutions.
What did you learn about how to actually find customers? Because I think when you're
selling something for presumably a pretty high price point, a lot of early stage founders just
get intimidated. It's like, all right, well, how am I like, I've never done sales before,
I don't even know who to email, who to call, like, how am I going to convince somebody,
somebody to buy something that costs more than just $5 a month, but might cost hundreds or
thousands of dollars a month? Yeah, I think the first thing for us was that you do have to start
somewhere. I think that there is, you know, people get paralyzed by the idea of picking the perfect
price. Like we see it with so many of our friends, we see it with companies that we've invested in.
And my thought on this is, you know, I don't think anybody ever picks the perfect price on day one,
I don't think many years into the company, most companies have the perfect price, you know, like
you look at LinkedIn in the space, LinkedIn is updating their pricing, like every other month,
they're AB testing different things, they're testing how do you package a recruiter seat,
you know, what do you get for that recruiter seat, it's been this constant evolution over the last
15 years with LinkedIn's pricing. And so I think for us, in terms of getting customers, it was
just get somebody who's paying something in the door, and then leverage that first customer. For
us, it was a customer called Taskus, was our first customer ever. They were based in Los Angeles,
and we had actually gotten that relationship through a relationship that we had at 42 floors
where Taskus was basically our outsourced customer support and data entry company. And we knew that
they were hiring a ton. And so the conversation to the founders in 2015 and interviewed was,
hey, I was the CEO of this company, we spent a lot of money on you guys, we took an early bet on you
guys, could you repay the favor? And I think that that happens all the time. Like, you know,
one founder selling to another founder, that founder is buying their stuff, it's just this like,
you know, continuous cycle, but it worked. And I think Bryce and Jasper, who are the co-founders
of that company, they took a bet on us, they paid us a tiny amount of money for the value that we
were delivering. But the important thing was, we had an early customer within the first couple
months, who was paying us for an actual prototype, we quickly convinced them to do a case study,
we rolled that into another company, another company, and all these companies are paying us
500 bucks a month. And then I think after, you know, probably six or seven of those customers
where we had built out the case study, we also got, I think, four of the seven as investors.
So Jonathan Swanson was one of those who was running Thumbtack at the time, he came on as
an investor. Bryce and Jasper from Taskus came on as investors. And so we got like four of our first
seven customers to actually invest in interviewed, I think around the time, pre YC, which was super
powerful, because then we were able to leverage their networks to say, now I have a reason as a
CEO to go talk about this company to my other CEO friends who are also, you know, struggling to hire,
you know, non technical talent at scale. And so that was sort of the early journey. And it was
really, I think for us too, we really, really, really prioritize what we call the three L's.
So that was lettuce, as in like cash money, learning and logo. And so we always wanted to get
two out of the three. And so in a case with like Taskus, where we weren't getting a lot of lettuce,
we weren't getting a lot of money from them, we wanted to learn a ton from them. And we wanted
to get their logo to go leverage into getting other logos or getting other customers. And so
that will like continued, I still use that framework today for like our own sales team,
Alaska, I used it all the way through interviewed. And it was a pretty good framework of like,
when your first 100 customers, I think for some businesses and your first 1000 customers,
you're never going to find your perfect customer, I think you could make an argument that you should
go strive to go find perfect customers in the early days. I think for us, it was, you know,
take the customers, but if they're paying you a ton of money, and they have a really good logo,
like, you know, Wells Fargo is using you early on, don't get too concerned about not learning a lot
for them or about the expansion opportunity or whatever else, like take the money and run,
take the logo and run, try to get a case study. But if a company doesn't have a lot of money to
pay you, I think that they can still be a really valuable early customer, as long as they agree to
do things like give a testimonial or a quote or case study, where then that can be leveraged into
getting, you know, a customer that will actually pay more money. And so I think we were very,
we were very flexible with our early customers that interviewed. And I think taking bets on
young emerging companies worked out super well for us. It's worked out super well for other companies.
We took an early bet on Canva when they were like 40 people. We took Dordash was one of our first
customers, I think they had about 18 people out of YC, maybe two years before us or something.
