How Aspireship CEO Corey Kossack grew Aspireship to $5.2M revenue and 70 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is corey kozak he's inspired to make a greater difference and help overlook candidates get into software sales to do that he launched aspire ship a free online training and job placement platform he and his team have helped thousands of workers from all backgrounds and experience levels land high paying jobs and sas sales corey you ready to take us to the top yeah let's do it all right so first question how many engineers are on your team uh we just hired another so now we're up to four okay so when you guys hear free online training in the bio don't tune out going oh it's a consulting guy it sounds like there's real software here right so corey what is the software component yeah for sure so it's super interesting basically we built a homegrown kind of lms for the education side of the business so it's free top of funnel instant access for candidates uh and within there there's things like built-in role plays for audio and video role plays for you know testing people for sales acumen and stuff like that um so we built that whole framework to basically take this big top of funnel and whittle it down to a top 10 percent candidate pool and then on the back end what's really cool and i think longer term stuff is matching for companies so we operate mostly like a talent marketplace where once we've identified the talent we're then matching them to companies who want to hire them um and figuring out who's right for what roles yeah so you're putting people on jobs with like mind body obviously well-known sas company uh folks like how many employers have you put at least one candidate like they've hired yeah i think we're up to about 70 now 70. interesting okay so and is that the right question right is that what you measure is it how many employers you put one candidate with and then how many candidates you place all together um so i i think it it depends how you're looking at it i think the normal like investor b2b sas more way to look at it is okay what's an average customer how many do they hire how long do they stay i'm actually more interested in the candidate side because it's a network driven business so as more candidates come in they attract more candidates and then attract more companies and so i actually look at it more as a how what does it cost us to get that candidate pool going and accelerating and then how likely is it that we're going to monetize it and what do those economics look like so that that's more the way i look at it but you could look at it either way well let's start with how you look at it that's much better way to look at it what does it cost to get a new candidate on the platform gotcha so i look at active users which basically means someone who not only signs up but they do something like they watch a first class or something like that so it currently costs us about 20 bucks to get an active user and within 120 days at least over the last 12 months we've averaged 275 uh dollars per active user um so super fast uh return um it's actually like a 80 gross margin business always shocks everybody um but but basically yeah that's that's how we do it but it used to be a hundred hundred fifty dollars per active user when we were pumping marketing dollars um but once we sort of cross the chasm you know we get this group of people in and it just goes like this so so that's the way the business works so so 20 bucks to get the the candidate now sorry that yeah the candidates signed up and active they watch at least one video and then that you make off that candidate over the first three months about 275 bucks so obviously very quick payback period how are you making 275 bucks per candidate in the first 120 days yeah so it comes from employers so employers it operates like a talent marketplace think of like upwork or something like that um but essentially we're kind of replacing a third-party recruiter or any of that sort of stuff where companies are paying nine thousand dollars per hire um to hire out of our kind of hand-picked talent pool that we match with them all right what was that price it's 9 000 per hire fixed uh you could think of it as you know roughly 15 of salary depending on on the roll um in many cases it's going to be less than that and then we have an alternate model for people who want to lean into it where they can pay 6k a year in a subscription and then pay 6k per higher instead of 9k oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview 6k per month or per year sorry per year yeah so it's just like i think of it like amazon priming it right so 500 bucks a month and then your cost per placement goes down by a third okay so reverse entering the math there right so 275 dollars per active user is what you said you generate and it sounds like you generate a sale it's a 9 000 sale placement so can we take 9 000 divided by 275 bucks it means you need about 32 active users to place one new successful candidate in 120 days yeah so think of it as three percent so from the top of active users like three percent at least at the current state of the marketplace is about what it looks like there's a three percent get hired yeah through our network where we actually monetize there are significantly more that get hired outside the network we don't restrict it um but that's sort of like our distribution so as people come through even if they go out of network it then spreads into those companies it spreads into other people um candidates and we have this really cool viral loop going on so what's the bottleneck your cat payback's really quick three out of a hundred activators get hired you make nine grand on the most six grand on the low side per hired candidate three candidates at six grand probably 18 grand for 100 new user sign ups what's the bottleneck here yeah there's no bottleneck so really it it's taken a couple years to get to this point so we're about two years old um the last i would say three to four months is like the