What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from ndhackers.com, and you're listening to the Indie Hackers podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of what it's like to be in their shoes.
How did they get to where they are today?
How did they make decisions, both in their companies and in their personal lives, and
what exactly makes their businesses tick?
And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and
go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
If you've been enjoying the show and you want to support what I'm doing here, you should
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It's a great way to help others find the show, and I really appreciate it.
In today's episode, I sat down with Aileen Lerner, the founder of Interviewing.io.
You might remember I spoke with Aileen last year about how she turned her idea into a
landing page, which generated 7,000 signups on its first day, and eventually turned that
landing page into a full-blown company that generated millions of dollars in revenue.
And then COVID-19 hit, and hiring basically stopped for a lot of Aileen's customers,
which meant her revenue plummeted to near zero.
And so in this episode, Aileen and I discuss how exactly that went down, what it feels
like to be a founder whose worst fears actually come to fruition, and what she's been doing
to cope and build her company back up.
Enjoy the episode.
When did you first start taking COVID-19 seriously, not as a founder, but just as a human, an
ordinary citizen?
I don't really want to admit this, but I guess I will.
I mean, I didn't take it seriously.
I hope I don't regret this, but we were in this unenviable position where we had a new
employee starting literally on the day that San Francisco went into quarantine.
And he emailed, he's like, hey, did you guys know this is happening?
What should we do?
And I remember thinking, we should just ignore this.
This is bullshit, right?
Let's just have everybody should be at work.
Make me money, peons.
Didn't actually really think that, but thought it for a second, and then I intervened in
my own bad thoughts.
But that's kind of where my head was, didn't know whether quarantine was the right thing.
I don't know if it even made sense.
And I think I was having a hard time adjusting to it.
I took it seriously outwardly from the day it started happening.
One of my employees made a really good point, actually.
I was bitching.
I was like, this is awful, why are they thwarting my ability to do my job?
And he's like, hey, listen, our grandparents were drafted and had to go to war.
You just have to stay home.
We got it easy by comparison.
We got it easy.
So when I heard that it was humbling, and I was like, you know what, dude, you're right.
I'm sorry.
I'm being an ass.
Let's take this seriously.
I mean, I think there just wasn't very much information early on to even know how seriously
to take it, especially January, February.
I remember being pretty concerned about it, like just reading, okay, there's this disease
ravaging China and it's, they tried to contain it, but now it's out and it's going to spread
and it's coming for us.
And I was just in there thinking like, I'm horrible at being sick.
Like I'm like the most pathetic sick person ever.
I really don't want this to happen.
Maybe I should take it seriously.
But it was hard to predict like what the effects should be like, what should you be afraid
of?
Because we just didn't know.
Like, is it going to get into the food supply?
Am I going to have to like start my own garden and grow my own vegetables or should I like
move to a house in the woods or like a hospital is going to be safe?
Like should I get medical supplies?
You just didn't really know how to react.
I don't think anyone can realize.
My boyfriend's like much more, you know, there's this continuum of preparedness.
And on one extreme side, you just don't do anything and you actively like lick doorknobs.
On the other end is, you know, people that are on doomsday preppers, which is this amazing
show on National Geographic if you haven't seen it.
For those of you who haven't seen it, you should watch it.
It's amazing.
So, you know, he's more toward that.
So I kind of felt a little bit relaxed about the whole thing because I knew somebody else
in the household was doing some of the worrying and that freed me up to be more of a doorknob
licker.
Of course, I wasn't looking doorknobs.
But I think one of the ways I felt it more like the stress for me wasn't for some reason
I wasn't scared of getting sick should have been probably but I wasn't I think I was much
more scared about whether my company would survive this, right?
Because I'm like, I don't have that much control over not getting sick.
I'm going to do I'm going to follow best practices, even though of course, the CDC seemed to change
best practices day to day but did our best but I'm like, this is something where I actually
have agency and control.
So I'm going to stress over this instead of this scary big thing, which I don't even know
how to wrap my head around.
Well, I think the challenge with that is if you don't know exactly what the effects will
be on the economy and society and just the way we move around.
How do you prepare your company for something like that as a founder?
You know, okay, we have a tech company, we're helping connect job seekers and developers
to tech companies, you're hiring them, but like, there's this pandemic, like, what's
going to happen?
Is this going to affect our business?
Maybe it'll help our business.
Maybe everybody will become a software engineer and everybody will want to hire software engineers
or maybe the opposite.
So at what point did you like start making plans for your company?
Well, I don't know, like you're this way.
You're a founder too.
Sometimes you can't trust your own brain because there's this reality distortion field.
So one thing that my brain does a lot, which is very tempting to do is come up with scenarios,
in which case COVID is going to be the key to solving all of our problems.
And somehow it's going to make us win over all our competitors and get all those new
market shares.
So like, and that can be completely not be grounded in reality, but that's kind of one
of the first places where my head went.
I mean, one of the sort of tensions in our business is we have this recruiting marketplace.
So on one side, you have software engineers that are potentially looking for jobs.
And then on the other side, you have companies that potentially want to hire them.
I've always enjoyed the part of our business more that dealt with software engineers rather
than...
So it was like a B2C to B. I like the B2C part a lot more rather than the B2B.
And one of the main reasons I didn't really like the B2B as much is that I always felt
like we had to sell to in-house recruiters rather than engineering managers.
There's some amazing recruiters out there, but most of them are terrible.
It kind of sucks to feel cynical and full of hate about a good chunk of your customer
base.
Generally, what happens is engineering managers are very incentivized to make hires because
they're like, well, either their political power in a company is tied to their headcount
or shit, they just need to get things done and they need a headcount to do that or any
number of reasons, but they're motivated.
In-house recruiters are sort of on the spectrum of very motivated to very unmotivated because
they're not always incentivized to make hires as much as they are incentivized to keep their
job, right?
So it's one of the differences between selling to a profit center and a cost center, right?
In a profit center, if you're selling to them, they just want tools to make them better at
their jobs and to make more money.
And there's this very direct, positive feedback loop.
When you sell to a cost center, it's kind of muddled and you sort of end up being more
incentivized to create tools that make people look like they're good at their jobs.
And even more directly in a lot of companies, in-house recruiters are compensated in part
on commission and they get commission for candidates that they bring in, but they don't
get commission for candidates that they get through what are in a broad swath painted
as agencies because if a company is already paying a third party some finder's fee to
bring in a candidate, they're not going to also pay a finder's fee to the recruiter.
So in-house recruiters have this love-hate relationship with tools and agencies because
on one hand, they're never making the hires they need to make.
So they need somebody to help.
