Hello, hello. This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers 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 of their companies and 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.
Today, I'm talking to Ketan and Jarya. Ketan, welcome to the IndieHackers podcast.
Oh, thank you for having me.
You are the founder of a company called Hire Club. We interviewed you on the website about
six months ago, and you were doing $11,000 a month in revenue at the time. What's changed
since then, and where are you at now?
Well, I'm a big fan of IndieHackers. Thank you for having me on a podcast. A lot has changed.
We are actually now doing $31,000 a month in revenue, which has been incredible. I think
one of the big things that's changed is we are constantly improving our product. We don't
rest in our laurels. We are always listening to users. We're always listening to feedback.
Sometimes we're fixing issues like next day. And I think that creates a lot of trust between...
So the product we have is career coaching, right? So what we do is we help people get
ahead in their careers by matching them with a career coach, and then we take a cut of
that. And what we realize is that trust is probably the most important factor in coaching,
right? So our job is to build software that creates trust, and how do you do that? So
I think what we've been doing is creating more trust by having more quality software,
by having software that you can understand better, by having coaches that listen to you
and understand you better. And it's created this amazing organic growth. We've grown 20%
a month for the last five months straight.
Yeah, it's crazy. How does it feel to go from a lot of dollars a month in revenue to 30,000
in just six months?
It feels absolutely incredible. Why I don't want to use the word product market fit because
that's like the golden goose that everyone wants to have. I think we're seeing early
signs of it, right? By seeing retention go up and churn go down and revenue go up. And
so it feels really great. It also feels, I feel like a startup is like a child where
every age has different needs. So like a six month old startup has a different set of needs
than a year old startup. And so every time you get to the next level, you have different
challenges, right? And so now I think we're in this like awkward teenage phase where we're
like, Hey, we kind of know what we're doing. But we're also kind of awkward and gangly
and still got to figure some stuff out, you know,
it's like you're, you're coming into your own as an adult, but also you suddenly hate
your parents.
Yeah, sure. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. And I think that is the interesting
and amazing challenge about being a founder and having a startup is like, there's new
challenges every, every month, every growth kind of mark a milestone. There's new challenges.
Heart Club started off in its infancy as a Facebook group in 2011. Is that accurate?
It is. It is. What was your goal in the beginning of starting a Facebook group?
You know, I was a big proponent of Eric and the lean startup movement. Right. And I had
a design agency back in 2011. So we had clients like Adobe, Microsoft, Twitter, Skype, and
we were making different mobile apps and things like that for them. And I actually instituted
a 20% day like like Google has where our team could just think of ideas. And one of the
ideas we came up with on a Friday was hire club. And the goal was, you know, back then
we wanted to find amazing people to hire immediately. Right. And we didn't want to spend a lot of
money doing it. And hiring as I'm sure as you know, is one of the hardest things in
any business startup or not. And so I had this idea. I said, Hey, let's create an obviously
I'm a big fan of fight club and a big fan of the movie and the book. And we said, let's
create this thing without spending money. Right. And what can we do to kind of help
people get fine jobs, help hire great talent. So we had these five rules from day one, you
know, first rule, don't talk about hire club. Right. Second rule, vouch for your friends.
Third rule, post jobs you have access to. Fourth rule, be kind. And fifth rule back
then was fuck recruiters. And our whole goal was moving fast in hiring. And interestingly
enough, we had posts on our first day. And our very first day, we had our first interview,
someone got interviewed right off the group. And the first week we had our first hire.
And this was not spending any money. And I think when it comes to user research, when
it comes to product development, if you can learn without spending money, it's a wonderful
way to learn about product. And Facebook's groups back then were pretty in there. They're
in their infancy. No one was really doing anything like this back then. And so the group
just organically grew, you know, and we kind of took off from there.
So you had rules right at the beginning, partly inspired by Fight Club. I run a community
and the hackers has many tens of thousands of people on it. I don't have any rules, nothing
explicit. And my thinking is that people will generally use their common sense, they'll
watch how others are behaving and sort of adjust their behavior likewise. And I don't
want to have too many rules, because I don't want there to be a lot of friction, like some
of those subreddits, for example, where you go on and you can't even make a post because
you've got to read a whole book of rules first, it doesn't seem very friendly. How do you
think about striking a balance when you're running a community between making it easy
to participate and having rules so that it's actually useful for people?
So one of the things I think is really important in any kind of talk about what you're doing
is we didn't really know what we were doing in the beginning. And I think it's, you figure
things out as you go, right? And so we started with these five rules. And in fact, they're
still our rules, right? They haven't changed. We were lucky enough to hit the right rules
from day one. And I think that the balance is this, is what you're doing helpful? Is
it helping people accomplish what they're trying to accomplish? And are you moderating
in such a way that you keep the content and the community really engaged? There's a saying,
you have to be really intolerant and intolerance. And so I really love that saying. So what
that means is I'm sure as we all know, there's lots of online communities, Reddit is one
of them, Facebook is one of them, where there is a lot of negativity. There's a lot of posting
that can be acrimonious and attackful and attacking. And we have done what I think is
a stellar job of really saying, look, this is a professional group. This is for talking
about work. And there is no tolerance for hate. There is no tolerance for rudeness. I
mean, I even mean, you know, using bad language, right? Often, right? I even obviously have
no personal attacks allowed. And so I think if you create the right environment, it's
like having a party, right? If you have the right drinks, if you have the right music,
people will have a great time. And that's what you want to do with community moderation.
You want to create the environment where people can thrive. And you really quickly want to
say, hey, that was a party foul, right? And I think by setting those examples, and me
doing it myself, and, you know, and we rarely delete comments, we rarely ban people. But
we just just by leading by example. And that's, luckily enough, to this day, now that we're
about to hit 30,000 still had the same kind of wonderful, in fact, even better energy.
So what's cool is that with all of these rules, and with however you structure the group,
it seemed like was working right out of the gate. You said you got your first hires in
the first few days through the group. Tell me about the mechanics of this group. How
did it actually work and always experience for somebody joining it?
Yeah, so you we started by just you have to be invited. So alone in moderation, that says
something right? You have to know someone to get in and we weren't trying to be elitist,
we were just more trying to maintain the quality, right? So that kind of sets like if you invite
a friend, you know, invite someone you trust and it'll work that way, right? Fight club,
right? Same exact concept. And so the rule was original, originally like this, if you
look at job postings, most job postings aren't very social. And they don't really tell you
much about the job. And so our rule was talk about the job in a real way, right? We had
guidelines saying, you know, a job post might be like, hey, I'm the founder of hire club,
I'm looking for a senior Rails engineer, you know, we're in downtown SF, we really love
helping people succeed in their careers, we're looking to hire tomorrow, you know, or today,
or whatever you want to say. And the people would comment and say, hey, my friend Cortland
will be really great for this, right? My friend, Sheila will be really great for this. And
they would vouch for each other. And because it was in a social feed, other people would
see it. And they kept on popping up in your feed and it kept on showing activity versus
something like, when have you ever gone to a job post more than once? Right? It's useless,
it's almost like a static page you never touch. So we made job post social. And, and I think
we were one of the first ones to do it where people were actually interacting and talking
about jobs. And that created this really unique thing of you could talk to the job poster,
right? And we all know looking for a job is honestly really hard, right? And you never
get to talk to a human, right? And we may we humanize the nature of posting and looking
for jobs. And I think that creates such engagement and such kind of like warmth, that people
just kept on doing it.
So it was almost like a marketplace early on where you had some people who were posting
jobs, and other people who were basically either applying for jobs or discussing the
jobs. How do you grow both sides of this marketplace early on when you're starting from nothing?
I think for us, we were lucky enough because I had been in SF for a long time. And I had
worked with various companies that I just invited people I trusted, and they invited
people they trusted. And a lot of times they were leaders of companies or managers of companies.
And we just found some really great folks to kind of see the network. Reed Hoffman talks
about this with LinkedIn, right? How he's leaded seeded LinkedIn was very similar by
having the people that he thought would be great in at the start. And I think that created
this natural growth mechanism. And the reality is companies always want to find the people
to hire, right? So any other option for them to get a unique point of getting their word
out. Hiring is often just as much about branding as it is about hiring. So if you can write
a great post and people are showing interest in that post for hiring, that shows your company
is exciting. So like when a company like let's say Stripe post in Hire Club, which they have,
a lot of people get really super excited about it because it's a company that people love.