inflection point for us so all right just to be clear you launched in 2019 late 2019 yes right before covet okay so then we had 20 20 coveted nobody's hiring almost no revenue all that stuff and then you know came out you know guns blazing um since then but what was 2020 revenue total uh like 120 000 yeah that's awesome yeah yeah for sure um and almost all of that was in q4 yeah so yeah so um so bottleneck was candidate supply but now that we've sort of cracked the code on this organic viral growth um the candidate pool the number of candidates signing up per month has quadrupled in the last six months so we're we're on on the way now how many candidates sign up in the last month uh 1800 1800 and if you'd quadrupled over the past four months so what you're doing 400 500 signups a month back last year it was less than that it was like three in the threes up until like maybe september interesting and where are you you said you spent 20 bucks to get those 1800 new candidate signups every month where are you spending that money yeah so that's blended so we do some adwords you know some display ads you know things like that we also sponsor organizations um but the bulk of what happens and the reason that the cac is so low now is that we do we attract people through like we'll partner with organizations that help out like a specific niche for example we have a partner called the teacher career coach it's just an individual she has an online course for transitioning teachers who want to get out into something else and she's like hey if you're looking to get into the tech industry and specifically sales you gotta check out a spy ship and so they'll send a group of people in and then once those people in it spreads within the teachers um so just a bunch of stuff like that that that leads to um to the growth interesting okay so you did 120 000 bucks in 2020 what'd you do last year in 2021 700 000. wow okay i mean that's great scale with how many people on your team full time uh so at the time uh we did i think we were about 10 last year and now we're 16. so we've added a bunch in the last few months and what do you think you'll do this year in total revenue uh it'll be in the twos um so two to three you know three would be three would be upside down yeah now what's the breakdown of that so so how many i guess the right question is how many employers are on the six thousand dollar per year like subscription fee right now yeah so it's maybe like 15 of the base so the majority even ones that do repeat hiring they just like a la carte they like to pay when they hire you know low commitment it's also the easiest you can sort of look at us like a plg or usage based pricing type model where just low friction to get in even on the employer side and then once they're in i mean it's been kind of amazing you would think that more would just automatically upgrade to the subscription but i think some of the dynamics of how they get budget approved and stuff like that they're like well look i already have approval let's just keep going yeah so how many candidates did you successfully get a job last year uh i think probably about a hundred okay about a hundred directly through the network so figure that there's two to three x that amount outside the network that are landing jobs in tech so they're all success stories but not monetizing yeah if you did seven hundred thousand in total revenue and everyone was paying ava cart nine grand per higher that'd be about 78 hires i believe last year some are not a la carte though so it's a little higher something about 100 total highers direct not to mention that we've changed pricing at least three times in the last 12 months um we used to charge 5k per higher interesting okay tell me tell me about that was there push back when you increase price there's a lot of people listening right now going i really want to increase price but i'm scared it's going to piss people off no i mean basically just the demand has been so strong um and every time we even even when we got to 9 000 most people like oh that's below market for recruiting it's like well we're not recruiting we're a marketplace it's different um but that's there it's basically i think most sas companies and people that look at this they're either willing to pay something or they're willing to pay nothing it's less about oh that's too expensive that's too pricey and especially because we have ways for them to lean into you know higher volume stuff that cost less we don't get hardly any cash back on pricing and in terms of like sort of run rate uh when you add up all your revenue last month you did something what like like 120 130 000 bucks in revenue yeah so you can you can say we're you know 1.5 um run rate um it's super interesting though because it can change real quick i was going to say yeah because you're effectively sas plus sas being sas plus sort of transactional based upsell based off of success you know a successful placement that thing can go up obviously really quick if usage grows so it also was the first it was the first month that we ever cracked 100k um it's congrats yeah thanks that's exciting and so so i guess for people listening right now maybe that are not founders but are thinking about joining a founding team right as a sales rep who are these sdrs you're placing aes csms bdrs what's the core role your focus yeah so right now it's sdr or bdr uh and ae so we do both you can think of the candidate pool split in two there's one who are transitioning professionals from all walks of life that have never held a sales job those are your likely sdr's bdrs and then there's sales people that have actual experience closing but they've never done sas before um and so they could be in insurance sales or mortgages or advertising or whatever and we'll help them transition in directly sort of skip the sdr path in most most cases and go straight to an ae role interesting okay so if someone is joining let's not use mind body because they're an actual customer but like let's say someone's joining gong today