On the other hand, that tool can make them look bad or can cut into their livelihood.
So long story short, I used to be a recruiter as well, and I have this complicated relationship
with recruiters.
But one of my first thoughts was, well, when COVID hits, potentially there will be fewer
recruiters and then maybe it'll be easier for us to do business, or when COVID hits
and this is kind of what ended up happening, we can potentially unlock a new revenue stream
because pre-COVID, engineers had all the leverage in the labor market.
There's such an engineering shortage that if you're a marketplace that wants engineers
in your ecosystem, you can't have any friction to getting them in the door.
If you try to put up a paywall, they're going to laugh at you and all the best people will
leave.
Facebook didn't want to do ads for a long time and they certainly don't want to charge
their users.
It's because the users are the product and they don't have to use you.
They can use any number of other things.
So interviewing IO was always free.
And then I thought, well, post COVID, maybe we'll actually be able...
I didn't want to charge users, but I thought, well, maybe we'll actually be able to charge
and then this might set us up for success because other recruiting marketplaces can't
charge users because they don't offer them anything of value other than jobs.
Right.
So there's this big switch, I think, from running a business in times where the economy
is booming versus times where you're just fighting for survival during a recession or
you've lost a significant chunk of your business where you have to question a lot of your assumptions.
And in your case, that assumption was we can't charge developers because they have so many
other places to go.
And it turns out that actually you probably can because as you said, you're providing
real value to them in a way that other platforms aren't.
You're not a commodity.
You're actually something that people care about.
But when we spoke last year, it was pretty clear that interviewing IO wasn't just some
heartless business effort where you found a gap in the market that you could exploit
to make money.
It's a very meaningful mission driven business.
And you have so many strong opinions from when you worked as a developer and a recruiter
about how hiring is broken and how it doesn't really reflect the realities of who has the
power and which engineer should be considered for which jobs.
And so when you started interviewing IO, and people who aren't familiar with their story,
I recommend they go back and listen to the last episode we did because it's great.
Such a cool story.
But it was very much your attempt to fix the broken industry and do some good in the world.
And you ended up hitting a revenue run rate of millions of dollars a year in the process,
which is pretty cool when you can have both of those things.
But obviously COVID destroyed your business model as it existed.
Completely.
Yeah, I mean, it was so we used to make all our money from employers, right?
So companies would pay us, despite me kind of complaining about recruiters, in many cases,
very great to work with, and they were kind enough to pay us money.
And we'd make, you know, tens of thousands of dollars per hire, in many cases, or our
larger customers will pay us six figure subscriptions for, say, a year of candidate flow.
Then, and I love this because I don't want to charge engineers, like I'm trying to fix
their lives and companies are kind of paying for it.
And everybody thought that was okay.
Then, all of a sudden, COVID hits, right?
And all of these employers that have big subscriptions with us come to us and they're like, hey,
we're just gonna pause.
It wasn't even, hey, our renewal is coming up in six months.
Let's use up what we have.
And we don't know if we're going to renew.
It was just, we're just not going to use you for a while.
And we don't know when we'll be back.
And 75% of our revenue came from these deals.
So that was already extremely alarming, became pretty clear that we would not be able to renew
these on schedule, if ever.
And then the remaining 25% of our revenue came from smaller companies that didn't have
the budget to maybe come into these large deals or have the headcount to need the amount
of volume we were serving, but still used us serendipitously for hires when we needed
them.
And there they pay us this 15% typically finders fee.
And those small companies were, I think, hit harder in a lot of ways than the large ones
because in some ways they have less runway, they have less certainty.
So customer, it was like this normal distribution, right?
So first there's this trickle of pause, very apologetic pausing, right?
And maybe we're getting one every few days and we're girding our loins because we know
the big spike is coming.
And then all of a sudden, companies are canceling multiple times a day.
And in a matter of weeks, we went from millions of dollars to basically zero.
Jeez.
Yeah.
Yeah, all our big customers paused and then we had a few left on contingency, but those
you don't know when they're going to make a hire, you can't build a business around
that.
So it was very, very scary.
Probably the most stressful time professionally in my entire life.
So I had a conversation with Vincent, which he listened to a few weeks back.
And we talked about what motivates founders, kind of on the negative side.
What are you worried about?
Who do you feel obligated to?
A lot of people become founders because they think, oh, it's just going to be this big
happy journey of total freedom.
I don't answer to anybody.
I'm my own boss.
But the reality is you kind of answer to your employees, and obviously your customers and
your partners and co-founders, you may even have investors, you don't want to let down.
And of course, you have your own expectations for yourself.
You're like, hey, Aileen, you said you're going to do this and it's going to succeed.
And then suddenly out of nowhere, you're staring at the potential end of your company.
What do you think or who do you think it was that you were the most worried about letting
down and the most worried about interviewing IO failing?
It was hard because normally you have, if you're not doing well, you have some amount
of time to adjust to the new reality and everything was sped up.
It's like, this is maybe not an apt comparison, but I'll do it anyway.
When a loved one dies in a car accident versus from a drawn out terminal disease or both
are horrific, but in one you're completely blindsided and the other you have time to
practice grieving.
Here it was much more like the car accident.
I've been doing this company for over five years, but I've been angry at recruiting and
hiring and how the status quo works for much longer than that.
I was a recruiter, ran my own firm and was head of hiring at a few companies.
So I've been in this space for almost a decade and that's been my whole life.
So I think that the person or entity I was most afraid of disappointing was myself because
I was scared to look through the other side and be like, okay, well, I don't have this.
Who am I now without this company?
One of the things I saw this comment on Hacker News where somebody was talking about some
companies shutting down and one of the top comments was, well, maybe they were doing
shitty before this and COVID is just a convenient excuse for everybody to say face.
And then I started thinking, well, what if everybody thinks that about interviewing IO?
And then more broadly, I've always believed that hiring should be about connecting smart
people at scale.
It shouldn't be about middlemen.
It shouldn't be about, you know, resumes.
All these things that I think a lot of your listeners probably viscerally find frustrating
and why hiring feels like it sucks, right?
I believed sort of axiomatically that if given, if we can just fix a few things, it's going
to work.
And then I'm like, well, what if we never get to fix these things or what if my whole
worldview is wrong or what if I never get the chance to prove it because market forces
are now against me and, you know, a lot of success is about timing.
So definitely me, after that, my employees, a lot of them are, you know, the engineers,
I thought, okay, they will have the easiest time finding another job, but maybe not, right?
We didn't know what a post COVID economy would look like.
Some of these people have kids.
Some of these people have mortgages.
I didn't know how I could look them in the eye.
