A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:11:15 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya
[00:11:15] S0: What ends up happening? You get this first – let's say first customer, just a huge deal, $40. Does that become a real business? You ended up, I would say – let's say pivoting or evolving maybe into something bigger around recruiting, which is what we're doing – what you're doing now and what we'll talk about shortly. How long were you running this kind of career coaching service, and how did that grow? [00:11:42] S1: Yeah. I think we launched the official website in January of 2015. It wasn't incorporated, and it was still a side project I was working. I ended up getting a job at Best Buy in the analytics department, not in the store but in the headquarters in Vancouver. Then, afterwards, I left that job to work for a startup accelerator, which is more my thing. VanHack was a side hustle for the first year doing this English course. I quit my job and went fulltime December 31, 2015, so since 2016, been working on it fulltime. Yeah, the English course was good. I mean, it was definitely, to me, a real business. It wasn't, I don't know, making millions of dollars, but I ended up making more money from the English course than I was making in my day job, not that I had a very well-paying day job. [00:12:32] S0: You started off with the resume builder. By the time that this was – you're making more from this, let's say, “side hustle” than you were from your job. What was the full offering? You’re talking about English courses? Is Was that part of it at that point?
00:12:32 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya
[00:12:32] S0: You started off with the resume builder. By the time that this was – you're making more from this, let's say, “side hustle” than you were from your job. What was the full offering? You’re talking about English courses? Is Was that part of it at that point? [00:12:45] S1: Yeah. That became the main thing is we would do group English courses for software engineers, and we called it tech English. There was a lot of business English out there where you can learn about how to do English in a business environment, but there was no English for software engineers where you can learn how to pronounce PHP, Ruby on Rails, MySQL correctly, answer common interview questions, talk about just general software engineering terms. I can share a funny story. One of the students – or I used to go on sales calls for that or a lot of sales calls for that program, and I had a call with one guy. I was like, “Hey, tell me more about yourself.” He was like, “Yeah, well, I'm software engineer. I have 10 years’ experience. I work with HOR.” I was like, “Sorry, what'd you say?” He’s like, “Yeah, I work with HOR.” It took me a while, but then I realized what he was saying is R-O-R. In Portuguese, you don’t pronounce H’s or R's are H’s, so he was actually saying Ruby on Rails, just R-O-R and then with the Portuguese accent. I was like, “Man, just – let's stop right here.” [00:13:49] S0: That’s not going to help you. [00:13:49] S1: That's not going to help you. Try and get an interview. [00:13:53] S0: That's not going to get you a job.
00:13:53 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya
[00:13:53] S0: That's not going to get you a job. [00:13:53] S1: Yeah. I was like just say I work with Ruby on Rails. [00:13:55] S0: What were you charging, by the way, at that point, or what was the business model? [00:13:59] S1: It was a yearly subscription back then. We since evolved it to have two options of monthly and quarterly, but it was, I believe, 500 Brazilian reais was the first price per year. Actually, the first price was one-time fee lifetime. Actually, this is another thing that maybe is a lesson for people is that, in the beginning, actually, I would just charge people very low amount of money for a lot of value just to be able to get sales and get customers and learn. [00:14:21] S0: I mean, the recruiting business was always right there, I guess, but how did it really happen? How did you specifically see that and start going after that part of the funnel?
00:14:34 · Ilya
[00:14:34] S1: Mm-hmm, yeah. It’s true what you said about it always being right there. I had a notion that there could be this recruiting business because a few people had told me that. Actually, when I was working at one of my jobs before, the job I got actually before going to Best Buy, what was worked as a software development company, and we had to recruit software engineers for that job, and it just ended up being my job to do that. I remember working with a recruiter and learning about that space, but I didn't really understand exactly how it worked. I just knew that there's – there could be something there, but it all started when – we used to go to these TechVibes, TechFest events where recruiting – basically, recruiting fairs where a lot of the city startups and a few of the larger companies would get – go into this big conference room. People would network and try and get jobs. Then every startup would also pitch themselves at the – on stage. We would take, actually, a laptop and do a webinar and livestream the recruiting fair to all of our VanHackers, most of them from Brazil but, at this point, a lot of them from other parts of the world too. I would go to every booth and say, “Hey, I'm not just a crazy guy with a laptop. I actually have a few hundred engineers here who are looking for jobs in Vancouver. Would you like to pitch your startup to them?” The HR person would go ahead and pitch, and then I'll be like, “Hey, what's your tech stack?” They say, “Oh, it's Java and React.” I said, “Okay, well any Java and React engineers here? Please say so in the chat.” Then we had 15 people in the chat say, “Hey, yeah, me, me, me, me, me.”
00:16:05 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya
[00:16:05] S0: I have to ask, by the way, does that – that's not a normal thing. It's really smart. Was that normal idea for you, or how did you come up with – how did you even think about I’m going to go to this career fair with a laptop? [00:16:17] S1: I honestly don't even remember. I think we just went to one with some of the local VanHackers, some of our community members who are in Vancouver already for the first one. You’re like this is really great, and then we would do a lot of webinars. Webinars were a really large way for us to sell the course because what we would do is we would have a webinar and then be like, hey, everyone who joined the webinar, you guys get a 15% discount if you buy in the next 24 hours. That was a really good sales method for us. We started a lot of digital marketing courses back then, and that was a way that they sold info products. I was like, well, the best content for us is really the companies. Who are the companies? We make blog posts, like the top 10 companies to work for in Canada or something like that, the best startups to join. I don't know exactly how – it’s been such a long time. I don't remember exactly where the idea came from, but I do remember going to two or three of these events. I even went to one in Dublin and did the same thing in Dublin. I was always really interested in this kind of concept of bringing people who can physically be there to be there virtually.
00:17:20 · Pablo Srugo
[00:17:20] S0: The East Side Games was your first hire. I'm sure that was a pleasant surprise. What do you do from there? I mean, you're still running the school. Do you start right away focusing on recruiting and earning more from recruiting, or do you have a few of those other kind of serendipity – serendipitous moments that really awaken your – awaken you to the opportunity that exists in recruiting?