And I think that energy and that kind of socialist around hiring is what other companies see
and say, wait, I want that too. I want people to know about my company. I want them to know
my jobs. And I want to have a discussion with this community that obviously really cares
about hiring. While all this was going on, and you're sort of bootstrapping this amazing
social hiring Facebook group in 2011, you had another company at the same time called
Cardflick. You raised money for it. You went the whole nine yards. What happened there?
So I like to say I successfully ran that into the ground. So Cardflick and interesting enough,
Cardflick and Hire Club were born the same day, March 28, 2011. And Cardflick was the
startup we decided to put money into. And Hire Club was a startup or the idea that we
just put on autopilot in the group.
Who's we at this point?
This is my design agency, Kid Bombay. So I had a team of about 11 people back then. We
were doing various mobile projects. And so Cardflick, the idea was sharing digital business
cards. And we were the first ones to move to portrait designs. We had this really in-person
amazing flick gesture that everyone loved. It demoed really well. And we ended up going
to TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011. And we won Audience Choice. And we went from like having
like 7,000 downloads to having like 50,000 downloads our first day. And it was like this
really incredible rush. I mean, Time magazine interviewed me and everyone was loving this
app. Everyone was saying it was the next big thing. And to be frank, it probably went to
my head. And while we were solving this amazing problem of making beautiful business cards
and having people share business cards, which is back then a huge problem. It still is a
problem in lots of ways today. It was kind of something that happens very infrequently.
How many times a day do you meet new people? I'm a big networker. I might meet one new
person a day. So the usage is low at certain places, but people like VCs, people like salespeople,
people like founders are going to conferences and events. And that was really where we were
taking off.
The problem with Cardflick was we never had a business model. Now this was during 2011
where social was everything and everyone was like, hey, use growth at all costs. And we'll
find ways to make money later. And Snapchat was doing this and Facebook was doing this
and Instagram was Instagram.
You weren't supposed to have a business model back then.
You weren't supposed to have a business model. I was doing what I literally I had investors
who said, don't worry about the money. And so I put some of my own money into it from
my agency and eventually we decided to go full time on it. And we got into 500 startups
we've had a great, there's a few angel investors. I think we ended up raising like around 300k.
And really what happened is everyone loved the product, right? The initial version. And
I think I just got some stuff into my head and I tried to make, instead of making a version
two, I revamped the whole concept. Instead of making instrumental small changes to improve
the product, I tried to think really big and be like, okay, wait a minute. Can we take
on LinkedIn with five people? That literally was the vision I had. In hindsight, obviously
that sounds dumb. That sounds really stupid. But to this day, let's be honest, most people
don't love LinkedIn, right? Even to this day, it's not something that a product that not
everyone loves. And we went from this simple idea of just sharing business cards and sharing
contact info and meeting people to saying, can we take on LinkedIn and can we own your
network and can we help you connect? And can we be this digital rolodex? And like, it went
from like this really simple, beautiful thing to like this convoluted kind of like way to
say, man, how is this team of five going to do this, right? And we tried to raise money
and we weren't raising more money. And then, you know, I made a lot of mistakes. I hired
an engineer through a recruiter that cost a lot of money. And we hired this engineer
that we had never worked with in person. It turned out that like we literally had to fire
him that week because we had worked remotely, but we had never worked in person. And that
was like a really bad idea when we started working together, you know, without having
a business model, without having clear revenue, without having, without being careful of spending
money, we basically ran out of money. And honestly, this was around 2013, when we ran
out of money, I was devastated. You know, I thought, you know, I had Time magazine interviewing
me, right? I had everyone being like, you're gonna be the next big thing. This is gonna
be amazing. You know, to give you an idea, I think Instagram had $25,000 on their first
day, we had like 30,000, right? And so like, it's really easy, I think back then, especially
as a founder to, to get lost, to kind of like not know where your North Star is, and attention
and publications and press and all this stuff can be really exciting. But that's not really
what you're doing it for, right? That should be what you're doing it for. And we kind of
lost sight of that. I'll be honest, it was a lot of this was my fault. It was not anybody
else's fault. I can't blame anyone else. It is on me. When I when the company shut down,
I was really bummed out. I was basically depressed. Afterwards, I had to, you know, lose my investors
money, I had to let go of my team, who relied on me to find an income. And I mean, just
to be frank, it was just a shitty, shitty time. It was really bad. And to this day,
people still email me about card flick and asking about Hey, what happened to that? And
people are still trying to do this business card idea. But I learned a lot of what not
to do during that time period. And I learned a lot of how important a core model and caring
about your users really is.
How do you recover from something that catastrophic that terrible losing your job, losing your
startup?
I'll be honest, I didn't at first, you know, like, it was a couple months of me just wallowing
and self pity. And kind of, you know, my relationship with my daughter suffered, who was like in
middle school at that point, I was just a jerk to everybody. I was like, what was me
and I it wasn't good at first. What I ended up doing is I just took a few months to kind
of figure it out. And I ended up starting consulting again. This was like in late 2013.
And what's funny, all this time, higher club was just running, it was just doing its own
thing. I wasn't doing anything with it. It was just growing and people were adding to
it. And I wasn't even thinking about it. But I kind of just put my tail between my legs
and just started going back to consulting and just trying to get clients. And I found
a few small clients based on my past experience, and you know, things here and there. And eventually
that just built up again, because people knew my work, right? And I knew how to build mobile
apps and you had to build back ends. And but I can't say it was like a one month thing.
It really took three to six months before I was back on my feet.
Yeah, and it wasn't your your first radio watching a startup go up in flames, because
you're also part of the first.com boom, not as a founder, but as an employee. Yes, yes.
I've seen a lot of startups go belly up. And I've been a part of that, when they have gone
belly up or gotten laid off because they've gotten belly up. So I've seen it from the
rough side plenty of times.
Does that not discourage you from starting new companies after watching so many fail?
You know, my dad is an immigrant. I'm an immigrant too. You know, I came to America when I was
a kid. My dad worked with computers. He was an H1B visa, you know, programmer. And we
live in the projects in India. There's the building that my grandmother used to live
in before she passed away. It literally is the projects. There wasn't running water yet.
She had to wake up at 4am every single morning to what's called the donkey and fill up water
and you know, bring it downstairs. And there was shared toilets, like three toilets to
a floor, right? Like literally the projects. And my dad is the American dream. He came
over and he raised his family and he's now successful and retired. And he was always
a really big optimist. He was always someone that said you can do anything that you want
to do. You have to believe in positivity. And I think I have a lot of that in me. You
know, I have a lot of that immigrant kind of work ethic plus the positivity that my
family inspired. And eventually you just you want to stop being sad and you want to get
back to like helping people and you want to get back to making money and you want to get
back to like building something you care about. So I think I think it's good to take breaks
when you have those pauses. But I really am an optimist. You know, I really am. And even
though I've gone through hard times like is so much better to be positive and to find
beautiful things to work on and to find beautiful people to work with. And look, you're going
to have ups and downs. That's just part of the game. Yeah. I'm super big on optimism,
especially as a founder. Being a founder is sort of an exercise in applied optimism. You're
basically believing that this thing can work where all gods are against you and it's so
much easier just to go get a job elsewhere. And I think it becomes somewhat of a self
fulfilling prophecy. Because if you're optimistic, you'll try harder because you think it's possible
and then trying harder helps you succeed. Whereas if you're pessimistic, you'll have
all sorts of reasons why you should quit or why it's not going to work. And that just
makes it way easier to actually follow through and quit.
Yeah, there's some study that was like done on newspapers, where they asked people if
they were lucky, and the people who said they were lucky, they gave them a test and said,
find this word and count it in the newspaper. And the people there were lucky saw this one
part of the newspaper and literally had the answer. Oh, this word is in the newspaper
17 times. And the people who were unlucky never saw that, right? The answer was there
all along. And I think what optimism and kind of where luck comes from, is being positive
enough to see opportunity, right? And I've always really wanted to adhere to that. And
I think a lot of what innovation comes from is saying, hey, what's out there for me, right?