And Task Us grew from like 1000 people at the time to I think they just IPO'd this last week,
and they're now like 24 or 30,000 people. So being in the hiring space, I think the other thing is,
if you take a bet on an early customer, they're not only easier to close, but they also grow with
you. And so we didn't have to do any incremental work on Dordash or Lyft or Canva or Task Us or any
of these companies or Thumbtack like these all just, you know, they were already fairly sizable
startups, call it like 20 to 200 people, we got them in for a small amount of money, we priced
based on volume. So the number of candidates they were screening with us. And you know, at the point
that some of those went from screening, you know, 100 candidates a day in March of 2015 to, you know,
1000 candidates a day, two years later, that contract sort of 10 X'd, you know, with that
relationship, which was super powerful for us. I think one of the most important parts of pricing
is actually kind of like, what are the sort of unit, what is the unit that you're charging for?
And by picking kind of a unit where you're getting paid more, the bigger the company is,
because they're hiring more people, you're kind of aligning your incentives, because no company is
really complaining about like, getting bigger and hiring more people. And you're kind of like,
then incentivized to sort of bet on customers who are going to grow, like you want to get the
customers who are going to grow the biggest. And so like, it's kind of an everybody wins rising
tide lifts all boats, sure, you're getting paid more, they're paying you more, but like everybody's
happy. And it seems like kind of a fun sales process to be involved in. And I think also
people sort of underestimate how fun sales can be, you know, it kind of seems like it's this huge
chore, it's terrible, if only I could just have a marketing driven company, or I don't see anybody,
and they just sort of see an ad on the internet, or they read a blog post, and they sign up, like,
that would be great. But actually, like, some of the fun and running a company is like talking to
your customers and getting to know them. And in your case, like a lot of them became friends,
and investors or partners, and maybe even future employees. And like, these are people who are
going to help you solve your problems. Are there people who are going to help you do you know, one
of those three L's like learning and tell you like, Oh, hey, you know, why don't you restructure your
homepage like this, I want to go out for this service. And it just makes the entrepreneurship
journey much more rewarding, and I think more likely to be successful. And so I wish more
founders didn't run away from sales in the early days, I wish more of them were willing to do sort
of what you did and just pick up the phone, email people, contact your previous contacts
or employees or customers and just say, Hey, like, you know, will you be our first customer?
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I think everything, everything as a founder comes down to sales,
or 80% of things come down to sales, like you're, you're recruiting and that sales,
you're trying to convince people to take a bet on you and on your vision and on your company,
in many cases, especially today for way lower initial compensation that they would be making
at a large tech company. You're, you're selling, you know, investors in a lot of cases, or in,
you know, if you're bootstrapping, in a lot of cases, you're trying to get loans, you're trying
to structure debt, you're trying to get, you know, bank relationships set up, you're trying to get
like your payment processing all set up. And all that is sales. And then I think, you know,
I think a lot of founders are okay with that. But then it comes down to, like you said,
talking to those early customers. And I think a lot of it comes down to, you know, people
innately don't like to be rejected, like rejection sucks, right, you have to go through a lot of
rejection when you're fundraising or when you're hiring or when you're selling. And so if you're
doing it in other areas, it can be painful to have customers tell you no 100 times a day.
And then I think a lot of it too, I remember this, that interviewed a lot of it. And even
here, Alaska, like in the first, I don't know how long it is, it's different for every company in
the first couple months, in the first couple years, in some cases, I think it's embarrassment. It's
like I think Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn had this thing of like, back in the day, if you are not
embarrassed to demo your product to your first user, you have waited like way long to go find
your first user or something like that. And I think that there's like a huge embarrassment
when it's just you working by yourself, or you and your co founder in a room or working remotely.
And you've spent months on this thing. And you're afraid to get, you know, embarrassed by it by
having some buyer at some company tell you this thing sucks. I think the reality is that's never
really happened to me, I think most most people tend to be pretty nice on the internet if you if
you if you approach them. And so yeah, I mean, there's definitely always that fear of rejection.
