A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:08:33 · Ilya
[00:08:33] S1: Yeah. The original idea I had was to help people because I was really working in the tech space in Brazil. I didn't know that you can actually get paid to do recruiting. I knew of job boards and I knew of online schools. I really liked the online school model where you can create content once and sell it many times. We were like a unity model. I moved back to Vancouver Canada Day, actually, July 1, 2024, sorry, 2014. I just start getting a lot of messages on Facebook because I post pictures of – I’m pretty active on social media, and so I posted pictures on just saying I'm super happy to be back in Vancouver, really nice picture of the False Creek and stuff. People start commenting on those and be like, oh, this is a so beautiful. One day, I'd like to be there, like in Portuguese, and some people DMed me about it. I thought maybe if we can help people learn how to code – come to Vancouver, learn how to code, and then that way they can move here or improve their careers. That was the first idea of the landing page. I just threw it up on a lot of Facebook groups, and people started signing up. I think we got 50 signups on the first day. The pitch was come to Vancouver, learn how to code, something like that, and move to Vancouver. I originally thought the people who would first want to come to Canada to buy my course or take the program – actually, originally I thought it would be like an in-person course. People would fly here, which then we just realized it's super expensive. Getting a visa is a challenge.
00:09:59 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya
[00:09:59] S0: I was going to say – I'm like, really? That's a big ask. Okay, that makes sense. [00:10:03] S1: Yeah. Cool. I don’t know you just – I just threw something against the wall. [00:10:05] S0: That's right. [00:10:05] S1: I had an inkling, though, that there was some – there was something there. I didn't know exactly what it was. [00:10:11] S0: If I remember correctly, when you were helping people with the resumes, you were unemployed, right, at that time? It’s just a memory I was just thinking about it. [00:10:21] S1: Yeah. That's actually funny so, yeah, this other detail. I ended up just not – the Brazilian startups didn't work out. That's a whole other long story but ran out of money. Yeah, I just didn't get along with the co-founders. I ended up getting another job, moving to São Paulo. I got let go from that job, and I came back to Vancouver with my then girlfriend, now wife, Giselle, and her and I were living together with my parents at 26 years old in my back – in the room that I grew up in. I was also like looking for a job because I was thinking I want to marry this girl. How could I marry her if I don't have a job? I went to all these meetups, and I started looking for roles, applying to jobs. It's funny. A few of the companies that I applied to ended becoming customers of VanHack, like Mobile [ unclear] , Hootsuite, and on Bounce too. I actually applied to work there.
00:10:21 · Ilya, Pablo Srugo
[00:10:21] S1: Yeah. That's actually funny so, yeah, this other detail. I ended up just not – the Brazilian startups didn't work out. That's a whole other long story but ran out of money. Yeah, I just didn't get along with the co-founders. I ended up getting another job, moving to São Paulo. I got let go from that job, and I came back to Vancouver with my then girlfriend, now wife, Giselle, and her and I were living together with my parents at 26 years old in my back – in the room that I grew up in. I was also like looking for a job because I was thinking I want to marry this girl. How could I marry her if I don't have a job? I went to all these meetups, and I started looking for roles, applying to jobs. It's funny. A few of the companies that I applied to ended becoming customers of VanHack, like Mobile [ unclear] , Hootsuite, and on Bounce too. I actually applied to work there. [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?
00:11:15 · 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?