What can I see in front of me? What am I missing? That's right in front of my face. And what
can I grab onto and go with, you know?
Speaking of opportunity right in front of you, card flick was crashing and burning.
But at the same time, Hire Club, which you started on the same day, was growing in the
background, sort of unceremoniously.
So incredibly, the community just kept growing. We invited more and more people. We started
doing meetups. Like we had our first meetup in South Park, like 25 people came and we
just kind of talked about hiring and more and more companies started posting and we
would invite more people. And you know, I had worked on different startups at that point.
I had done other things and around 2017, we hit 10,000 members. And I hadn't literally
spent any money on card flick at that point. I mean, on Hire Club at that point, right?
We hadn't built product. We hadn't spent money. It was just a thing. I said, well, hey, 10,000
members, that's something, right? And talk about luck and opportunity. I'd always so
said to myself, I'm really bad at social media. And someone had to point out, hey, you have
10,000 members. I think you're pretty good at social media. I still my Instagram is terrible.
But we had 10,000 members. And I said, okay, we can do something with this, right? Let's
try doing something. How do we make money with this? Now, everyone in the uncle was
saying, hey, go build a recruiting platform, right? Go get people hired and take a cut
of that. And I'll be honest, I mean, that is something we did try. I don't love recruiting.
Right? I don't love this notion of going out and sourcing candidates and then, you know,
helping companies. I ultimately love helping people. Right? And what we realized is one
of the first things we tried was headshots. So I had this idea of like, hey, everyone
needs a professional headshot. My background's in photography. I went to school for it. Can
we do a photo shoot where you get these beautiful headshots? So we found a photographer, we
started booking sessions and we made $5,000 our first day. And I was like, wow. And these
photos that came back, I'll send you a few. They're beautiful. Every single person who's
gotten a headshot from us has made it their profile photo and literally has gotten 400
likes on their photos. It becomes a professional photo. It becomes your dating photo. And it's
just this really great way of showing up, right, for work. Like, who doesn't want a
great headshot, right? Who doesn't want to look good? And, you know, with social media
and photos, just such a big thing. It's on hireclub.com slash headshots. You can still
book them. You can still do it. And y'all have to come over. I mean, uh, we're in both
NSF. So yeah, it's pretty easy for me to head over. Please do. Please do. And we didn't
charge a lot of money. We charge. It was like 100 for one headshot, 150 for two and 300
for three, which gives you 30 minutes plus styling and makeup. We went and our headshots
were fun. We had DJs. We had mimosas. You know, I would come help style you. We had
jewelry designers that you could like try out their jewelry. We really made it a thing.
It wasn't just like show up and take a photo. Like people couldn't hang out. They would
get their photo done and they would really hang out and they would say to me, Hey, look,
I'm trying to show off. I want to speak at a conference. What is the look that I should
have? And because I have a background in design and I have a background photography, I could
help them work through it. Our photographer that could help them work through it. And
these photos, honestly, they're really beautiful. They're really amazing. A lot of people, you
know, are shy about photography and don't feel like they look great. We literally help
people look and feel their best. And it was a good feeling, right? And interestingly enough,
as to how we did the licensing, we said, look, this photo is yours, but higher club trains
the light rights to use it as we need for marketing purposes. It ultimately ended up
being a lot of what we use in our marketing materials is to show our community these headshots.
So we did this like three or four times in 2017, made a bunch of money. But I will be
honest, you know, we counted my time. We probably didn't make that much money, but we made revenue,
right? We weren't counting my time, but we made revenue. And we had like 100, 200 headshots.
They're amazing. They're beautiful, high quality headshots. So like, cool, this is cool. But
then will this scale, right? They always, always a startup question, will this scale?
And you know, how many times in your lifetime are you gonna get headshots? Like I love photography,
but maybe at the most once a year, you'll get a new headshot, you know? And so we knew
that wasn't going to scale. And interestingly enough, just randomly, a friend of mine, Shahro
Sharania, who is involved with woman 2.0, she reached out to me in early August of 2017 and
said, Hey, there's this new TV show coming out called Meet the Drapers. Do you want to be on it?
And I'm like, what? What is it? What's that? And so it's Tim Draper, Jesse Draper, his father,
and it was kind of like a version of Shark Tank. Upset is tied to a crowdfunding platform called
Republic, which is the founders of Angel List started. And basically, you go on the show,
you do your pitch, just like Shark Tank, but anyone can invest, right? And so it's kind of
unique because instead of the Sharks deciding or the judges deciding who invest, the community
gets to decide. So I hadn't even incorporated Hire Club. We had no like legal documentation.
We were just community. We had nothing. Sometimes like, or like, or like August 1st, she reached
out to me. August, like 11th, we're doing the TV shoot. August 17th, we incorporated.
And I'll be honest, I bombed the show. I had never finished Hire Club. I didn't know what we were
doing. I was nervous. I was super nervous. And the runners of the show, they're amazing. They're
wonderful. And they wanted to create a warm, inclusive environment. I think they did a pretty
good job of that. But they were grilling me on questions. And originally, at that point,
our vision for Hire Club was we would be like upwork, right? Anyone could come on and get
contracting work, we would take a cut of that and grow from there, right? Kind of like a gig model
in that shape and form. And I hadn't really nailed the pitch or anything. We shot video,
we spent all this money. But incredibly enough, we raised $47,000 for my community as a crowdfunding
republic. We didn't even have this product yet, right? But just from the sheer will, and also
simultaneously, our community grew from 10,000 to 20,000 in eight months, because I started
investing in growth on that. And so we raised $47,000 before we had product. We raised money
from people who didn't even have a job. They were like, I believe in you. I love you. I love this
community. We really care about what you're doing. I want to see where this goes. And people are
putting 25 bucks, people are putting 50 bucks. One person put in 5,000. And I was like,
amazed. I was like, holy cow, people really support us. And the show launched, we totally,
I thought we bombed. The Drapers definitely didn't like us. There was three total startups
on that episode we were on, on the very first episode. And interestingly enough, the producer
came back to me and said, hey, we did testing. Actually, people loved you. You were positive,
even when you got tough questions, you held your own. You never spoke back rudely.
And you really tested well, the audience really liked you. And they really, you were the underdog.
And I was like, cool, awesome. The show now I think is in its third season. And I think
they have a lot more things worked out. And I'm really happy that we went through it.
It was my first experience with anything kind of like reality TV. You know, and like literally,
I was on like a TV show one week after someone talked me about it. So that was kind of interesting.
And that's when we started developing the coaching product. So September 2017, what we realized with
Hire Club is all these people were getting referrals for jobs. And the one of the things
I would say the skills to do a job are very different than the skills to get a job. And
we would send someone a referral. And for whatever reason, it didn't work out. Now,
as you know, social capital is pretty sparse, and it's very valuable. And if I send someone
to a company, and they don't do well, that's gonna reflect that on me. Right. And so we
started coaching people. And we started saying, hold on, let me help you with your resume.
Let me help you with your interview skills. Let me help you with your style negotiation. So we had
these single sessions, and I think we started pricing our first sessions were $59 a month.
And if you think about the Upwork model we originally wanted, what we really did
was a similar model, but only for career coaching, right? And what investors would call
a managed marketplace. We built a managed marketplace only around coaching. And we got
some great coaches coming on board. You know, career coaches have this issue where it's really
hard for them to find customers. And it's really hard for them to do the marketing and the growth.
And we had these 20,000 members that were trying to find jobs and seeing jobs every day. So it
tied in really well to that model. It was a natural cycle that tied into it. And we took
like a 30% cut, right, of whatever it was 7030. We did that, I literally said, what's Apple do,
we'll do the 7030 split, right? And we started like getting, you know, $1,000 a month, $2,000
a month in career coaching sessions. And they were making really big differences, right?
People started getting jobs, people's resumes were improving. We added reviews as part of
the coaching process. So we started getting all these great reviews, people saying, I love my
coach, I love the experience. And so the first iteration was really based on what was happening
in our community, right? We wanted to help people find jobs. People were posting jobs all the time.