That's one of the things I loved about the the you know, indie hackers AMA in the community,
which is, I think in your comment box, it's like say something nice to Chris or like say
somebody to support this project. And I think, you know, you have these communities like that,
that do a great job of like lifting one another up. And, you know, we talked earlier about
motivation, I think ultimately, you know, nothing else matters if you lose motivation. And so,
like forcing yourself in the early days of your company to put your product out there and to get
it in front of users and get their feedback. The feedback is never as bad as you think it's going
to be like, most people will be very pleasant, very nice, even if they're not going to buy and
having those, I'm not going to buy this because of x conversations that are real, and you actually
get somebody's candid feedback. Honestly, it's just as valuable as getting early customers who
are maybe buying for the wrong reasons, I think in the early days. Yeah, I mean, you basically said,
the most important thing to do is to not quit, right to not lose motivation. And it's super
important to just continually therefore find like, what's sapping your motivation, if you are in fact
having that happen to you, and get rid of it. And I think this sort of three L's that you three L's
framework that you had, we were sort of going for like lettuce learning and logo is super smart,
because it gives you a very concrete thing to latch on to, like gives you wins, right? You know,
why you're taking a particular action, like, why am I trying to send up his customer? Because I
want one of these three L's. And then you know how to handle that interaction, because you're
trying to always drive the conversation to one of those three L's. So you don't feel like you're
sort of aimless. And then when you get it, like you have a little win, you're like, okay, I got a
logo out of this, maybe they didn't pay me my full price, you know, maybe I didn't learn anything,
and my product is just as bad as it was yesterday, but like, I got a logo, I put on my homepage,
and that's gonna make the next time easier. And I think if you have this sort of like upward
staircase, like when you always know that like, what you're doing contributed to like making the
next step easier, it's just easier to maintain motivation. And that's ultimately what matters
in your startup in very early days, like, if your startup fails, it's because you quit, you know,
and if you quit, it's because you ran out of money or something else. But it's ultimately
because you weren't motivated. Because even if you ran out of money, there's other ways to go get
more money, you know, even if no one's buying your thing, you can like restructure your product,
etc. And so it really just comes down to motivation. And I love this sort of framework where you always
know, here's why I'm doing this. And here's the win I'm going to get that's going to keep me motivated.
Yeah, 100%. Over the last year and a half, I mean, we've been running remote teams for
seven years. But I think with remote, remembering to celebrate wins is particularly important. I
think we suck at it at last key, I think we were bad about it at interviewed. And when you do get
together with a team, like at Indeed, we had 60 offices all over the world. And I would like see
our I'd go visit our product teams and our sales teams and our engineering teams and our customer
support teams. And you would get those wins throughout the week, like somebody closes a
deal on the sales floor, and the people around that person are like celebrating with them.
And you have the like, this person's been here for one year, like balloons on their desk. And like,
all of those like micro wins that you get by being around other people, I think you have to be
super intentional if you're working remotely. And even with customers, like especially in the
hiring space, like we win when they win, which is hiring somebody like how do you help celebrate
with a customer who may be based in, you know, Brazil or Mexico or Europe, or like wherever,
it's really hard, you have to be intentional about it, you have to find ways to like,
help your team win to stay motivated as a founder and keep your co founders motivated,
to keep your customers motivated to keep like betting on you and keep, you know, using you.
And so I think it's definitely hard, I think the the wins are important. And it's like one of the
most under discussed parts of the entrepreneurial journey. And it's so easy, I think in remote work
to just be like, if you're coding all day, or you're selling all day, or you're fundraising all day
to just be like, you know, heads down, and everything is very tactical. Now you're using
checklist for everything and just checking things off. But like, looking back at the end of a week
and realizing how far you've come. And if the week sucked, okay, what are you going to do to
change it next week? If the week was great, like remember to say something about it. I think that
that's something that I try to remind myself of all the time. And I'm still terrible at it after
eight years of remote work. And it's just something that I think is way harder if you are working
remotely versus in person. How did you celebrate selling interviewed for $50 million or somewhere
thereabouts? Yeah, that was that was an easy one. I do have a good answer for that. My,
my two co founders and I, we paid out of pocket for our entire team, and all spouses, kids,
whatever to fly to Las Vegas, we gave everybody $2,000 in gambling cash, we paid for everybody's
flights, hotels, you know, restaurants, meals out, whatever. And then we kind of went back to it. So
that was about 30 days into into selling the company. And so we had a nice little retreat.
And then on an ongoing basis, I would say that is actually an extension of something that we've done
now, that I learned from Jason Friedman, who was the founder of 42 floors back in 2012, when I was
working for him, which was to do if you're going to be a remote company, you've got to spend the
money to get the team together on a semi regular basis. And so we would do locations back in the
day, we've done them, you know, now for eight years across three companies, we've done Salt Lake City,
we've done Austin, we've done Nashville, we've done Vegas, we've done Napa, we've done Tahoe.
