A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:24:20 · Ilya
[00:24:20] S1: Yeah. It just was real – hey, this is actual people, actual talent who actually want to work for this company. It's not about just me talking. I can talk all day but if I can show you on the phone here’s real people. I would open up their profile on Slack with their profile picture. Here’s Pablo. He wants to work for you, right? Actually, we have a lot of people named Pablo get hired, sorry, anyway. Yeah, that was, I think, probably one of the best tactics. Referrals were really good as well as businesses started. I think, with recruiting, it's a double-edged sword. There's a lot of players out there. There's a lot of not so good reputation players out there. There's a lot of noise, and it's hard to gain trust. Once you do gain trust and maybe have a few success cases with a company – think of the interest is to Article [ph] and Article ended up hiring 20 people from us over the year. Yeah. It’s just a lot of that. We also would do a lot of work with accelerators. Then one thing that we did really well and then maybe we should bring this back, actually, is we had these events called Leap where we would have engineers fly to cities that they want to move to and spend a week living there and going to – and we would set up a recruiting fair with our engineers. This was really good because all we would have to do to a company to get them to take a chance on us and say, hey, come to this meetup on Monday night at 5:00 p.m. at Mars. There's going to be some beer and food, and there's going to be 15 engineers who want to move to Toronto. Would you like to meet some of that – some of them, no cost? Just go there. You only pay us if you hire someone. Those were really, really good because we would end up creating a little mini marketplace where we'd have 10, 15 startups from Toronto; 10, 15 engineers. Then the best two would get two or three, five job offers. We had this one lady from India, Pritika, who got five job offers. A few people got five or six job offers during those events.
00:26:15 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya, S2
[00:26:15] S0: That’s helpful. Then you went through Techstars, so you kind of went through the accelerator. Obviously, you took some money from them. Did you end up raising VC? Did you try to raise VC, or did just go more the the bootstrap route? [00:26:27] S1: Yeah. We did Techstars. We did a few other accelerators too that were equity free, one called Start-Up Chile, the other one called Fit 4 Start and then Luxembourg, and after Techstars – and it just general all the time. I mean, I’ve always like wanted to raise money, especially since being in the accelerator back in 2020 at 21212. There's that demo day, and then just I’ve always wanted that dream of the TechCrunch…. [00:26:47] S2: Hype. [00:26:47] S1: Right, the TechCrunch hype. I've yet to get a TechCrunch article, one day, anyway. No one would invest in us because they're like this is just a lifestyle business. It's services company. I got a lot of the same thing. It's not a SaaS, so it's not scalable. After demo day at Techstars in Germany, Berlin, we tried to raise half a million euros, and it just didn't work at all. Everyone said no, so we decided to focus on customers. We made more than half a million euros in revenue in the last three months of that year. That was just a moment for me to be like you know what? Let's not raise right now and just focus on customers and growth. We did since end up raising – last year, we raised from a firm from Houston, Texas called Golden Section, which has been great. They're much more capital efficient, not so much Silicon Valley VC style.
00:26:47 · Ilya, Pablo Srugo
[00:26:47] S1: Right, the TechCrunch hype. I've yet to get a TechCrunch article, one day, anyway. No one would invest in us because they're like this is just a lifestyle business. It's services company. I got a lot of the same thing. It's not a SaaS, so it's not scalable. After demo day at Techstars in Germany, Berlin, we tried to raise half a million euros, and it just didn't work at all. Everyone said no, so we decided to focus on customers. We made more than half a million euros in revenue in the last three months of that year. That was just a moment for me to be like you know what? Let's not raise right now and just focus on customers and growth. We did since end up raising – last year, we raised from a firm from Houston, Texas called Golden Section, which has been great. They're much more capital efficient, not so much Silicon Valley VC style. [00:27:42] S0: That's great. Let’s stop it there. Maybe we'll just end on the two questions that we always end on. The first one, yeah, I think you touched on this a little bit, but when did you feel like you had true product-market fit?