But how do I actually help you get a job? And if you think about most job products,
how does LinkedIn actually help you get a job? How does hired actually help you get a job? How
does Angelus actually help you get better at getting a job? Right? So what we started doing
was saying, let me coach you to become better at getting a job. I have so many questions about
this. Please, let's talk about how you grew your Facebook community from 10 to 20 K. I want to talk
about how you came up with this idea for the coaching business. But first, just to sort of
zoom out and get an idea of the picture here. Yeah. How are you supporting yourself financially
while you were working on all these different experiments with the headshots and going on
reality, etc? Consulting, you know, I had consulting clients, and they were paying good money.
You know, I'm lucky to have an engineer and that I can make good money at that. I'll be honest,
it wasn't easy trying to do this, just two things at once. What I always said was whenever I had
like one day free, I would try to make one day free to focus on Hire Club, and the other days
we would focus. But eventually, like there was a startup I was working with called Up All Night,
and I ended up actually joining them for a while. But slowly, you know, Hire Club just started
taking more and more time and more and more interaction, the community just got stronger.
And so I was really, really lucky for Up All Night and the experience that we had with that.
And through that Up All Night, I actually learned a lot about subscription businesses.
I learned a lot about retention, I learned a lot about churn, I learned a lot about how to build
a lot of what we ended up building in Hire Club, because I had done it before, you know?
So I use my consulting really just to gain experience on what I need to do next.
Yeah, if you think about some of the different ways you can raise sort of your revenue for any
business, improving your monetization strategy is a big one, and transitioning from sort of one off
payments, hey, hire a coach to help you and to some sort of subscription based pricing is kind
of the holy grail of monetization for growing your revenue. And that's exactly what you guys did.
I don't want to make it seem like we had this grand plan from day one of our subscriptions,
and we like, I mean, like, literally, we tried everything before this, right? Like,
we tried headshots, we tried recruiting, we tried building a referral engine,
we tried building a LinkedIn clone, we tried building a dribble clone, like, we just literally
tried that, if you look at the code base, like, see what sticks, right? And so I don't want to
make this like, you know, in hindsight, oh, yeah, we figured all this out. It didn't, it was a series
of many, many mistakes. But two things that we always did, we measured, right? What was response
to the things that we did? And we had models or can we make money with it? Right? If it did, because
of my experience cards, like, not making money, I said, this has to make money. If it doesn't make
money, then we're not doing it. You know, because I had a job making money, right? So I didn't want
to do this thing for free on my limited free time. And honestly, you know, it's good to make money,
because people can tell you like, they love your product, they can tell you that they, you know,
oh, you have a great, great idea. And it's what I think one of the things with founders is to be
really careful of. If someone tells you that you have a great idea, you don't have a great idea,
but if someone pays for your service, you have a great idea, at least the beginnings of one,
right? And so I always looked at that as a model. And so we were using Stripe, obviously,
as our payment platform, and we were monitoring everything, we use better metrics as well. And
like, you know, how much people are buying? Where's our, you know, take? How quickly is it growing?
So we were really, I'm big on analytics, I'm big on measurement. And I'm big on setting small goals,
I think as a founder, it's like, everyone's like, Oh, I want to get $2 million. Whoa, whoa, whoa,
whoa, whoa, you know, get to 1000, get to 2000, get to 5000. And so interestingly enough,
one of the things we did, every time, now we had this 20,000 people in higher club,
every time we made a milestone in higher club, as a business, we would share it with the community.
Oh, we have $1,000 in revenue. Oh, we have $2,000 in revenue. Oh, we, you know, hired someone or
with some or we have an event. I was really, really transparent and shared pretty much
everything, the ups and downs. Oh, investor turned us down. Oh, this happened all the time
with our community. And I think that created a lot of people being excited about, Oh, wow,
this is someone that is being really transparent about their growth, you know?
Yeah. And just to go back to you trying everything, but the kitchen sink trying the headshots business
and trying recruiting and all sorts of stuff. I think that's really a testament, again,
to your optimism as a founder, right? You were convinced that this business that this community
could turn into something that was valuable. Yeah. And you weren't frustrated by the fact
that like a few things didn't work out. You're like, okay, I've just, you know, try these things.
Now there's more things for me to try. I think an experimental mindset is super important
at the early stage or even later stage of any company, because everything is an experiment
until it's proved out. Right? And so I really viewed it that way. And I didn't like if something
didn't work out, like, that's learning, right? If you tried something and didn't learn how you
learned, you just learned something. It's amazing. Right? So I stopped viewing things as failures
and more as learnings. That was a big change in my attitude, because in the past, let's say you
launched something and like, it's just crickets. And then you feel like an idiot. But the other
thing that we did is we constantly asked our users, what do you want? Right? What do you need?
How would this help you? And to this day, we still pull our users almost on a weekly basis,
right? Hey, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And one of the things I think
founders don't do enough is people always say talk to your users, but don't know what that means.
I think what it means is literally talk to users every single day, understand what their pain
points are. I think a lot of people try to build features. Users don't care about features. They
care about, are you making my life better? Right? So what can you build that makes their life better?
How do you talk to users effectively every single day? Because I imagine you're hearing the same
things day after day. I imagine sometimes people are giving you suggestions for things that
you've already tried or you don't want to try. How do you as a founder parse all that information
and turn it into something useful? So one, I make myself really accessible. To this day,
people DM me every single day, even though now we have 30,000 members. Because I have a background
design, when people give me feedback, I don't try to change it. I don't try to like argue to it.
I just say, why would you want that? Right? I keep on going further. Okay, how would you like that to
work? Okay, you know, what is the problem you want to solve? Like, I think a lot of founders
and product people, when they have an idea, and they hear feedback, they get really clenched up
and it feels like it's a personal attack. Oh, you don't like what I built? Oh, my God. I never really
had that. I'm there sometimes where I get a little bummed out and someone doesn't like something I've
made. But I look at it more as what's the feedback? Right? What are people telling me? And we did this
in the group and we did in person. You know, we would have events, we would actually get feedback,
we would pay people 25 bucks a session, we give them an Amazon card or a Starbucks card and say,
hey, come, come look at this UI. You know, the magic number is around five to 10 people where
you get good sets of feedback. But we literally to this day test every single day, right? We get
feedback all the time. And I think there's a couple things as a founder, you have to be responsive,
right? This is 2019. If you're not accessible, you're not really listening to your users,
right? And I think second of all, you have to understand the pain points people are going
through, right? It's not about what your product does. It's about what problems you solve for your
users. And then I think three, you can be transparent and social media and share these
learnings with everybody and tell people what's going on. And then I said, you'll start seeing
patterns, right? So like we start seeing a pattern of people being like, hey, I would go for a job
and I wouldn't hear a response back once I sent a resume. And I would hear that over and over and
over again, or I would hear, hey, I went to an interview and I didn't get a call back
after the interview, right? So you have to start looking for patterns. And this is how you derive
signal from noise is saying, okay, is 25 people saying the same thing? Okay, there's probably
a pattern here. If one person is saying it, it might be an interesting data point. It might not,
you don't know. But I try to look for patterns in the noise. And they also look at who you're
talking to, right? So like, if you're building a product that, you know, is meant for, let's say,
engineers, is the feedback from this engineer relevant or more relevant compared to the feedback
from designer, right? You have to know the audience too, that you're talking to. And so you have to
like, some people might give you feedback. And honestly, that feedback is useless, because
they're not relevant to your audience. You know? Yeah, I think it's it's so important to talk to
people so often, like you were doing, because there's also this element of recency bias,
where if you're not talking to people that often, then, you know, you only have a few conversations
and whatever, like the last couple conversations you've had are, like this outsized role in your
mind, like, oh, this one person said this thing, I've got to change it. Yeah, it's like, if you're
talking to way more people, you'd be able to put that in perspective, you'd be able to say, oh,
this is just one person out of a million saying this, or you'd say, Oh, this is part of a consistent
trend, you can just make a much better judgment. And the other thing I'll say is never listen to
investors. Like, investors will tell you all this stuff that they think you should be doing. And
honestly, they're not operators, right? They're not running your business, you're not they're not
talking to your customers. And oftentimes, investors only have a certain kind of viewpoint
into what your business can do and or your users want. So often investors will tell us something,
I'm like, sorry, no, that's not what our users say, you know, and there's obviously investors
who are very knowledgeable and understand, you know, large trends across, you know, product areas,
and they are very useful in their large trends. But when it comes to your, you know, internal
product and your, you know, microtranslate, you're happening, you're you have to know what they are.