So like finding somewhere where you can kind of fly the entire team in, build those relationships
once a quarter, once every six months, whatever it is, I think that that has been super critical
for like celebrating the wins remotely as well. Do you think you've like acclimated to that high?
Because I mean, you spend years building a company, it's a lot of work, it's a lot of challenge. And
then you have the sort of like, one almost instantaneous like exit event, or it's like,
bam, you did the thing, you know, you won. And that feeling fades, and the high goes away,
and you acclimate. And you know, even if you are celebrating it, like, eventually,
that's just sort of the new normal. How has it felt for you having sold this company and like
sort of reached the success? I think it has come in levels. So working at my first startup out of
college, where I was in sales, and I was, you know, in business development and partnerships,
and I was hustling at this small company for a year and a half. And then that company was sold
to Zillow for about 45 million, didn't see like a founder sized exit, but got a nice little chunk
of change at sort of a young age. And, and that felt, you know, I think very briefly, like, okay,
I'm on top of the world I made, I can remember what it was 100 or $150,000 in equity from the sale.
And I get a higher salary at Zillow. And I get all this Zillow stock and like, this is, you know,
this is as good as it gets. And you know, being in the Bay Area, it's like, oh, congratulations,
I can afford a marginally larger apartment now or whatever. This is not life changing
money by any means. And then kind of having a couple more experiences as an early employee,
you know, Zillow stock goes up, you kind of get to that next level. So I think for me,
I think some people, I've definitely had friends where it's like, they have a negative balance in
their bank account, or they like literally have like a couple hundred dollars in their bank account,
and they're making like 10 or $50 million personally, like, that is like a giant, you
know, level up. I think for me, it came a little bit more incrementally certainly interviewed,
you know, I think was the first like massive win where it was, you know, orders of magnitude
higher than, you know, anything I had received before. But I don't know that it faded for me,
like, I think that there are still things that I try to remain, you know, super grateful of. And,
and I think, you know, overall, certainly life is better with $100,000 than with $0 and with,
you know, $10 million than with $100,000. That goes back to like the capitalism
conversation earlier, like, you know, things, at least for me, like, my experience was things get
better. I think that there is probably, it's not as life changing if you're going from, you know,
if you're making a million dollars, and you already have half a million in the bank, or you're
making a million dollars, and you already have $100 million in the bank, like, I'm sure at that level,
it fails to be this incredible thing anymore. But there's definitely obviously this temporary
surge in this temporary rush, and you want to go spend the money or invest it or become an angel
investor, whatever it is. But for me over the last four years since selling interviewed has been,
I think semi sustained, like I'm super grateful to live where I live, super fortunate and feel
blessed to have like the house that we live in, in the neighborhood that we're in. And I think all
of that just wouldn't have been possible if I, you know, had just, you know, stayed in my first job
forever or had, you know, not worked in technology or not took the risk on myself of starting a
company. How did you transition from, I guess, feeling this high, and like having this huge
success to starting another company? Because now you're working on another company called Lasky.
This is the one you did an AMA about on Andy hackers. What was that transition like?
A long and painful transition, just in the sense of there's this period in between
being building interviewed for two and a half years and then selling it and then working at
our acquirer at Indeed for about three years and then starting Lasky. And so there was this period
where I had to go and like put my, you know, manager hat on and like put my executive hat on
and like, it wasn't my company anymore, but I still had to hire a ton of people. Our team went from,
I think about 12 people I'd interviewed at the time that we were acquired to several hundred
people within Indeed very quickly. And so that was just like a whole different beast. I think I was
on one hand trying to keep my like founder entrepreneurial hat on so that I didn't get
used to the comforts of working at this like massive company where there's an awesome paycheck
and perfect benefits and like everything is comped and I travel the world to all these offices and I
just like hired with somebody else's money and I spend somebody else's money like first real time
I think in my life that I had done that. And Indeed was this like wildly profitable company
where it just felt like money did not matter. Like all the time I was looking at budgets of like
$18 million and $10 million for this and $2 million for that. And I was like, holy shit,
like this is crazy. Like, uh, this is like a very small part of like what the total organization
is seeing. And so it was this balance of like trying not to get too sucked up in that,
but also enjoying it and trying to learn from it. Like our CEO and our executive team at Indeed,
they are brilliant. They're incredible operators. They're incredible at what they do.