And some of them, you know, for non-engineers, finding a new job tends to be a little harder.
So that was horrific.
My investors, I was kind of least worried about.
I figured they'd understand and, you know, one thing you learn as a founder, at first
you're like, oh my God, all these people gave me money and now it's on me not to lose it.
Then you realize they give a lot of people money and most of those people lose their
money.
So they're probably okay with it, not to be too cavalier, but not as worried about them
as about my own identity and mental health and certainly the livelihood of my employees.
Your investors are rich.
They'll be fine.
They'll be okay.
Well, I mean, again, post COVID, a lot of these things we assume like in the early days
I'm like, well, is this going to be the Great Depression?
Is it going to be worse than the Great Depression?
Is this going to be like that show on HBO I've never seen where some portion of the
population is raptured?
I don't know, could be any of them.
Could be anything, who knows?
And I think in situations like that, the fear of the unknown is so much worse than the actual
pain.
Yeah.
You don't know where the bottom is.
You just construct all sorts of mental simulations of like, okay, like what could go wrong?
Whereas the situation you're facing today in this instant might not be nearly that bad.
What kind of timescale is happening in your mind for when the end might come for interviewing
IO?
Well, the beauty of these things unlike in life, in most cases with running a company,
you know exactly when you're dead because you know how much money you have left, right?
Hopefully.
Hopefully.
As a human, you could be dead at any, I could drop dead in the middle of this interview.
Probably won't, but it's possible.
Let's hope I don't.
I would mourn you, Aileen.
Thank you.
You'd be one of the few.
I would still promise that.
I hope you would.
Can you imagine what that would do for my download numbers?
I think it would be better if it were somebody famous.
All right, this is getting dark.
Too dark.
So, you know, we kind of knew when we'd be out of cash and there is like, when you think
about your runway, there is, well, here's our runway if we keep in bringing roughly
the same amount of money we have been, assuming you're not profitable, which many startups
are not, we were not.
And then there is like your, oh my God, we're fucked runway where it's like there is no
more cash as of today.
And that is a lot shorter than, you know, the runway you generally think about because
you make some assumptions about how the world will be.
So you know, we were, I won't mention exact numbers because I probably shouldn't, but
like it wasn't good.
It wasn't good.
Fortunately, you know, in our case, like it wasn't that hard to think of what we could
do, because we did have this valuable thing we were offering people.
So I think anybody in our situation would have thought, okay, well, what do we have
that we can sell?
Okay.
Well, we have these free anonymous mock interviews with engineers from top companies.
This is the reason people are using our product, but it was kind of easy to make that decision
because we had no other choice.
We, we would have shut our doors and then nobody would get interview practice of any
kind or at least, you know, not, not at the caliber that we were giving it, but it was
a hard thing I think to tell our users and it was also a hard thing to accept, right?
You do a lot of things out of necessity, but that doesn't mean that you're happy about
them or that you're proud of them.
And so before we get into the exact details of what you did, let's remind listeners of
how interviewing IO works.
We touched on it earlier, but as a developer, like what's your experience when you come
into interviewing IO?
So most of our users come to us because they're either in the midst of a job search or
they're thinking about their next job search and across the board, they're kind of disgusted
and terrified and equal measure of undergoing a standard algorithmic technical interview.
A lot of our users are maybe senior engineers and they just haven't done this stuff in a
while because it's not what you do at work.
Some of them are juniors.
Maybe this is their first exposure to technical interviews, but either way, whether you're
junior or senior, you're like, oh my God, I have to reverse a binary tree block.
Okay.
What do I do?
Some of our users go on like leak code first and muck around on there a little bit and
then they come to us because talking to another human and having another human breathe down
your neck while you're doing the aforementioned binary tree reversal is a very different experience.
So if you're one of our users, get on the platform and before, before COVID, you set
up a pseudonym because everything's anonymous and then you just see a bunch of times and
you click a time and then when you show up, let's say on Wednesday at noon, there's going
to be an engineer from a fang or comparable company.
Maybe we have some non-fang interviewers like Dropbox and Slack and Uber English, but their
bar is comparable.
And then you meet that person in a version of CoderPad inside our product and they run
you through a very realistic algorithmic or systems design interview.
You can't see them, but you can hear them and then at the end, they give you actionable
feedback and also tell you where you stack up.
So for a lot of people, it's a way of getting your feet wet, but either way, you need to
work on and you break the seal and keep practicing.
Then if you do well in practice, it's a bit of a moving goalpost, but some top percent
of our users, then instead of having to apply online or talk to recruiters or update your
resume or get a friend to refer you, which is potentially dicey and also doesn't help
you that much, you can just click a button and have an interview with any number of great
companies as early as the next day, which is also anonymous.
So if you screw that up, the company doesn't know who you are and if you do well, you get
fast-tracked and go to on-site.
Which is so smart because as engineers, I think these emotions are very real, like in
the same way that your identity as a founder is tied to your company as an engineer.
It sucks to go into an interview and have people know who you are and just completely
bomb it and feel like a failure and this thing you've been studying for, practicing for years,
you're not good enough and someone tells you you're not good enough.
So the idea to have a site where you could practice and practice anonymously and get
better and a low-stake situation is so smart and when you launch this thing, well really
when you just launch the landing page for it because you hadn't built it yet, you got
something like 7,000 signups in one day on Hacker News because people really wanted what
you were building.
Yeah, it was.
I didn't think it would do anything and then that happened and then I was like, all right,
time to quit my dumb recruiting job and actually start this company.
So I think we do add a lot of value for engineers, for some of them it's the practice piece,
for some of them it's just getting fast-tracked at employers but that's what we used to do.
And as I mentioned earlier, it was completely free for engineers.
We did limit how many interviews people could do because we still had to pay our interviewers
but I think you got at least three generally and potentially you could unlock more by doing
various things on the site and then employers paid us for hires.
Now, post COVID, all of that changed very, very fast.
Yeah, you had to sort of become almost like a brand new founder, a brand new indie actor
where you're like, our business model no longer works because the people paying us money are
no longer hiring or paying any money whatsoever.
What are we going to do?
I'm curious about how you approach this because a lot of people listening in are trying to
figure out how to come up with an idea and they might not have had the same advantages
that you had.
You already had a huge user base, you already had a lot of momentum, you already had a team.
But still, it's not immediately obvious, 100% clear what idea is going to work once your
old business model stops working.
So how did you approach figuring out how to save the company when you realized that you
didn't have a lot of runway and you weren't going to be able to make money the way you
always had?
Yeah, so a few things.
One of the first things I did was go...
