A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:17:42 · Ilya
[00:17:42] S1: No, we went – started going pretty strong on recruiting because realized – because we were making, I think, at the time – I forget exactly how much it was, but I remember the Thinkific hire. We made more money that – from the Thinkific hire than all of the new ARR that we added that month for the English school, and there was a lot more work for the English school. I was giving all the classes. I was doing most of the sales. I was in Slack 24/7 chatting with people on DM. It was a lot of work to service that, but to hire, we just did a webinar. Then the money came and then that's it. There wasn't any other work there. I was like, you know what? Let's go all in on the recruiting side. Then we also changed the price to 15%. We since changed it to 20% of annual salary per hire. I remember making our first 15% hire, happened really in a funny story. I was just waiting for my wife to get ready on a Friday night to go for dinner, and I was like, huh, I got some time. I remember there was a Java developer I just met and this company Traction. The man was hiring Java developers, so I just sent an email connecting Anthony and Fernando, didn't think much of it. A few weeks later there's – they said again, “Hey, we hired Fernando. ” The salary was 100K, and so we made $15,000 from that. I was just like, damn, this is incredible. Yeah, it just opened my eyes. This is a big side of the business.
00:19:04 · Pablo Srugo
[00:19:04] S0: What were some of the unique things that you did? I mean, recruiting is an old business, and one of the challenges with it being a services business is it's pretty hard to scale. You’re only as good as the recruiters you hire and these sort of things. What were some of the things that you were doing that were unique that you felt like were maybe either more tech enabled or, at the very least, more scalable?
00:19:28 · Ilya
[00:19:28] S1: I think the biggest thing for us was the community side of things so building the community. For example, I think I mentioned this a few minutes ago, but our candidates, they call themselves VanHackers, so there’s really this feeling of we’re in it together. I think that started because we have that English school or education in our DNA of we're all students in the same classroom working together, friends, and trying to learn and get to the same success outcome. What I think that did is that made people really want to invite their friends to VanHack, tell them about us, and believe in us. We have a Slack group with about 90,000 people in it where we chat with our engineers and candidates pretty often, education content. Creating that community vibe, which makes it so that candidates are applying to jobs quickly, and we can get candidates that are really good. Yeah, I think that's a big thing. Another thing I think that's important is we did build a software platform, right? We ended up hiring from ourselves. Our CTO Tiago was actually our first employee still with us today, built out this combination of a learning management system and an application tracking system and did a lot of tech work to automate the processes.
00:20:39 · Pablo Srugo
[00:20:39] S0: Yeah. Tell me more about – so the candidate side, I think that's a clear edge in the sense that, if you're going to developing countries, there's going to be way more engineers or just high-quality candidates in general that will resonate with the value prop because they see the opportunity of living abroad. Maybe they specifically want to learn abroad, they want to make more money, whatever it is. The ROI for them is pretty clear. What was it like, though, landing on the customer side? There you're competing with just about any other recruiter who also charges 15 to 20%, who also promises great candidates. What was that part like? Any stories to share there in terms of how you got these customers to try you and then to continue to rely on you to make hires, which is not easy?
00:21:28 · Ilya
[00:21:28] S1: Generally, the biggest thing was just that we had a lot of senior candidates available, and then we could provide them very quickly, right? Other recruiters would come in and say we can probably send you some resumes in a few weeks, and they're probably sending the same resumes as everyone else because there's not – just not that many people who are looking for jobs inside the same city, whereas we had new fish that we can bring to the pond, if you'll, so we had this talent pool. I always say this and it's true that there's more engineers who want to move to Canada than there are in Canada right now. There's just probably 10 times more and especially if you're looking for the ones who are looking to work. Also, it’s you have to say that, for startups, they're budget conscious, so they can find a software engineer who's willing to work at a little bit lower rate. That's important too. Then over time realizes, our engineers as well, they stay longer, stay for about three and a half years. We didn't know that in the beginning because we just – we’re just getting started, and the beginning was all about like, hey, I have this Ruby engineer. I would literally edit resumes and remove contact information. We also used to send out Excel files where we have skills of people. Here’s Engineer 1 would have five years of experience overall and worked with Ruby, blah, blah, blah, blah, and Engineer 2 and 3 and 4. We just had what people wanted, supply and talent, whereas other recruiters, I mean, I'm sure they were also great, but they just maybe didn't have as many. Really, I think when we hit product-market fit on that side of things was when we started getting customers asking us for a lot of engineers.
00:22:58 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya
[00:22:58] S0: At that point, what were some of – especially in those early days when you still – now, I think VanHack is a pretty known name, certainly in Canada and probably abroad. In those early days, what were some of your best tactics to land customers, and how much was inbound versus outbound and specifically on the – and on either side, what were some of the things that were working really well in those early days? [00:23:19] S1: Yeah. It was all outbound. It was all outbound, just cold calling, cold email, LinkedIn, going to tons of meetups, tons of events, hiring fairs, startup events. I think you and I met at SaaS North, I believe, just going to events, so really just, again, hustle. One of my favorite tactics to get people to believe in what we're doing is, when I meet someone on a sales call or go into their office and have a meeting or run into them at an event is I got to ask them. Tell me who you're looking to hire. They say I'm looking for a Ruby developer with 10 years’ experience. Then I would go to the Slack group that we have and say, hey, I'm here with CEO of X company, and they're looking to hire Ruby on Rails developer with 10 years’ experience. Anyone here with that description who wants to move to Ottawa, please comment here, and then we would continue the conversation. Then maybe 10, 15 minutes later I'd be like, hey, let's check if anyone commented on the post, and then I would pull out my phone again and open Slack. There’d be 10 people who'd say, hey, me, me, me, me, me. [00:24:20] S0: Love that. That's great.