And so I also wanted to learn from them. I didn't want this to be just say like,
oh, I'm only teaching the people on my team how to work effectively at a big tech company. It was
like, how do I learn from our CEO? How do I learn from our chief product officer? So they gave me
a lot of opportunities, which I am, you know, again, super grateful for. But yeah, I think the
transition was after about a year and a half, I was feeling an itch to get back to something smaller.
It took longer than I, than I had kind of originally thought, but I knew that I would
partner back up with Daniel, my co-founder. And it was just sort of a matter of timing
for us in terms of what that balance was going to be. You know, I had gotten married in that period.
He had his first kid in that period. And so there were, there's just a lot of like life stuff that
came up for both of us, I think, around when we would ultimately start Lasky. But it was a pretty
seamless transition. Like I, I was fortunate to leave Indeed at a point where kind of regardless
of what happens with Lasky financially, I wasn't taking nearly as big of a risk on doing another
company like I was starting Interviewed. And I think that made it easier in some ways, but it also
it made it really scary because it's like with Interviewed, again, it happened so fast. It
happened in a day, we didn't know what we were doing. And there were also no expectations, like
founders fail all the time. I think that there are like way higher expectations, like raising
from all of our existing investors, bringing our team over to be like, don't fuck this up, because
like, we know that you nailed it the first time. And if you're going to go bigger than like we
expect like a big outcome with this one. And so I think that was like, honestly, a good six months
of it was just deciding like, what's the area we're going to spend? So it was it was night and day,
like the first company was formed. And I went to Wells Fargo and set up the bank account in 2015.
And, you know, got our company checking account set up and, you know, incorporated with this like
random lawyer we met over the internet, which turned out to be a disaster all in 24 hours.
And here it was like, I have like amazing resources to go like higher or it can like
hire, you know, all the best people to like kind of help us set up in the right direction. And
but that means that I think when you have unlimited options to go choose whatever you
want to do next, it actually makes it way harder than I think in sometimes just stumbling into it
and being like, Okay, you know, I found this opportunity, whatever, I'm not even going to
think about it, I'm just going to go sprint. It's definitely, it was very different, I think this
time around. How did you approach deciding what you wanted your idea to be? Because if you know
you want to go bigger, or let that automatically excludes like some ideas, add some constraints,
like you have to pick an idea that actually can get big.
That was definitely an interesting conversation that we that Daniel and I spoke about a lot,
but just of it was that we got to about $3 million of ARR in our last company in a market where
there's probably only 100 to $300 million in spend, at least in in the US, like in that entire
industry. So we did a small thing in a small pond, and it worked out well. And I think ultimately,
you know, at this company, what we're doing is helping people hire faster, hopefully hire with
a higher bar, we're actually like delivering the talent versus the software. So we've kind of taken
a lot of the software learnings over the last five years vertically integrated it into a staffing
and hiring business. And so with that, you see a ton of competition, there are like a nearly
unlimited number of companies popping up every day that are like doing the exact same thing.
However, this is like arguably the largest business in the world, or one of them, which is
like hiring and recruiting and staffing and people and paying people and tracking people and tracking
hours. And like, you kind of go down that like people talent HR stack, and it's massive. I will
say in the first five months being five months into Lasky, it has been easier in a lot of ways
from a market perspective to get early customers. I think that's simply based on the fact that we
picked a much larger market this this time around where it's a lot easier to get initial customers.
Now, how do you compete with all of these other staffing companies, headhunters,
recruiting companies long term, sort of different discussion for a different day. And we'll pop our
head up in a year and figure that out. But in terms of like finding initial differentiation,
I think in the beginning of interviewed, we actually tried to go way too differentiated,
like we tried to totally like turn the assessments industry on its head. And we spent like six or
nine months like actually building out all of these like machine learning models to assess like,
you know, typing speed and whether or not a candidate was using sort of the proper grammar
to address a difficult customer situation. And then we would, you know, show this to companies
and they'd be like, that technology is incredibly impressive. What we actually want is just like a
multiple choice test that you can do on your phone instead of on, you know, pencil and paper.