And this is maybe not the first thing I should have done but this was something that at least
I knew could work, was I went to one of our engineers, I was like, can you just look at
Strike this weekend and see how it works?
So we're going to need payments.
You figure that out.
Now, while you figure that out, I am just going to email our users.
And basically, the way interviewing IO worked before is we had a good amount of tens of
thousands of users but then we also had a very, very long wait list.
So our wait list consisted of folks that were either outside the US because we were generally
operating in the US, or engineers that we didn't think we could place.
And the reason for that is we're paying for their interviews so we had to have some reasonable
expectation that we could make that money back.
Now, many other players would say that these are people that didn't go to top schools or
top companies.
We didn't look at that at all.
We didn't care what their LinkedIn or their resume looked like.
Instead, what we cared about was, are they senior and are they actually a software engineer?
Those are the main things.
That means that we had a lot of juniors on our wait list.
We also had folks that weren't in our target markets on our wait list.
So I started going through some of our wait listed users and asking them if they would
like to get off the wait list if they could potentially pay for interviews.
And this email took me, the first draft took me so long because I felt like I wanted to
pour my heart out and apologize to them and explain that we're fucked in the wake of COVID
and we have to do something.
But the whole team helped me edit it.
We kind of got it down to something manageable.
And I would just start sending out these emails to folks on our wait list while we still continue
to let people on because we didn't know how long this would last and I didn't want to
just stop our candidate flow to the companies that we're still hiring.
So we're still sort of hemorrhaging money on one side, but we're testing out this thing.
So just emailing users and just offering them different price points.
And I started a spreadsheet and just tracked email open rates, email response rates.
And then we did this very, very janky thing and some users are like, are you a person
or are you scamming us?
Because we literally just had a PayPal link.
It was like PayPal me slash interviewing IO or something.
And we're like, okay, if you want to, great, you want to get off the wait list and you're
willing to pay, cool, send money here.
And we saw if they'd actually send money there and they did.
So we thought, well, if people are willing to trust us and send money to this janky link,
then probably if we built payments and what this wasn't all over email, it's not a crazy
assumption that this would work.
So we tried a few different price points.
We had no idea what to charge.
We kind of knew what market rates were for some of these things, but that felt a little
too expensive.
So we tried any number of things.
One of the interesting things we discovered in the process was that our users tended to
be kind of bimodal in their approach.
There are some portion of people for whom paying between 100 and 200 some dollars in
interview, depending on what the interview was, was no problem.
And they buy multiples and that's one hump in the curve.
And then the other one was users that are all the way at the other end and at most they'll
pay 10 or $20.
And there weren't that many people in the middle.
But this is literally like every morning I'd wake up and be like, who signed up?
Who got waitlisted?
Who can I reach out to?
Eventually we stopped doing free interviews entirely because we realized COVID wasn't
a blip and this is our new reality.
And then we just emailed everybody that signed up basically the day before that was in the
U.S. saying, hey, we have a waitlist, you want to skip the waitlist?
This is how much it costs per interview.
And then we started trying different offerings.
So we saw that a lot of our users wanted not just a practice interview, but a practice
interview with a Googler or with an engineer from Facebook or with an engineer from Amazon,
either because they already had interviews at those companies or because aspirationally
that's where they wanted to be.
So much good stuff there that I want to ask you about.
But this scrappy process you're going through where you're the founder and you're actually
taking the time to email users and send them this like janky PayPal link because nothing
set up.
That's what I mean about going back to square one and becoming kind of like a brand new
indie hacker even though you had a mature business.
And I'm curious, how did you do that when you had a team behind you?
How aware was your team of how dire the situation was?
Were they worried?
Or is this just sort of you doing this all by yourself and hoping your team doesn't find
out that you might be screwed?
No, they knew.
One of the things I think that founders can underestimate just in talking to founder friends
of mine is how perceptive and plugged in employees are.
They can tell.
I mean, they can tell your mood.
They can tell everything that's going on.
So I've taken an approach where I just tell my team what's going on.
Because if not, they'll know.
I've made some missteps in the past where I haven't told them what was going on and
then something that some grand plan I have didn't work out.
And it ended up affecting them and it blew up in all our faces.
So after learning the hard way also, I just stopped and I just tell everybody.
We have a graph where I shared this with a whole company.
I'm like, this is our burn.
This is how much money is coming in.
These are our projections.
These are the assumptions I'm making in these projections.
You can see exactly the month in which we're going to run out of cash.
And then you can also see how our revenue numbers are changing as we try different things.
And this was not everybody spent time looking at it.
Some people did.
But this way, it's all out there.
My ops team was really helpful in doing some of these.
As I figured out, the first iterations I did myself because I had no idea what I was doing.
So I wanted to kind of get a feel for how to do this before delegating it to others.
But people helped with copy.
And then as we jumped in, the rest of the team also helped with testing.
In parallel, my engineer got strife working, which wasn't hard.
And then after that, we started even before I thought we needed it for sure.
We started building a prototype for paid interviews.
In some ways, we were lucky because we already had a lot of product built.
But there are a lot of UI changes that we needed to make and UX changes that we needed
to make.
How do we explain to users that this is our new model in the UI without writing a giant
essay?
How do we show them all of these different options?
Do we roll our own order management system?
Or do we use something like Shopify?
There are all of these.
And I need help with projections.
Like reasonably, how much revenue can we expect from this in the best case?
So after I found my sea legs a little bit, it was definitely a team effort.
And some folks on the team had much more experience with consumer businesses than I did.
And pricing than I did.
So it was critical to lean on them.
I think I would have done the company a disservice if I had tried to go it alone.
And I can't imagine it was easy to decide on this business model where you're going
to charge your developers.
Because maybe that was the obvious approach, because you have all these developers who
are getting all this value for free.
But you literally used to say at the top of your website, practice interviewing with engineers
from Google, Facebook, etc.
It's free and always will be.
And in a way that's a promise to your customers like, hey, we will not charge you.
Yeah.
If you go to the way back machine, you'll see it's there.
And we...
I'm looking at it right now.
Yeah.
Right.
And we inadvertently lied.
One of the guy that started on the day of the quarantine, I think like his first...
So the first onboarding task that every engineer, I think everybody at the company does, is
we have this corpus of pseudonyms where we have an adjective and a noun, and then it
just puts them together.
So you can be like monstrous penguin or nihilistic defenestration, which was my handle for a
long time.
But your first commit is usually adding to that corpus.
So you add a funny adjective and you add a funny noun.
So after that one, his first commit was like, hey, find all references to free.
And can you like remove them, which was really...
It felt so shitty.
It felt shitty for me.
It felt shitty for the team.
