How 50Skills CEO Andri Janusson grew 50Skills to $2.1M revenue with a 22 person team in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is christian christensen he's the ceo and co-founder of a company called 50skills.com which is transforming the way businesses find and hire people christian are you ready to take us to the top sure all right tell us more about the company what do you guys do and how do you make money yeah so in a nutshell uh 50 skills is our recruiting software uh what we do which is a little bit uh different from other recruiting software's out there is that we connect directly with messaging platforms so companies using facebook workplace using slack it integrates directly with those and kind of changes the way people think about recruiting um in a way that we call conversational recruiting which is a new trend that's happening in the market and is it a sas model or is it you know ten percent of first year salary kind of kind of set up it's a sas model so companies are paying typically 12 months in advance uh for subscription of the service uh and then there's an optional integration fee so a lot of the companies use the software also to onboard new candidates uh so it can be for different types of software they have it can be checklists of things that they want to occur um so there can be custom integrations on top of the sas like subscription part but that's completely optional for the companies and something that more of the larger enterprises are going for and why would somebody pay a little verse a lot more in other words are they buying like a bulk number of placements per year or what drives the pricing economics no so we uh we have a tier based pricing model and it's based on the number of employees that the company has so it's not based on the number of users they have and in fact we actually want to encourage the company to add as many users as they can uh and not like not be diminished or having to pay a higher price if they add more users to the platform got it okay good so it's okay how does that work though for i mean i imagine you have more costs if you obviously place more jobs how do you keep pricing i mean what what allows you to drive pricing up higher yeah so you dropped a little bit out there when that during that question i'm just saying if you don't if you don't drive expansion revenue based off number of new placements what does drive expansion revenue that seems to be like the core utility value of your product so the the number of employees that the company has employed is what drives up the the price of the of the of the software and the reason why it's also you think about why is the price higher et cetera there's a number of things like one of them is that the software helps the companies uh hire through referrals so basically whenever you build a job you can add rewards to it you can incentivize all of the employees within the company to reach out uh into their social networks so basically the more um people you have working for you the more people you have optional to source candidates so that's one of the art the other is that we we have really a great support team we put a lot of effort into the support making sure that the customer is really happy um and so the effort is a little bit higher on our end at the if the company is larger got it okay makes sense but but someone could have a thousand person team they use your tool and it doesn't lead to any new recruits for whatever reason you're still going to price based off team size not number of new recruits yeah yeah we do a baseline says the company and we do have clients that have thousands of employees that are using the system they have different departments and they do use in a different way but overall it's a great offering in comparison to whatever else is out there and are you selling one time to like the you know hr lead or are you selling into these individual departments kind of an atlanta expand approach it really depends on the size of the company how we do it we have clients ranging from smaller startups into larger enterprises and the sales process and how you do that really depends on how they're structured who's making that buying decision and what happens there you also have companies that have a really different types of turnovers so like in the hospitality tourism types of companies they typically have a higher turnover or seasonal turnover um and and the hiring process is different there from companies that maybe have you know people stay there for 10 years and don't don't move the job afterwards and and i don't want to go down every customer code i'm sure you have many and you break them up but on average what would you say when these customers is paying you per month yeah so typically our price again the pricing is based on number employees so it's clients are typically paying somewhere between uh a hundred to three thousand dollars a month for services got it okay good i mean that's that's a pretty big range are you more enterprise at three thousand a month or more more s b at 100 a month yeah the 100 is more like the the smaller startups that are using it for their highers but most clients are closer to the maybe 500 uh to 5 000 employee range so that's our target market but we've gotten a lot of interest from smaller startups that just raised funding uh growing fast they'd love to use slack love to use workplace and they really want to integrate perfectly with that so we've gotten a lot of like inbound leads for that kind of stuff although our focus has been more on the 500 5k i'm just trying to get out so a more accurate average might be closer to 3 000 than 100 bucks a month yes that's your focus going forward is more enterprise the smb stuff is just coming on no touch and you're you're handling that as it comes on yeah yeah okay very good give me more the back story here when did you launch the company so company's about two years old uh with our kind of reaching out of beta in october last year and since then we've been growing pretty fast okay and what's pretty fast as i said going going just to be clear going from a dollar to two dollars is 100 growth many would call that very fast who are doing currently 100 million in revenue so it doesn't mean much when you say growing fast yeah yeah i mean on the i in instead of disclosing the the customer amounts that we have we're at about 30 growth rate per month right now okay again it doesn't it doesn't yeah i always wonder why founders especially ones that are young say that because it doesn't mean much again if you're going from a dollar to two dollars it means much more when you know these ceos come on doing 100 million in revenue and say hey we've figured out a way to stabilize around 30 to 40 year over year growth so um we'll move on past that uh i just i want to call that out because i have to obviously be fair that way walk me through your first few customers that you got how did you get them did you come from an agency and you brought them on where'd you get them yeah um the first customer that we got on board was just through our networks we just used referrals we looked at companies that we knew that were growing you know kind of you know some kids just begging them to try the software just to you know help us build it out and once that started out we got some great feedback we were able to iterate uh once that happens we had some word of mouth happening and then we tried a few different strategies so currently there's like three things that we do if i find clients in the b2b space one of them is just uh with outbound leads that we look at sources of what's a good trigger mechanism for us to reach other companies and there are a few in the hiring space that we've we've tried out that's worked you know in a in a decent manner the the other two is uh we used uh resellers a lot so we've actually uh gone out found resellers that have a great network and then we've used them to to find candidates that are a good source like to find leads that that kind of fit the criteria and they have their own kind of network scenarios that they operate why do they take time to help you though you must incentivize them somehow yeah they're incentivized to help us either as uh so it's a little bit different it's an incentive model as a percentage of the revenues that we make like a traditional kind of value-added reseller model yeah okay very good and do you by the way do you limit that or is it in perpetuity in other words if someone's if they bring you someone that pays you every month do you pay them in perpetuity or just for the first year or just for the first month or what we have a structure and all the revenues that they bring in from the clients uh it typically works on a 12-month basis like all the revenue they bring in all that period but there's different types of structures that we have depending on what kind of like a reseller partner we're working with yeah i know i asked that question a lot of the sas ceos will do on a you know a kickback like that in perpetuity which essentially locks your margins into much lower margins than what you'd see versus if you just do it for 12 months at least you have some margin gains after the first 12 months pass right yeah um interesting okay good and then um walk me through team size today how many of you guys are there and where are you based yeah so our our team is...