And we're like, Oh, shit, like there's actually a lot of money in this. Like, okay, like, I think
in a lot of industries, the learning was you actually only have to be 5% better, you have
to be 10% better to build a massive company. Like I don't think I totally respect I totally
admire founders who are able to go make an incremental change in an industry and like
totally revolutionize an industry. Very jealous of that love investing in founders like that.
But I think for me, it's just like, being, you know, fundamentally lazy at heart and knowing
that like the median recruiter experience is still so shitty. It's a pretty low bar to get
5% better, 10% better than what those companies are doing. So yeah, I was picking a big market
and being one of a number of companies in a much bigger market. And I think initially,
that's actually been a bit easier than being one of a smaller number of companies in the small
market. I love that idea that you don't necessarily need to be, I mean, the old mantra is you need to
be 10 times better than the competition to start a startup. And it's like, you know how hard it is
to make something that's 10 times better than the status quo? Like even if that's an exaggeration,
and someone says two times better, like, it's so hard to make something two times better than
what exists already. But if you enter a market where like, guess what people are paying for
particular solutions, and they don't blanket paying for these things. And they're always going
to want like a small incremental improvement if they can get it. You don't need a 2x improvement
over the existing stuff, you can be 5 to 10% better. When people go to make that purchasing
decision, like they might buy your option. I think what's challenging is in hiring, you kind
of mentioned this earlier, people don't tend to churn, they pick a solution to like, this is
working really well for us. We're hiring people like we're not even in the market for a new tool,
we're not looking for a new tool, etc. And so when you come out here with Lasky, like your brand new
tool, like you're staring at a market full of a bunch of people who already have this problem
more or less solved. How do you get your first customers when you're in that situation,
where it doesn't seem like people really need something new? You can go compete on pricing,
so that actually in hiring is quite differentiated, where if you have the ability to place a really
high quality, let's say engineering contractor who's working 40 hours a week, and because you
have a better database, because you have a better brand, and you get more engineers to come to you
versus a traditional staffing company, you're able, I mean, there's plenty of staffing companies
out there that traditionally are taking somewhere between 50 and 100% margin on the hourly rate of
a outsourced remote engineer contractor. So if you look at a company like, I'll pick on like Reddit,
because they hire a ton of contracted engineers, they have even just like a couple hundred engineers
who they're paying, let's say an effective rate of $150,000 a year to, for every engineer,
they're probably paying somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000 to a staffing company.
So I think price is one massive differentiator in this industry, where if you can actually compete
on price, if you can take 15, 30% margin versus 50% margin, you get a lot of people to pay
attention. It's sort of a cop out answer. But I would say in the early days, you can definitely
lean on your technical background, and you can lean on your ability to build solutions very
quickly for a customer. And I think early customers love that, which is, you know, if you're working
with Ron Stodd, who places a ton of engineers at big companies, I think that from a recruiting
standpoint, they're about doing 30 to $35 billion in revenue, I think there's about 50,000 people
that work at Ron Stodd. You know, Ron Stodd is not going to be going to the average YC company
and saying, you know, outside of just getting the talent, like, what are the other challenges? Is
it you're trying to get it faster? Are you trying to pay them in a different way? What about
compliance? Like, are you able to file all of their paperwork? And I think that there are some
of these small things that like, again, that's the five or the 10% improvement. But it's like,
we're going to swarm around you, like the 10 first 10 people at Lasky, we're going to swarm
around you, and we're going to like make these changes, or we're going to like put this into
the dashboard, or we're going to like give you that discount, or we're going to give you this
person faster. And so, again, I think some of it can be speed, I think some of it can just be,
you know, relying on, on your ability to quickly customize for your first 10 or 100 customers. And
I think that there's a fear in the industry, especially as a small business around that,
which is, oh, like, I don't want to create a consulting company. But what you do for your
first customer, you don't have to do for the next 10 what you do for, you know, your first 10
customers, you don't have to do for the next 100. Like, Airbnb is arguably one of the best,
you know, examples of this for like, the founding team is running around New York while they're
in YC, like physically in people's apartments, taking pictures, because they recognize that
photography was like one of the big differentiators for them. Like, you know, to an investor, it's
like, well, that's not a scalable model, you know, to a founder, it's like, well, we'll outsource
that eventually. But like, we want to make sure we nail the experience. And so I think that as much
as VCs, and as much as other founders urge you to not go down a consulting path, which I think
actually can be dangerous for a lot of companies, I think we take a very consultative approach with
the first companies and the ability to customize is definitely a huge differentiator, I think,
outside of pricing. What do you think is the difference between companies who get kind of
sucked into that consulting path and can never get off of that treadmill? And what you want to do,
which is to, you know, start there, but eventually build something sort of standardized and scalable?