But I think we all knew that it was either this or we're dead.
So I guess we're going to do this and we're just going to try to be honest about it and
own what we're doing and hope that our users forgive us.
This is another difference between starting a company and sort of booming economic times
and a time of recession and just fighting for survival.
The booming times are like, hey, we're offering all this value, but it's free.
And here's all these promises that we don't need to make, but we're going to make and
everything's good.
And then the hard times are like, this promise is rescinded.
We are charging.
It is X dollars a month, take it or leave it.
We need to actually survive.
And that's all you have to do as a founder, because if your company shuts down, you can't
even keep your original promise.
You can't provide a free service if your company doesn't exist.
But were you afraid of how users might take that?
Because people on the internet are sort of, especially developers, it can be ornery.
Yeah, extremely excited when companies charge money for things that were previously free.
Extremely afraid.
I think I was afraid of two things.
I was afraid, one, of just people hating us and then also hating me.
A lot of what I love about my job is that it's awesome building for engineers.
They're like the best users because you admire them, right?
You're like, wow, these people are building things themselves and it's cool to build things
for builders.
And they're insightful, right?
And they're solving a lot of the same problems at work that you're solving.
So in some ways, they have a lot of empathy for, they're like, oh, I see you guys are
AB testing this thing.
Like, they get it, right?
They peel back the curtain and they kind of understand what's going on.
And they have strong opinions and they'll tell you and the bug reports people submit
are beautiful because they're super detailed.
And I love building for these users.
And one of the things I love about my job is that engineers like us generally, right?
And they, by extension, like me.
And then I was like, what if this is it, right?
What if this is the blow from which we will never recover?
Part of me thought, well, look, as long as you're still adding value, some portion of
people will use it because it doesn't matter if people love you or your brand.
At the end of the day, what matters is, are you giving them something that they want?
And no matter how great of a brand you have, if you're not doing that, that's temporary,
they're going to leave.
So that was scary, though, because I expected a lot of blowback.
And in some ways, what sucked too is I had sold a lot of people on this vision of how
hiring should be, kind of alluded to that earlier.
And was this a big capitulation, like, no, actually, hiring isn't going to be the way
we want.
And we have to charge these people that we never wanted to charge.
So really scary.
Like I said, the whole team jumped in and helped me edit this almost tearful email to
the community about what was going on.
And it was extremely well received.
I was so grateful.
I was shocked first and foremost, but then I was extremely grateful that people understood.
Like one of the things that I think made it better is we decided like, even if we're charging,
we're still going to have some kind of free tier, right?
And we to this day have a tier where you can interview other users and they'll interview
you.
So it's this sort of peer to peer thing.
And I think that that helps soften the blow a little bit, but also it helped us kind of
continue this mission of like, if somebody can't pay, like they should still be able
to get some help.
So we did that.
That made me sleep better at night.
And I think it helped some portion of our users that it would have been probably upset
otherwise, even if the quality of those interviews is more up and down, and less predictable
than a professional interviewer.
I think when people, maybe the analog, I know that's closest, it's just raising prices.
Often founders have similar fears as yours, people are going to hate me if we raise prices
and we've always charged x dollars a month, how can we really justify charging twice as
much?
And then people do it.
And every now and then, you get some hate emails and some negative reactions and some
angry tweets.
By and large, if you're providing value to people, and it's worth the cost, and people
understand why you're doing it, you're not just trying to like squeeze some extra money
out of them, but like you're facing certain death in a global pandemic, or if you've hired
more people and you're providing more features, and now you need to charge more to support
the team.
I think usually customers understand.
And when it comes to making a promise as explicitly as you did, you know, it's free and always
will be.
I was thinking about a quote from Reid Hoffman recently where he said, the only promise to
the customers that you can't break is giving them the value that they need, you know, for
a price that they can afford.
That's a really good point.
So ultimately, yeah, I think it's so true.
And so, you know, obviously, it worked out in your favor, things have sort of turned
around.
How well are you doing now?
You know, you were millions in revenue before, you lost pretty much all of it practically
overnight.
How well did this new change work?
Well, what was crazy is so we shipped the first version of paid interviews in a real
way where it wasn't just me emailing people being like, please, sir, can I have some money
at this PayPal link?
We shipped in in May and I think in a matter of like six weeks, we went from nothing to
a million dollar run rate, which is like unreal.
So like, I'm still shocked that that happened.
And I'm so grateful that our users were willing to do that.
We also had to change, you know, we used to pay our interviewers more than we're paying
them now.
So I'm very grateful that they were kind of willing to take that hit.
And that, you know, there were more people that were willing to be interviewers.
But yeah, that was unreal.
And you know, I didn't really sleep well for months.
And then I remember when we kind of got close to a million, which we're still not profitable,
but once we got there, I had the first good sleep I'd had in a long time.
We're now close to where we used to be.
And we're growing pretty steadily month over month.
Some months are crazy high.
Some months, it's just a little bit of growth, but every month is better than the last.
That's crazy how fast you had that turnaround.
And it just goes to show how much unlocked potential that you had sitting there on your
waiting list.
Pretty much this whole time.
Yeah.
Is there any part of you that regrets like not doing this earlier?
Like last year, pre pandemic, like do you think you go back in time?
Would you have, you know, charged developers?
It's a really good question.
The answer is that I don't know.
And in fact, our data scientist came to me with this, like really well thought out presentation
where he's like, look, we clearly have product market fit on the practice side companies.
Yeah.
We're like making more money than we probably would be from candidates, but it doesn't feel
like a machine.
We should charge.
And I disagreed with him.
Of course, once this happened, I went to him kind of apology hat in hand, being like, Hey,
dude, you know, I think, I think you might've been right about this.
But the fact is, I don't know, right?
Because, um, so much of our behavior is shaped by market forces.
And I think one of the reasons people are more willing to, maybe they're not, maybe
the, I think some portion of our users would, would always have paid, right?
But I think the hard thing, uh, when I thought about it before was how do we decide who is
going to get the service for free and whom we're going to charge?
And that, that didn't seem like a question that had a good answer, right?
Very pragmatically speaking, if we were to charge it before, we'd say, okay, candidates
that have no trouble getting jobs and have a lot of network and, and, you know, have
friends with whom they can practice and already have a good job, we can give this to them
for free.
And people that really need this, we should charge them.
But that felt gross.
And I just like didn't want to do that.
And then if we charge everybody, we would probably scare away the users whom we needed
most, right?
A lot of misconceptions around interviewing IO or that our whole platform is junior engineers.
And even now it's really hard for juniors pre-COVID, it was extra hard for juniors to
get jobs.