And you're going to, I always say, your best investor is your customer.
So in 2008, in 2018, excuse me, you transitioned into subscription coaching,
did you have investors at that point? And do you have investors now?
In 2018, after months of users literally saying, hey, I want to do multiple sessions. And I was
like, I don't know if I really want to do that. How's that gonna work? What about the single session
thing? What about this upwork thing? I really wasn't listening, I'll be honest. And then I
finally was like, oh, crap, we could build this as a subscription, we could turn this into
subscription. And so here's the model we launched, we made it a lot like a cell phone plan, you get
time with a coach, and you can pay for 30, 60, 120 minutes a month, right? And you can get you get
those minutes, they're in your bank account, and then you can use those minutes when you're talking
to a coach. We launched that on June 1, 2018. And because we already had our community,
because we already had our single session customers, we immediately got 10 subscribers,
right? And we started pricing at like $79 a month, I think was our original price.
And we made $1,000 in MRR in our first month. I have to look at the data, but literally I think
the first month we had $1,000. Second month, $2,500, right? Now throughout this whole time,
I am planning this product hunt launch, and being like, yo, coaching is going to be big,
let me get our product hunt, let me figure this out. So we work with designers, we made a video,
we made our little GIF that product hunt wants, you know, we like made sure all the flows were
correct. We had to adjust the product a lot to make sure it was easier to use. And then in September,
we launched a product hunt. And we went from $2,500 in revenue to $7,500 in revenue. And in
product hunt, I'll be honest was if you do it right, it was just an amazing launching point.
And TechCrunch reached out to us, companies started reaching out to us, press started reaching
out to us and people were like, Oh, what is this thing? Oh, career coaching. Oh, you're a lot more
affordable than other organizations. Let me see how it works. And it was really awesome and also
really scary because we went from like, in three, I think the average SaaS company gets to $10,000
a month in revenue in 450 days, we did in 150 days, right? So almost three times as fast.
So here's what happens. Then it's October, September, YC application time, right? And I'm
like, okay, I got this, I went from zero to 10K monthly revenue. Look at all this cool stuff,
right? We're gonna be great. YC is gonna love this. It's gonna be awesome. In that meanwhile,
before we applied for YC, I did find one of my old CEOs, we helped his daughter through coaching,
get a job. And we helped her get a $25,000 raise. And he was like, Yeah, I'm gonna invest. Yeah,
don't worry about it, right? Okay, I see the product working. So he, his name is Ted,
he was our first investor. He was my old CEO, fantastic person. He put the first 25K check in
at literally a time we really needed it. And I was like, cool, awesome. We got 25K in amazing.
And that was our first check for a very long time, like literally months and months. And that's the
only check we had. And then we applied to YC when we get the interview. And I posted in our hire
club. Oh my god, we got the YC interview. Literally 1000 people liked it, right? It was like, everyone's
so excited for us. I'm like, Oh my god, YC interview. I've never done this. Let's go to this.
Go to the YC interview. We just get rolled. Just hammered. They were coming at us and I had the
answers. And I thought it was doing good. And you know, I think I'll be honest, the YC experience
is pretty brutal. It's not a fun experience, right? It's not experience that makes you feel like,
oh, wow, that was fun. You know, like, oh, wow, like, that was really I can't wait to work with
these people. And, you know, a few weeks later, we got to know. And I had a team ready to hire,
I had an engineer that wanted to come on board. I had a designer that wanted to come on board.
I was like, okay, we're going to get this 150k. It's all going to be good. We were all at lunch,
or we had plenty of dinner together. And we're like, maybe we'll get the yes, we'll do the dinner
together. And if we get to know, we'll at least be together to do it. Man, ask my co-founder now,
I was, I was bummed. We got to know. And we got to know for a reason, I don't think is really
relevant. But YC is YC. They said, oh, you're not going to find coaches to grow your business,
which has actually really never been a problem for us. We've never had a coach acquisition problem
to this day. Maybe in the future, that might be a problem. But there's not been a problem for us.
But whatever, they said no. And, you know, the optimism we were talking about is gone. It was
gone. Yeah, because I really look up to YC. You know, I really think they have made such amazing
inroads into helping founders build amazing products. And I'll be honest, look, you know, even
going into the YC interview process, I'm 42. There was no one being interviewed that was younger,
that was older than 30 than my in my session, at least. And it was really hectic. I had all these
people helping me. I had all these people like trying to help out. I had founders vouching for
us. But I was we didn't get in and I was super bummed. And I was like, we have 10,000 a month
in revenue. Right? Like, and we did it in three months. Like, and every every investor says show
me three months of growth, right? And we're like, this is it. So November 2018, I just basically
was bummed out again, you know, and I look, I have suffered with depression a lot of my life,
I suffered with anxiety, and my team, I wasn't there for them. I was like, I was
bummed. I was like, man, this, I put all my, you know, hope into this, I really thought we were
gonna get this. It's kind of hard to talk about. We didn't get it. And that was reality. But here's
going back to how negativity affects your mind. The same month in November that YC told us no
last year, was the month we hit 14,000 in revenue. And I didn't even notice because I was so bummed
out, because I was so just focused on this one source, this one kind of validation from obviously
a great place to be validated by, but external validation, right? So I took kind of November to
like, nurse my wounds. And I said, Okay, look, what can we do to automate some of these things
that we're running across? How can we get back to back? So December, and January, we start automating,
I started going back to coding, I started going back to talking customers, I started improving
product, right? And we did have a dip, we had a dip in January, December, where we made less money
than before. And then January 2019, I think we were at 11,000. And then we just started improving
product. We just started listening to users and saying, What do you want? How can we fix this?
What do you need next? And then I think sometime around January, I don't remember the exact date,
another friend of mine came down to Seattle said, You want to get drinks? I said, Sure.
And we came over, we talked at home, we were doing fire club, he had been a member for a long
time. And I said, we're doing coaching, I showed him our numbers. And literally, five minutes in
the conversation is like, yeah, I'll invest my what? What? And that was our second 25k check.
And then he introduced someone else. And we got another 10k check. And he introduced someone else
and we got another 10k check. And at some point, we had raised like, with the 47k from the crowd
fund. And then with angels, we'd raised another like 75k, so like 125k basically, that we had
raised. And that was most of 2019, that we were running off that money. And we were being super,
super scrappy, right? Like not spending money on anything. I spent all my credit cards,
I spent all my savings, like we were just trying to save money as much as possible. But we were
also making money, right? So when you're making like 10,000, 15,000 dollars a month, and you're
keeping 30% of it, hey, that's money you can use, right? And so like we did, we had something to
survive off of, right? And I had set a goal after we had 10,000, I want to get to 20,000. So it said
aiming for this big right goal that a lot of founders sued, let me get to a million. I said
from 10,000, let's get to 20,000. So in April, I think we hit 20,000. And then in May, it was like
26 or something like that. And it just grew 20% month over month. And August, the final numbers
were 31k, which was our new record. And then what happened was, investors started coming to us,
right? Meanwhile, I'm sharing this every single month, I share all our numbers with a community.
There's an interesting thing about doing crowdfunding, there's a thing called form C,
where you have to yearly report your numbers to the SEC. It's really like being a public company.
So I said, look, if I have to do that anyway, I'm going to share with my community,
because I want to go to the SEC form, they can look at our numbers. So why not share them?
Right? Why do I have to hide anything? Right? I don't want to be like a we work and hide this
stuff until it's too late. Yeah. And so I started sharing our numbers, I started saying, hey,
there's so much money we made every single month, I will start sharing it, good or bad. And people
started really responding. And there's an interesting thing in a business, the more money
you make, the more people want to use your product, you know, they more trusted. And on top of that,
we raise prices four times. We're still not at our highest price point. So one of the things I
would say for our founders, charge more, you're not charging enough, literally, you're not charging
enough. Because until people start canceling, because it's too much, you know, you've gone
over, you're not charging enough, but also provide good service. And then so sometime around
August, one of our coaches who was on our platform who had made lots of money with us said, I want
to invest. And I was like, what? This is the equivalent of an Uber driver saying I want to
invest in Uber, before it was Uber. And I was like, this is incredible. So one of our coaches
invested another 25k. And then here's a really interesting story about negativity. There was a
firm called Unshackled VC. And I actually had done their website in 2014 when I was a consultant.