You eventually get confident and you learn to say no, you know, I tweeted the other day,
which we're going through this actively right now, I think first, you know, first of all,
going out of the gates and being a one month old company and closing a million dollar contract
just doesn't happen. On the other hand, closing a customer for $1,000 a month thing where they
have $100,000 a year budget is way harder than closing a customer that has, you know, is going
to spend a million dollars, but they have $100 million budget. So you like look at those sort of
like orders of magnitude difference between those levels of spend. And I think some of it is getting
the confidence back to the like, let us logo learning of like, we learned from early customers,
we adapted to that learning, we made changes for them, we worked hard for them. And I think in our
case, it's very clearly kind of going up market to larger and larger customers where it's not
expected that, again, Wells Fargo is going to ask Aerotech or Ron's daughter, one of these like
massive recruiting companies to make a change, they just want the people they want the people
delivered fast, and maybe pricing continues to be our differentiator, but we're not always
customizing for them. And so I think we saw this that interviewed a lot where it's about going up
market, I think in a lot of cases, and with other cases, it's just learning to say no, I think,
you know, with the consultant hat on, you're generally saying yes to everything. I think,
you know, I don't know if it's right. But I think with my founder hat on, I'm saying yes to almost
everything for the first three or six months. And then as we hopefully find hints of product
market fit, or hints of success with those early customers, it's starting to say no, and no, and
no. And I think it's it's scary as a founder. And again, I'm actively going through this with Lasky
to say, no, we're not going to discount that pricing. No, we're not going to discount these
terms. No, we're not going to build that for you. But or like, you know, the proverbial like, oh,
we'll put it on the you know, the product backlog that you know, nobody ever looks at. And so saying
those things to customers can be scary. But I think ultimately, good customers will respect you
for them. They don't expect you to be their consultant long term. And so I think a lot of
cases people will push and you just have to push back. So I'm gonna wrap up here with a question
about ideas, because I think one of the places where you sort of envision like the funnel of
entrepreneurship, the very top of the funnel, people who haven't gotten started yet, and the
very bottom of the funnel is people like you who like already had an exit and now you're on to the
next thing. There's just way more people at the top of the funnel. And for a lot of them,
they just don't know what to work on. They have no idea what to work on. And they probably listen
to this episode saying, Okay, like the hiring space seems ripe. But what should I do? How do I even
figure out like, you know, how to break into this space? And I've talked to a few indie hackers,
who've done different things. I talked to john Doherty, he runs a company called credo. He's
kind of helping small businesses connect with service providers, whether they're web designers
or audio engineers, etc. I've talked to my friend Lynn Thai, she runs a company called key values.
Key values helps engineers find jobs at companies based on their values. So you could go to her
website and be like, I want a company that you know, values family time and pets and healthy
eating. And it will show you companies that are based on like, you know, the salary range, but
based on like these sort of intangible values. And she's found a cool niche there. I've talked
to Ben Tossle at Makerpad, who helps people learn how to, you know, get no code skills, and then
he's got a job board there for people hiring no coders. And I've talked to like, Legion, who run
side hustle stack, which is basically the kind of a job, a giant notion document. That's like,
here's a bunch of different places for side hustles. Here's how to find a job here's how much
they pay, here's our tips for getting a job there. So it's a different like cool ideas that are all
sort of kind of working. How do you think about, you know, maybe how do you think an indie hacker
might go about figuring out how to break into the job space if they want to create sort of a modest
bootstrapped business? Yeah, I think there are a lot of different approaches here, I generally
like to, I find it's very valuable to go talk to the people with the money, you know, the way that
I would start in hiring, let's say that you wanted to go down that path is, I would talk to a lot of
hiring managers, I would talk to a lot of recruiters, I think all of that is fairly obvious, it can be
really hard to break in there. And so one hack that I think works particularly well is just like
spending instead of framing the first one to three months of your company as a customer development
phase, why not just frame it as a newsletter. So when we were starting Lasky, we had this sub stack
where we were publishing toward kind of a couple months ago, all of these stories about like
interviewing people at, at Tesla, and I think we interviewed some people at strike, right. And so
we were like going to big companies where you're you're hiring fast. And there's like this huge
growth curve in terms of hiring, we talked to Emily Choi at Coinbase is the CEO of Coinbase. And so
we talked to all of these different executives at fast growing companies. And we framed it as an
interview series, which I think can be a lot more powerful than like, hey, I'm a founder, I want to
interview you about x. And the advantage is like, maybe I'll publish this, maybe I won't, I'll put
it on my sub stack or write up like a nice review, you can then share that with your network. And what
that does is it exposes you and your early brand and your name to that person's entire network.