And when we went to sell to employers, they'd always say, Oh, well, we don't want to pay
for junior engineers.
And then we'd be like, wait, wait, no, no, no.
Like our average years of experience is around seven, right?
Most of our engineers are senior.
About 60% of them are already at top companies, 40% of them you probably wouldn't hire based
on their resume and our value is in getting you those candidates and then making you feel
bad that you previously rejected them.
But if we tried to charge a lot of our users, I think would just not pay.
But post COVID, as I mentioned earlier, the sad thing is there are more candidates competing
for fewer jobs.
And that has changed the dynamic.
So I don't feel so great about that.
But one of the ways I've tried to resolve charging people in a time when they need help
the most is we've created some scholarships and some fellowships, which I hope we can
expand.
And, you know, we'll just as long as we stay alive, I will I always do what I can to make
sure that we're we're not unfairly treating people that can't pay us.
I mean, figuring out who to charge and how much to charge them is just another problem
that I think any hackers run into when they first start their businesses.
And with you, you had this interesting dynamic where it seemed like some people, as you said
over email, were willing to pay hundreds of dollars to find a job.
And some people like really didn't want to pay that much to do interview practice.
And I think one of the cool things about the whole space that you're in the hiring space
is that there's just so much money changing hands, which is indicative of how much value
there is.
I tell founders all the time, like, if you're not sure what industry to be in, like, ideally,
pick an industry that's like the intersection of something that you love, and also something
where people clearly find things valuable because they're paying lots of money.
And with you, it's on both sides.
Companies pay software engineers so much money per year to hire them.
It's like their lifeblood to have talented software engineers.
And so they're willing to pay recruiters or companies like yours a lot of money to help
them hire.
But also people who are learning to code or people who are trying to get jobs, like that's
a transformative event to get a job at a company that's going to pay you a high salary as a
software engineer.
And so if there's a platform that helps you do that, like if I'm going to get a job that's
going to pay me six figures, I'll probably be willing to sell out hundreds, if not thousands
of dollars to make that process more guaranteed.
So I guess what I'm curious about is, what was the difference between the people who
were willing to pay you $200 a month or whatever it was for interview practice versus the people
who were only willing to pay like 20 bucks a month?
Yeah, so it's not per month.
It's per interview.
So you just kind of pay as you go.
The people that...
Even better.
Yeah, right.
You just use what you want and you don't use what you don't want.
I think that there is definitely a high level.
Senior engineers tend to be more willing to pay than juniors.
And people who still have a job are more willing to pay than people who've been laid off.
So if you just cut the audience that way, you're probably going to get like 80% of the
truth.
There's some skeptics, there's some users whom I talked to when I was doing user research
and they're like, yeah, I have the money.
I just don't know if I want to spend it on this.
So one of the things that we started thinking about was, well, how can we de-risk this purchase?
How can we make it so people do the practice that they need and then pay us once they get
a job?
And we actually, we rolled out a V1 of what we call financial aid recently, where you
can defer payments until you find a job.
And as long as it takes you as that's as long as it takes.
One of the things I found really surprising in my user research is people are like, yeah,
I would totally pay for this.
Like, yeah, it's amazing.
I can practice with a Googler.
I pay like 50 bucks a month for that and maybe I can get three interviews.
I'm like, do you know how much an hour of a Googler's time is worth?
A lot more than that.
So there's definitely that mismatch, but I think it's pretty cut and dry.
If you have a steady income and it's a high amount because you've been in this industry
for years, you'll pay.
And if not, then maybe some college students can pay a lot of money.
Some can't, most can't.
So what do you think was your biggest uncertainty after you unveiled this new plan and users
seemed like, you know what, this is okay.
We'll pay for this.
What was your remaining uncertainty that this might not work?
Yeah.
So it was easy, I mean, not easy, but we were able to get some portion of our users paying
immediately right now.
The thing we're struggling with is growth, right?
So how do we get more than X percent of users to buy something?
And the more you do this, of course, the harder it gets because you've exhausted some of the
lower hanging fruit.
One of the cool things about this actually is that it's turned our culture into much
more of a culture of experimentation.
Before when we made changes to our product, our sort of north star was how many hires
are we making?
And the latency between an engineer signing up for interviewing IO and an engineer can
get a job is significant.
So you know, three to six months on average.
So running any kind of A-B test or new offerings for users wasn't very expedient because it
took forever to see any kind of result.
And the other reason is it's a funnel.
So by the time, no matter how many users you have at the top, by the time you get to the
point where people are finding jobs through you, there are a lot fewer, which means that
it takes longer to see results if things are close.
So now the feedback loop is much tighter because somebody gets on the platform and then they
buy something or don't typically in a day or two.
Most people buy the first day they're on.
So we can start doing all sorts of weird stuff and running experiments and seeing what's
going to work and what's not, but it does get harder.
Like once you sort of maxed out on the low hanging fruit, what do you do next?
And one of the things we're going to start thinking about is growth, right?
Our unit economics are pretty good now.
So how do we get more people in at the top?
Maybe funnel hacking is not the right thing to do anymore and we just need more people.
But that's a tension that we're dealing with internally.
Yeah, user acquisition, I think often people see these graphs of Facebook's growth or like
any rocket ship startup's growth and it's just like up and to the right, like a perfectly
smooth curve.
But the reality is often there's plateaus and you figure out things at work and then
you sort of exhaust that channel and you've got to go back to the drawing board and figure
it out again.
Yeah.
And a lot of the time you also looking at those graphs, you don't know where that growth
came from, right?
And you don't know if it's ROI positive growth, not to be super cynical, but when we did paid
marketing for a time, our growth numbers went through the roof, but that's not necessarily
a win because are you making money per user or not?
And sometimes when you're running a startup, it doesn't matter because people just care
about engagement metrics.
But in this climate, we're all about revenue.
So we have to be a lot more careful with things like paid marketing, even though we're probably
going to start doing that soon, but when you see those graphs, there's generally a lot
more going on under the hood than first meets the eye.
Yeah.
I think that's just, you know, it speaks to the times, like recession, Aileen has got
to think about revenue and got to think about keeping expenses low.
And we spoke last year, you're telling me about like how you spend your day as a CEO.
And you said, well, I spent a lot of time thinking, a lot of time hiring, a lot of writing.
How has that changed this year?
Oh, to be pre-recession, Aileen, again, well, these days, I spend a lot more time in spreadsheets
and looking at revenue and projections, also looking at A-B test results, right?
So I'm in a much more kind of product analyst role than I used to be before.
I definitely not spending much time on hiring, where the team is the way it is, and it's
lean, and we're going to work our asses off and stay the way we are until we hit profitability.