And they invested in this company called Career Karma, which doesn't do what we do at all. But
in my mind, in my negative mind, in my, you know, think I was like, Oh, they're not going to invest
in us. It's too competitive. And one day I go to this event in downtown SF, and Manon, who was one
of the partners at Unshackled, who had done the original website for, I go up to him and say,
Hey, would you be interested in investing hire club? I thought it'd be a competitive
career karma. He's like, No, it's fine. We'll invest. Like it's, I don't think it's competitive.
So we start talking to them, we do the numbers, and they ended up investing. And now to this
date, we raised $500,000. Crazy. And we're making, you know, 30 plus K a month. We're paying our
bills. We're not paying all our bills yet, because our burn has increased. But we have a real life
startup funded by a VC firm and a couple other angels came in. And we're super happy. And growth
has been great. And churn has been reducing. And we're listening to users improving the product.
And this was like a two year journey. This was not like, you know, I press the button, and like
magically, I get money, you know, this was not like I press the button, and the product launched,
and was everything was amazing. Like it just took years of iteration. It took years of ups and
downs. It took years. And we're not at a point like we're not, you know, $500,000 is not that
much to raise. It's something to raise. I'm very proud of it. And I'm very proud of the product
that we have that helps people, you know, get further in the careers. But I think a lot of
times in the VC world and SF startup world, people think, Oh, you just talked to a VC,
you read 10 crotch, and everyone's getting funded left and right. We just got turned by
down by an investor last night, to this day, right. So like, I'm still going through these
ups and downs. And I mean, perfect example, the investor that turned this down invested in a
similar startup years ago, with someone who had no traction with the same exact product. And I'm
like, what? How does this make sense? We have a community, we have traction, we have product,
we have investors, you know, like we have like literally everything's lined up. And honestly,
I think a lot of people play chase the VC money game. And that's a dangerous game.
Why try to raise money at all if you're making, you know, $30,000 a month, if your revenue is
growing 20% month over month, you did your anti hackers interview earlier this year,
before you raised a lot of this money. What changed? Why? Why the focus on raising money?
I wouldn't say it was a focus. It was more along the lines of,
well, I stopped doing all my other consulting, right, I was full time on this. And I didn't
want to be poor. And while we were making money, I think my co founder wasn't making enough money,
some of our team members, our contract wasn't making enough money. I wanted to do them a solid
right. And I wanted because I was putting a lot of I was putting a little insane amount of hours
in I went with five every morning. And I don't stop until 10pm, basically, which is not healthy
at all. Something I'm working through a different topic. But I felt that we had enough to have
conviction. And then the question is, yes, how much do you raise and how much do you want? And so we
only gave a small away percentage away of our company, we didn't try to give away a lot on
purpose. We actually had an investor come in a few weeks ago, and make an offer that would have
given them, you know, 20% of the company, I was like, No, I don't want that. So I don't think it's
like a hard fast rule in terms of how much you raise and how much you don't raise. I do think
I live in SF is expensive. And I do think one of the some of the goals we have requires some money
to build. So like, for example, we just hired our first full time engineer, right? So I've been this
main engineer for the vast majority of this, he starts next Monday, super excited. It's a big
turning point to have, you know, official full time engineer working on this addition to me.
And those are some of the goals we had, because what was happening is I couldn't do everything.
I literally was like, we had we'd hire customer support, because there was so much support coming
in. It's almost like the product is calling this out, right? Like, because I have to design,
I have to build, we hire designer. And so I don't know if we'll be one of those companies that's
going to raise like 30, 50, 60 million dollars in the future. I don't know. But I do know that we
want to raise enough to make sure that we're not stressed in building what we want to build.
Because in the two years prior to this, I probably gained 30 pounds, I'm the heaviest I've ever weighed.
And stress has really got to me, my health is deteriorated. And since we've gotten the
investment, all of that has changed, right? Like, like, you can use your revenue to grow. Yes,
it's a wonderful way. It's a fantastic way to grow. You can also offset it with the right
amount of investment, right? It doesn't have to be you raised $10 million and give away a lot of
your company. I see a lot of different models for this, you see companies like Zapier, who
went through YC, raised money and never raised again. And then I see some companies doing the
opposite, where they bootstrap their way up to some insane amount of revenue. And then they
decide, you know, they're going to change their business model, and then they're going to raise.
And there's all sorts of combinations in between. Let's talk about growth. Because we've talked
about how you've grown 20% month over month for the past six months. But we haven't talked about
how you're able to do that. Is that growth that came through sort of spending the money
that you're raising from investors? Or how did you get how did you get that much revenue growth?
We don't do ads. We have we did an ad test once it was been like 2k on it. I'm not a big fan of
ads. I'm not a big fan of getting all my money to Facebook or Google, and not seeing the return I
want. The entirety of our growth has come through our Facebook group and our events in person events
we do. So a lot of companies build a product and then build a community. We are the exact
opposite. We had a community and then we built a product. And I think that's the right way at least
for us to do what we want to do. And we our product is 100% in line with what our community wants.
We literally built a product that they're asking for. And so there's a couple things that go into
that. One, just improving the product, right? Earlier, people didn't know how to find coaches.
So I built an automated coach matching system. Earlier, when people wanted to cancel, it wasn't
so easy. So we made that a lot easier. Earlier, if someone didn't like their coach at first,
they didn't know how to switch, we now switching coaches is built into the platform. And you can
switch coaches at any time. And we give you 15 minutes. Basically, there's just like a series of
small improvements based on what users are telling us over time that make the product better,
right? That also includes redesigning landing pages, testing out verbiage, writing better copies.
The perfect example is we do a start negotiation session. And we were charging like, at first,
like $99 for it, we were like getting our median salary bump for someone doing start negotiation
is $17,500. Wow. The lowest we've ever raised for someone is $2,000. And the highest we've ever
raised is $120,000. I mean, I mean, additional compensation, like you're spending 100, 150 bucks
and making 100 grand, that's ridiculous, right? The best ROI on the planet outside of illegal
things. And so people weren't booking that session enough. So I went to Hire Club and I said, hey,
guys, explain this to me, right? We have a start negotiation, numbers are great.
Why aren't you booking? We got 150 comments on that post. Hey, you know what? It's not clear to
me how much you actually get back. Oh, wait a minute. I didn't know this was even a service.
He didn't explain it clearly. Oh, wait a minute. What happens in this case? Is it just for people
getting new jobs? Is it people forgetting promotions? Hey, what happens if I'm not happy
with it? I literally went through and looked at all this feedback and we rewrote the landing page
based on all this feedback and all the numbers went up. And so I literally say, what is the problems
we're having, people? Please help me. And people give us the feedback and we listen to that feedback
and we improve. So a lot of the growth one comes from is a variety of things. One, sharing honestly
with the group, what's going on with our community. Asking for feedback and taking action on that
feedback. And when we take action, using the right user research and my co-founder, Lisa,
who's incredible, who's an RPM, to decide how to enact that feedback. People can tell you X,
but what does X actually mean in terms of product? And that is, I'll say, our secret sauce. We're
really good at saying, what do people really say? What do they really want from that? That is good
product, right? And so we've gotten a lot better. We can definitely improve more. We're not by any
means at the end of that, but we're really good at listening to people and kind of turning that into
that. And the fourth one is events. So we started doing events. We've now done events in 12 cities.
We just did an event in San Jose. We have done events in New York and SF in LA,
Austin, Chicago. I fly out. I have some of the investment money spent on that. And we've
templatized our event content. So we do a resume makeover event. We do a side negotiation event.
We do a mock interview event. And these are just three events we do. And we just repeat them
because it's a new audience every time. And originally, when we were doing events,
we weren't really good at selling at the event, right? We'd be like, here's all this great content.
See ya. And now in the last few months, we like have a sign up sheet and we have discount codes.
Don't forget, I have a discount code for this podcast. And we literally improved our process.
And I think in September, 10% of our new subscribers are from events. And so I don't
think there's any one thing you can do that's the magic trick to say, oh, I'm going to have
all this growth. But I do think all the ties down a community, whether it's your online or
offline community. Yeah. You said build a community first, build a product later.