And so you get some of these early network effects were like, when we started last year, we spoke to
110 hiring managers and recruiters, but we didn't know any of them. So instead of tapping our
existing network, we went down this path of like, hitting somebody up through a Twitter DM Emily
Choi at Coinbase. And she's like, Oh, I can't do it. But why don't you talk to my VP of people,
you know, he'll jump on a call with you. In that call, we're asking for who are two other people
leaders that you respect. And we're generally framing those conversations as what's the hardest
part of your job. And you're going to get a wide range of answers. And I think it's correct to go
through 95% of those responses in the trash, because they don't apply to you, they're not
interesting things to solve, you can't solve them, like they're technically impossible to solve right
now with your skill set, whatever it may be. But I think in those 110 conversations, we had
five or 10 conversations that deeply resonated. And it was like, Oh, that is something that I
could go solve. And I could get excited about that. And would you be an early user of that.
And I think like, that is a good way to kind of turn customer development into this like,
research phase, but also find hopefully some early users, I think that that dance can be really hard,
you don't want to promise somebody, hey, I want to do a profile on you, I want to do an interview,
and then I'm going to pivot and sell you something. It's like, you're trying to learn
from them, you're trying to explore. But I think that if you do it correctly, you can have that
initial conversation be a lot of learning about what they're struggling with as a hiring manager
or recruiter, and then get a lot of information. I think the second thing that I would do,
that nobody does, that I would totally do, it's sort of like a pro move,
is go talk to corporate development. Especially as an indie hacker, I think I talked about this
in the AMA. The advice from like Paul Graham and a lot of people just categorically is like,
if you're a founder, don't talk to corporate development until you're ready to sell your
company. I actually think that that might be a mistake. I think for us, we spoke to corporate
development teams a lot in the early days that interviewed. And talking to the CorpDAO team at
Workday and LinkedIn, and indeed, and some of these big talent boards, corporate development is
generally very plugged in to not only where the product team is going from a product and engineering
perspective, but also from an investment perspective or an acquisition perspective,
where that company is going and what their biggest problems are. So an individual hiring
manager, let's say at Indeed, may not be able to give you an amazing idea on which company to start,
but the head of CorpDAO or somebody on the CorpDAO team at Indeed might, if you can get them on the
phone, they would probably tell you a lot of like the top 10 things that Indeed is just struggling
to solve internally right now. And so whether you want to just go build a business that throws off
an extra thousand dollars a month, or you want to build a business that gets acquired for a million
or 10 million or 100 million in a few years, like using those ideas to say, there's this big company
that has a lot of money that has smart people and they're unable to solve this problem.
Like if you find an idea that resonates, it's within your skill set. I think it's a wonderful
way to sort of like come up with that idealist kind of in a space. I love it. It's the pro moves
right at the end of the episode. Thanks a ton for coming on the show. I'll have to have you back
again at some point when Lasky is a little further along, just to shoot the shit and talk about
what you're up to. In the meantime, where can listeners go to find out more about what you're
up to now to find, I think you had like a cool B2B business sales playbook as well,
and wherever else you post on the internet. Feel free to go to lasky.com, L-A-S-K-I-E.com.
You can follow me on Twitter at Chris J. Bakke. So it's C-H-R-I-S-J-B-A-K-K-E on Twitter. And then,
yeah, if you want access, we do have like, we sort of told our story about going from zero to two and
a half million in ARR in ARR at our last company. I think I linked it a couple of times in the indie
hackers AMA. So feel free to just search me there. Or if you just want to send me an email to
chrisatlasky.com. I'm happy to send you a copy of it too. Cool. And I will put all of this in the
show notes. Chris, thanks again. Sweet. All right, thanks so much.