But I think the writing thing is still important.
I've written a couple things since the pandemic started, and I'm working on another piece.
I think like content marketing for us has always been such a great thing.
And now more than ever, I find myself wanting to communicate with our users, because I want
them to understand where we're coming from and why we're doing the things that we're
doing, especially now that they're kind enough to give us money to do it.
I think now more than ever, people are hungry to read things.
I mean, it's been a kind of recurring theme on the podcast this year.
Just number one, how much money people are making just by writing on the internet, paid
newsletters have sort of blown up.
People are getting subscribers faster than ever, and it's become almost like a trendy
thing to be a thought leader and publish your own podcast or your own paid newsletter, etc.
But you've been doing this forever.
Even before you started interviewing, I know you were doing lots of research and what stands
out on a resume.
And it's been tremendously popular because it's just a space where the stakes are high
and people really want to know what works.
I also think it's a space where most other writers don't share data and graphs.
I think that the reason people like my writing, the writing is that good necessarily.
It's the fact that I'm willing to peel back the curtain and do these painstaking experiments,
which I love doing.
I think writing also gives you a nice mental break from...
At least with writing, it's something I can control.
I know that if I put in 40 hours, I will have something that's decent at the end.
I've done this long enough now to kind of have a repeatable process with some of the
other stuff we're doing on the product side, selling.
It's completely non-deterministic.
You could spend so much time on a feature and then it doesn't work.
We've had a few losses like that where I was sure this is going to be the thing that changes
everything.
I've learned not to think that way anymore because it's naive and there's never a thing
that changes everything.
But writing at least, I'm like, hey, if I spend 40 hours on this, I know this many people
will read it and some of them will like it enough to share it.
Give me an example of how you might put out something that you've written and why you're
so certain that it would succeed and maybe contrast that with an example of a feature
that you thought about building and you're so confident about it and it turns out it
didn't go down the way that you planned.
Well, let's think.
I'll use an example of something we wrote a while ago or no, I'll even talk about the
thing that kind of put me on the map.
This was many years ago, but even then when I hadn't written much, I kind of knew this
would resonate.
I was a software engineer for a time then I switched to being a recruiter and on my
first recruiting job, I decided that I would try to create the be all and end all like
logistic regression to sort of predict which resumes are going to end up as offers.
What does a winning resume look like?
I fed it with the resumes of everybody we had interviewed the year I was there and also
with the resumes of people who had joined the company previously and I thought that
this would be easy.
I think what mistake engineers make a lot when working in a space that isn't engineering
is hey, if we just make the tech good, everything else would be great.
We just need to optimize this thing.
If we could just have like lower latency, something or another, we'd have better government.
Well, it's like, no, that's actually not, the engineering is not the hard part.
I fell into that and it was hard to really get that much signal out of it, but I realized
that one of the things that did carry signal was how many typos and grammatical errors
a resume had.
And of course, the fewer, the better, didn't matter where people went to school, didn't
matter how senior they were.
So I did this big study kind of saying like a lot of the things we look at on resumes
don't actually mean anything and here are the few things that mean something.
I published that, submitted it to Hacker News.
I had a good feeling that that would do well because so many people are frustrated by the
way hiring works.
I felt like if I could arm people with a little bit of data that backed up some of these intuition,
some of these intuitive things they'd been feeling and thinking, then it would be a win.
And in fact, that has been the formula in my mind for succeeding with an engineering
audience.
As you think about what do people believe, but that's controversial, but don't necessarily
have the evidence to back up.
And if you can tell that story and just arm them with hopefully meaningful, real, thorough
data about why their intuition was right, then they'll respond to it.
That's different than feature development because features don't care.
A few different strong insights kind of power your company through content marketing.
It's understanding that people want these insights and that you have the data to provide
them.
And with your product, it's kind of understanding on both sides that companies are looking to
sort of, they're looking for these unfair advantages in hiring.
If there's some overlooked group of developers that they can hire who are actually really
good, then that's great for them.
And developers are just looking for practice in a safe way where they're not going to risk
their ego or their reputation and they can actually get practice.
But out of all three of those, it seems like the content one is probably the one that you're
the least double down on.
Seems to be you who's writing the content.
Have you ever thought about building out a team and making this a function of something
that you do?
Yeah.
We have our guest posts and our data scientist has written a few things that have been much
more in depth than I think rigorous than anything I've ever written.
Mine tend to be a little more off the cuff where I'm like, yeah, that's good enough.
Not so in his.
We actually have very likely our first guest posts in a while coming up soon because I
think content is such a powerful machine.
Historically, it hasn't been the most high priority thing on my list and we haven't had
the resources to grow a team around it.
But now where it's becoming very, very clear that our product works, our unit economics
work, and we probably just need more people to come in at the top.
All of a sudden, content marketing is a bigger and bigger part of that strategy.
So it's something we thought about, haven't done it yet, but it's something we're toying
with.
One of the things that's been hard about finding a content person is there aren't that many
people that write well and also have the domain expertise to have the right tone for the audience
that we're trying to attract.
I've talked to some content people and the last thing I want is top 10 things engineers
do wrong in interviews or one weird trick to make your penis bigger and make you better
at algorithmic interviews.
It's not...
Developers hate that stuff.
Developers hate it.
I take a lot of this for granted because I'm part of the community and I used to be one
and there are a lot of people that don't...
They're like, okay, what programming language is?
Nobody cares.
Nobody cares.
You need to have something much more subtle and much more thoughtful in the second, third
order stuff.
So maybe I'm being a little bit too prescriptive, but it's been hard to find someone.
But I met somebody on the internets recently that I think is a great writer and he's probably
going to do some stuff for us so we'll see how it pans out.
I've dealt with kind of the same challenge at IndieHackers, but in reverse, I find people
who have domain expertise, but then they're not the best writers because they're like
developers and founders and that doesn't necessarily make you great at expressing your ideas and
telling a story in a way that readers actually care about.
Yeah.
So I've been trying to work through this problem too.
Well, what have you learned?
Do you have any tips for me?
I've been talking to a lot of people about it and just working through with IndieHackers.
And I think a lot of it, number one, just comes down to editing and sort of pairing
people up.
So you might not have one person who's good at both skills, but if you kind of prioritize
the domain expertise and you pair them with someone who's like, okay, well, I know how
to tell a story, etc. and work with them, which in IndieHackers case often is me or
my brother, I think that can often produce better and more entertaining stories and things
that actually resonate and are meaningful rather than like are cheap, you know, like
some like cheap listicle or that are like overly, you know, they're sufficiently technical,
but like, they're just not, they're just like a drudge to read through.