Every now and then I have someone on the podcast, we talk about building communities.
And often those are the least popular episodes. I think people don't take it seriously. I think to
them community doesn't feel like a real business, doesn't feel like a real strategy, which is
unfortunate because number one, in my opinion, a business can look like anything. It can be pretty
much any activity as long as it's attached to some sort of self sustaining revenue mechanism.
So community can definitely be a business. But on top of that, it's also strategically super
advantageous to have a community at the core of your business. Like you're saying, you're
able to share transparently with the community members to help you celebrate your wins.
They're constantly giving you feedback, helping you basically improve your product,
their customers for the products that you're releasing, et cetera. What are your thoughts
on some of the strategic advantages to building a business on top of a community like you've done?
I think people are kind of blind to a lot of the community stuff. And it's unfortunate.
Like giving example, Facebook started as Face Mash, which is based around the Harvard community,
specifically around meeting women in Harvard. That's a very small community. And then Facebook
went to Harvard and they went to other schools. They use the college communities for growth.
Instagram used to do photo walks when they first started. You could meet someone from the Instagram
community. You can do photo walks with them. People would post photos. They went and talked
to photographers. They would do all these events. And that's how they grew their community.
And so if your product has any offline component, community is a wonderful way to do things.
I mean, Indiana is a perfect example. I love the community that you've built. People are
commenting and talking to each other and giving each other feedback and listening to each other.
And so I actually say community is our product. If you think about coaching, coaching is a former
community. It's a one-on-one community, but there's also group coaching. There's also multiple,
you know, massive coaching. And so to me, I can't imagine a product these days being successful
with our community. And a lot of products that we think don't have community that actually do,
we just don't recognize it, right? And we haven't seen the early days, like the early days of Twitter,
there was definitely a community, right? There was early days of LinkedIn. It's Lily who read
invited. That was a community. Prior time is the perfect example. Prior time started as an email
list, right, that Ryan started. It was a small community and then it became the website. So I
actually think most of the successes we've seen around anything social related are based on
community. But often founders and investors think you need to have product, right? But your community
can tell you what product you need to have. I mean, product time is a perfect example of that.
Yeah, I say this all the time. It's so easy as a founder to look at these success stories of
companies that are in their later stages that are already successful and try to copy that. And you're
totally blind to the sort of winding path they took to get there. And you've got to start at the
beginning of the path. You can't just sort of get straight to the end. Like you can't go to a gym
and copy the biggest person there and lift as many weights as they're lifting. Like you're going to
get crushed. So I think this is such a keen observation that at the sort of genesis of so
many of these consumer facing applications and products, they started off with a really small
community and that gave them some advantages that they could build on top of. Yeah. How do you build
a successful product off the back of a community once you've got it going there? Because not all
communities really lend themselves to some sort of product that you can sell them. And even if you
do, you have to be kind of careful not to be too salesy. Otherwise, it's pretty easy to compromise
the trust that your community already has in you. It seems like you've avoided that completely. And
your community is super enthusiastic about all the stuff that you're doing. How do you walk that line?
I don't know if I agree that not every product can have a community because your customers are
your community at some point, right? So like even if you're building like some total SaaS like maybe
just some pure marketing product, what the customers you have are your community, right?
You want to engage with them and learn from them. I think ultimately, it is about listening
and saying and asking what they want and understanding what their pain points really are.
Like I have a saying, you know, benefits not features, right? If you go to a lot of like
home pages, they'll have features like, you know, email 1000 people. This costs, you know,
$30 a month and, you know, have merged link lists, let's say for like a mail product.
The benefit is reach your customers at any time, right? For like a mail tip type product, right?
Create beautiful marketing that your customers can relate to. Talk to your customers every day if
you want. Like that's like a more benefit oriented. And I think when you talk to your community,
you can understand their pain points so then you can create benefits for them, right?
In terms of not being too salesy, we do a lot of stuff for free, right? So the group is still free.
People can post jobs for free. People can, you know, ask to say they're looking for jobs for free.
We often do free resume reviews. We often do our most of our events are free. When we charge,
it's only to make sure that people show up and they'll flake. But you know, our events that we
partnership with GA or WeWork or any the athletic or beta brand, you know, these events are really
there to help understand what people want and because they're free that we can understand,
you know, create content for them, right? We've built a free resume builder. We have built a
free job search tracking tool. We've built a free profile tool for people. So like we've built a
lot of things for free that says, look, let's show you value without having to spend money,
right? I think in terms of sales, I appreciate your compliments. I don't know if I've necessarily
nailed it in terms of that balance. I think recently we just got our first message from
someone saying, hey, I hear a lot of posts about hire club, but I want to see more posts from
companies. And I was like, oh, and you know what? This question that you asked about sales,
I'm literally going to do a post this week saying a poll. Do we sell too much or do we not sell
enough? Right. And so, uh, I don't know the answer to that, right? I think what I often do
is I write good content. Uh, when I say write good content, I talk about my hiring difficulties.
I talk about my career difficulties. I talk about issues with confidence, with anxiety,
with depression, which is so much more than hiring and coaching and jobs. And we just tell
people are on source and we let them share. So a woman just posted the other day, uh,
could you all please go? She went to like seven interviews and they didn't hire her
and she posted in the group. And you know what? I think something like 90 people responded in
support and giving her positivity. Like imagine that, right? Like imagine a place where, you know,
when you go for a job and you don't get it, like how much it sucks, right? Imagine if you can go
to a place and people can literally support you and say, you know what? It's not you. You'll find
something. We believe in you. You know, if you want to talk, I'm here. Like that is amazing community,
right? And so I don't really, we haven't done a lot of ads. We probably could do more ads. We
probably could do a better job of like looking at our analytics and looking at our funnels and
that stuff. I don't know if I've necessarily solved the balance, right? But I think what it is,
I mean, people use the word authentic a lot and sometimes it's overused. I'm just me. And when I
say I'm just me, I'm unapologetically me, right? With all my frustrations, with all my positives
and negatives, people just get to know me and know our community and know what we're talking about.
Yesterday I did a post saying, if I don't listen to Lisa, my co-founder, I'm an idiot.
And a lot of people like that post, which is very true because she has
got amazing instincts for product. And every time I don't listen to her, I'm wrong. I share
these honest things, right? And sometimes I try to make them humorous, right? Sometimes I try to
make them meaningful. I don't think there is a lot of, especially in coaching, there's so many,
like the Instagram generation with ads and posting, and you see so many people being like,
sign up for my course, you know, and all this stuff. I don't really like that style, you know?
I'm more like, hey, what's the issues you're dealing with? Maybe we can help you with that.
You're building a very human business. And I think it's intrinsically good for what you're doing,
because like you said, hiring, applying for jobs, it's a very human process. There's a lot of
emotions that run through that. You get rejection from a job or you make a bad hire or something
like that. It's a real thing. That's an emotional impact on you. And so of course you're going to
want to do that with the help of, this is another advantage of community. You're going to want to do
this with the help of a community of supportive people. You're going to want to do this with a
business that's not like super salesy and pushing everything on you, but actually has like a human
founder with a face and a name and experiences that you can relate to. You know what's really
cool? I go to places and people who recognize me now and like I was in Napa having a father's
day brunch with my daughter and this guy was, hey, are you the hire club guy? Can I take a photo with
you? And I was like, what? And it just, I love that so much. I was in Prague, I was in San Jose
and people come up to me, I was at the bar and someone was like, hey, are you the hire club guy?
And I'm like, no, there's the hire club guy in San Francisco now, which I think is actually
really adorable and I really love it. And I've always said, please do that. Please come up and
say hi to me. Please come up and tell me what you're working on and how can I help? And I think
there's a lot of research saying millennials want to work with companies that have mission statements,
but I think we've seen the pushbacks of companies, of the larger companies like Facebook and Google
when they become a faceless organization, even Apple, where you don't feel connected to the company
anymore. And I think the modern world, especially if you're a startup, you can really talk about
what you believe in. You don't have to build a company that looks like other companies.
I'm not doing this business just to make money. I'm doing this business because this is what I
believe in. And I want to be me and I don't want to necessarily change who I am to do the things
I love to do. Now, there's things I can grow on all this all the time and I do want to have my
coaching to help me with my growth and my exercise and my personal trainer. But I do think when I
purchase things from companies, I purchase things from companies that I respect and I like what
they're doing and I trust what they're doing. And privacy is a big part of this, how they use my
data is a big part of it, what they invest in. So, Apple, for example, I think puts a lot of
investment in green energy. We all know that Apple's not perfect in a lot of ways, but I know
they care more about privacy than maybe some other companies. Or at least they say they do,
and I think they're doing a better job in some companies. And so, I think when you're talking
about commerce, when you're talking about sales, you're talking about buying something.
I don't think in the modern era, it's just about buying a product that works for you. It's buying
about product from people that you can relate to. I think there's a startup simple analytics
that is like the indie hacker version of Google Analytics. And I don't remember the founder's
name, but I think they're doing really, really well because they have a very similar concept.
We are simple analytics. You can trust what we're doing. We're not selling your data to everyone.
You can do with your data whatever you want. You can delete whatever you want.
And I think that kind of movement is really powerful. There's another movement called,
I don't know if you've seen this article, but zebra's fix what unicorns break.
And it's all about the unicorn is the giant companies that raise billions of dollars
and that are ad driven and they're using VC money to grow versus a zebra, which is community driven.
There was profit models built into it. It's about working together versus competition.
It's about a positive sum game versus a zero sum game. And I went to this zebra conference
a couple of years ago when the hire club was first incorporated and it was really
great experience for me. And I met a lot of wonderful people talking about this idea of
what is startups in the future and what are the ways we interact with our customers and
do we have to be these exploitive, data hungry, privacy, bashing companies,
or can we build products that give back and make money? I don't think we need to be altruistic
necessarily in the sense of we should make money. We have to feed ourselves.
But I think there's a wonderful movement happening right now with a lot of founders saying,
hey, can I build not just a better mouse trap, but can I be a better mouse?
Yeah. I'm looking at this zebra's fix what unicorns break article right now and it says zebra
companies are both black and white. They are profitable and they improve society and they
won't sacrifice one for the other. We talked a lot about building a human business, building a zebra
company. We talked a lot about optimism and continuing to try as a founder even when things
get hard. What's your advice for founders who are just starting out who aren't sure if they
should even start a company or maybe they've started and they're in the early days and things
are going well? Yeah. My first advice would be to get a coach. I have a coach now and it has been
instrumental in having a sounding board, having someone who can call me out on my shit. I think
it's massively, I don't think hierarchical would be as successful as it is without like I use my
own product. You know, I think the second one is figure out what problem you're solving.
Right? And why does that matter to you and why does that matter to people? I think a lot of people
try to build a widget and sell it, but they're not really understanding the emotional and
need-based, you know, methods of what this product needs to do. Don't start coding,
right? Like don't just jump into coding. Don't just jump into design, but talk to people.
What are the problems you're having? What do you use to fix this problem? What's the frustration
with the fixes that you have? What are the solutions that you use that are terrible? What
are the solutions you like for this? And then you can get really wonderful ideas. If you talk to
enough people and you don't talk to a hundred people, you need to talk to 10 people. You can
learn a lot, right? And so I think for founders, don't sit behind your laptop and think that you're
building a product, right? The coding and the designing is the last step. Understanding
customers is the first step, right? And a lot of people, I think, jump into code, jump into design,
jump into like putting something up on product hunt, you know? And I think the last thing is
figure out your business model and charge more for it probably. Like don't, like how are you
going to make money, right? And one of the things we've noticed, the more we've charged, the more
customers we've gotten, right? People pay for valuable things. So if you give away stuff,
I see so many startups giving away like the whole farm and they're like, I'm not making any money
or I only have like $500 in revenue because I'm charging 10 bucks a month. Like I think there was
a couple of articles on Hindiacres about this. If you're charging 10 bucks a month, you literally
have to have something like 1 million users before you're even close to making ends meet,
right? But if you're charging 50 bucks a month, that, you know, is an exponential change. If you're
charging 100 bucks a month, it's another exponential change. And so your product should have to be
worth it. Don't charge more just to charge more, but in your product should have features and value
for the end user. But a lot of people, I think, founders are afraid to charge. And maybe because
of my consulting background, maybe because I don't want to be poor, I'm not afraid to charge,
you know? And I'll give people stuff when I, like if they're unhappy, I'll definitely give me a
refund. If they, you know, if someone is in need and they don't have the money, we'll figure out
a way to work with them. But like you have to understand the mechanics of your business. Like
we have a forecasting doc for Hire Club that talks about all the revenue coming in, all the expenses
go out. It is modeled out to January 2021. And I mean, it's modeled out to every single expense,
how much are we spending on Google? How much are we spending on bare metrics? How much are we
spending on gas? How much were you spending on rent? You know, like it is, I have done the work
of modeling the growth, modeling the churn, modeling, like I, I'm in Excel, right? Like I'm
not, I'm not in here just being like designing a product and being like, Oh, what's good? Like I
want to know where my business is going to be. And I think a lot of founders, especially in my
earlier days, especially at CardFlick, I did not do the business modeling, right? I did not look
and say, where are we going to do with this money? Where's it going to be in a few months? How are
we going to keep our lights on? Right? I was literally just being like, Oh, we'll get money
and then we'll figure it out. And like, that's stupid. And so like, I think there's a lot of
things that like build it, they will come and that's, we all know that's not really true.
But build your business model, right? Model out, okay, if I'm charging 100 customers,
X amount of money, and the churn is 25%. And the growth is 80%, let's say, what's going to happen
in one month, in two months, three months, hopefully your shirt is not that high. Do the work
of figuring out your model, right? And if you don't do that work, you will likely fail.
Got every single time I ask you a question. I want to ask 50 more questions. I'll tell you back on
the podcast at some point in the future. Thank you so much for coming out and sharing a story
about a higher club and sharing what I think, frankly, is just the inspirational journey of
you going through so many hardships and trying so many things that didn't work to finally arrive
at a place where things seem to be working spectacularly well. Can you tell listeners
where they can go to learn more about what you're up to at higher club, how they could find a coach,
maybe a founder coach, if they're looking for one and also the promotion you mentioned earlier
in the episode. Yeah, yeah. So our website is higher club.com. H I R E C L U B.com. Just go
to that. Click get started. You'll get free 15 minutes with a coaching or choosing. We have a
coach mattress so you can get matched to a coach based on what your needs are. We work with a lot
of founders. We have an indie hackers code. It's literally just indie hackers, your brand name.
That'll give you $20 off your first month. And we're going to keep that open for all the community
and indie hackers, which we're big fans of. And you know, if you are facing challenges,
you don't have to do it alone. This is what community and coaching is all about. You can
do it with someone else. You can have people on your side helping you. Please don't go out there
and try to change the world on your own. It's really hard. It's very frustrating. So we'd love
to have you join. If you're looking for a job, we can help you. If you're looking into promotion,
we can help you. If you're looking at a salary increase, we will help you. If you're stuck on
your resume, we can help you. Um, if you want to become a better manager, we can help you,
right? We have coaches for all the stuff. You want to become a better designer. We just got some
great design coaches are starting with us. Um, we can help you. Um, we have a Facebook group.
It's facebook.com slash group slash hire club, or just search for hire club. You'll see it. Um,
feel free to join, uh, mentioned in the hacker. So I know because we do still have the invite
process, but we've let most people in once they've created an account, but we'd love to help you.
Like one of the things I love about indie hackers because it is my same background is like,
like I want to help people succeed in a career. That's what I'm here for. And we love them and
help all the hackers, indie hackers do that. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Listeners,
if you enjoyed hearing from Kettin, I would love it if you reached out to him and let him know
he's at kid Bombay on Twitter. So if you learned anything useful from the episode,
if you're just appreciated hearing his story as much as I did, uh, just reach out and tell him.
Thanks. It really means a lot to him and to me as well. I also appreciate hearing from you.
I am on nd hackers.com, which is a community of founders like you and me building online
businesses and really just helping each other out. So whether or not you have an idea that you're
working on, or if you're just thinking about getting started, go to nd hackers.com, make a
post and feel free to tag me. I'm at CS Allen there, and I would love hearing from you.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode and I will see you next time.