So that's kind of where I'm at.
But I like talking about the stuff because it's very much a work in progress.
I don't know what the answer is.
And you don't know what the answer is.
No idea.
I think what's cool for listeners is most of them are in a place where they don't know
how to grow their companies either necessarily.
So I'm just curious, like, how do you model this whole challenge in your mind?
Are you more of like, I need to find out what's working for another company and copy them
or you need to find out what's worked for us in the past and extend that?
Like how do you even know out of all the millions of possibilities, what to even investigate
as to how interviewing can grow in the future?
I've generally been a fan of just trying stuff quickly and then seeing if it works.
There's so few cases where other people's advice has worked for me, mostly, I think
because advice, unless it's somebody that really, really knows your situation is going
to be this first order thing, like reading advice blogs isn't that useful most of the
time.
And, you know, even, you know, some of our investors who are kind enough to give us advice
don't have the full grasp of like what we're doing.
So I think the best thing is to just try stuff yourself.
One other thing back to the subject of content marketing that actually was surprising to
me that I learned and helped me a lot is last year I wrote a few chapters in a book about
recruiting and that was one of the first times that I worked with a professional editor.
And man, oh, man, is that a gift like that is amazing.
They're amazing.
Right.
And I've, you know, since just like used her on and off from my writing because I can just
vomit out a few drunken pages, clean them up a little, like make sure the data is correct
once I sober up and then I can just pass it to her and she's like, hey, let's reorganize
it this way.
Did you mean this?
And, you know, cuts it down.
That's I don't know if that's that's useful for the audience, but that's that's one of
those things that I just I didn't for some reason, I had no faith that editors were good.
I don't know why I thought this.
I think I'm just cynical about everything and I think that holds me back because I should
probably take other people's advice more.
This is one of those situations where like, oh, yeah, this is why this whole industry
exists.
Okay, cool.
Well, I think if you're a founder in general, you're somebody who's pretty confident about
your skills is someone who's obviously pretty talented and it's like just the whole dilemma
of hiring in general is like, you've got to find someone to do the thing that you're already
good at.
Like you've already written a bunch of hit viral blog posts.
And like how can you really put trust or faith in someone else to take part of what you know
how to do really well and do it and your place and a lot of it is like you have to just kind
of like try it and dive in and like ideally find someone who's great.
And the opposite can happen to like I've talked to so many founders who made like a bunch
of bad hires not just like solidified in their mind that like you can't hire you can't outsource
it got to do it all yourself.
But man, when you work with someone really good, does it really change your thinking
about how capable other people can be?
Yeah, and it's like, you know, it's easier in some domains than others.
So I trust our end team implicitly.
Because I like I was a decent engineer, I was never great.
And like, I haven't written code for this company for, I don't know, like five years,
like I wrote some at the beginning and then I hand it like, I'm not going to meddle in
what they're doing.
I trust them.
And they're there.
They've shown over and over that like, I don't need to meddle and they know exactly what they're
doing.
But it's harder when it's something that you know how to do, right?
One of my friends always used to say it's shitty being a designer in some ways, because
design is one of those things that everybody thinks they know how to do because it's approachable,
right?
Unlike coding.
You just don't know it.
You don't know it.
Great.
The engineers get left in peace.
There are topics like that where people think they're experts.
And they aren't.
And there's really no way to convince them that their design isn't good, that their thoughts
on the economy, like violate all the rules of economics that we know about.
But anyway, Aileen, you've had quite a journey.
I mean, you faced basically certain death.
You somehow managed to turn it around.
I stared into the abyss.
I stared into the abyss and you've returned safely and you're on the up and up.
I know you said that your approach is that other people's advice hasn't worked out for
you.
But I think that's perhaps my favorite prompt to ask you the question, what's your advice
for people listening in?
You think people shouldn't necessarily take others' advice.
And yet you've got a lot of experience where probably some of the advice that you would
share would be very helpful to some people listening in.
So if someone's an indie hacker, they're trying to figure out how to survive during the recession
or maybe come up with an idea from scratch, what do you think they can take away from
your journey, Aileen?
Yeah.
I guess strategic advice is better than tactical.
Broad strokes are less likely to be wrong.
I think the best thing that in hindsight, and we're not out of the woods yet, right?
We're on the up and up.
I hope we make it.
We're growing, but let's hope we keep it that way.
But I think it's too early for me to rest on my laurels and say, well, just do what
Aileen did and everything's going to be great.
But we did escape certain death, and we did have a pretty crazy redemption period.
So if there's anything I learned from this, I think is make decisions fast.
I'm so glad that we started looking into people paying for interviews even before it was clear
that COVID was here to stay.
That gave us, I think, a month's head start in some ways.
But if we hadn't done that, we might have been much closer to running out of money.
So make decisions fast.
I think that the other thing is do your best to test things quickly.
Do it cheaply, right?
Maybe it's emails.
Maybe it's something else.
Just figure out what is the best way I can get signal on whatever this question is.
If you're just starting a company.
In our case, when we first started, we threw up a really crappy marketing site and put
it on Hacker News.
And that was the test, but don't worry about the details.
Just figure out what's the most basic question you can ask and try to get a validation and
an answer for that as soon as you can.
And I don't know.
In some ways, maybe this whole thing is a blessing because it really forces you to build
a much more sustainable business than you could otherwise.
And just because it's hard for you doesn't mean it's not hard for other people.
This is hard.
This is something I remind myself.
This is really, really hard for everybody right now with the exception of maybe a few
war profiteers whom I respect.
But for the most part, everybody's struggling.
Everybody's struggling.
And I love the advice that you gave because it parallels what you actually did.
You were scrappy when you first launched Interviewing IO and Hacker News with just like a landing
page and nowhere product behind it.
And you're scrappy even now when you had millions in revenue and a dozen employees, you're still
just sending out these scrappy PayPal links and you hadn't built anything yet.
I think way too many founders wait for their thing to be like perfect before they launch
or perfect before they release.
But if you can iterate quickly and cheaply and make decisions fast, then I think you'll
be much more likely to catch errors in your thinking and get on the right track sooner
rather than later.
Yeah, nothing can be uglier than the emails we send out.
Take heart.
That's the bar.
That's the bar.
Ugly as the emails that Aileen sent out.
Aileen, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to find what you're doing at Interviewing IO?
Just go to interviewing.io.
It's so easy when your company name is your domain name.
It's a blessing and a curse.
Thank you.
All right.
Thanks Aileen.
Later.
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you should leave a review for us on iTunes or Apple Podcasts.
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Thank you so much for listening and as always, I will see you next time.