what should an sdr be expected to see in their offer letter in terms of comp sure so it's changed a ton in the last six to nine months i would say with the constraints in the market um but i generally say you know 50 to 65k on a base and you know 10 to 20k in a variable um so you're looking at you know 60 to 80 is you know all in is is typically what you're gonna see um we do see stuff outside of that as well um we've had certain like kind of more strategic type sdr roles where you know your ot might be 100k um so you know kind of crazy and these are all primarily remote roles so we're not talking about like you have to be in the bay area or new york and and that sort of thing interesting and and have you sell fun of the business or did you decide to raise we did raise so i i had a a company before actually exited to mind body so that's the the connection there which company was that it's called frederick um it's a sas marketing platform for smbs um and so um so anyway so straight after leaving i mean i raised a 1.4 precede uh when i had nothing like no team no product just like hey i can do this there's a big five cap or something yeah that was like that was in um in uh 2019 yeah that was that was the five cap i had a bunch of people i worked with and i'm like hey i'm going to make these terms like awesome obviously you can make a ton of money and and that stuff so i did that and then i've basically taken inside money since then we've raised a total of 4 million to date uh and um you know now sort of looking at okay as uh is a series a in our near future um we're not far from being profitable so like lots of different options so four million minus one point four right is 2.6 when did you raise the 2.6 like seed round effectively from insiders yeah so we didn't do it at once it was when covid hit we were like oh um who knows what's going to happen here and so we took i don't know another 800 something um then and then um we just had little chunks come in another 600 at a different point we did a million something last fall so just all all small did you keep increasing the valuation as well yeah so yep yeah so the last million you took in i guess last year what valuation did you raise that at yeah so i had uh i had about a million that was at a 15 cap and then we had a top off uh at a 20 million yeah interesting interesting okay so you still own what sixty percent of the sixty five percent of business something like that something like that interesting okay and a little less than that okay cool and any co-founders or just you yeah so uh i recruited a co-founder named jason rydell we met through our kids preschool um and he's a like seasoned uh tech guy from paypal um and so he's our our cto um and then uh you know we i have some like really early people uh like christine rogers who i brought in as president and ceo she was the head of sales at um uh the last company and we worked closely together and uh so i almost think of her like pseudo co-founder but not not technically a co-founder and your first company founded in 2014 frederick uh did you raise capital there and if so how much so we raised 620 000 in angel uh and then we were first acquired not by my body but by booker um in 2015 it was like eight months after customer number one we were not looking for a sale but it was like so strategic and so aligned um and so i i joined um i joined booker and and built the business inside of it uh and then we exited you know jointly to mindbody you know was that a big cash event for you when you sold a book or was it more like getting equity in booker and then the cash event was selling booker to mindbody yeah it's the latter yeah so i was looking at it as continuation of a startup um and then the big cash event was mindbody and then uh nine months into mindbody as i was staying we were acquired by vista for 1.9 billion um so it was uh it was a crazy little you get to dip into that as well or you have already sold all your stock uh mostly sold yeah much yeah all right that's what we call like the trip with the quadruple dip with a little bit on the end there on the vista deal so what a good story here so okay if you do raise so look it sounds like you're thinking maybe about a series a if you do rate a series a how much will you try and target yeah i think six to eight million is what we're what we're looking at what we're talking a few people about and what do you think you can raise valuation-wise out of range obviously is fine i'm not sure i mean i think i think we'll see i think there's a difference between what you can do and what you should do or picking the right partner so i'm not necessarily going to the highest bidder um you know a lot of uh not personal scar tissue as much but scar tissue through people i know like choosing the wrong vc so i'm definitely prioritizing that over uh whatever the number is going to be all right let's wrap up here corey with the famous five number one favorite book uh favorite book i like founders at work number two is their ceo you're following are studying i like andrew godzeki micro choir i like the fact that he's like kind of like a movement you know i like that's that kind of stuff that founders do number three what's your favorite online tool for building a spire ship there's something most people don't know called trevor dot io incredible analytics uh back end there's so much stuff you can do with it super lightweight number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night five to six okay and what's your situation connor married single kids or corey sorry married and uh four kids eight seven three and one wow how old are you i'm 38 38 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 um something i wish i knew when i was 20 i would say um just keep going he launched he launched his first company in 2014 raised some angel money sold the booker in 2015 not a huge cash event then but obviously got a lot of stock in mindbot and booker which became a nice cash event when a mind body acquired booker obviously mind body acquired by vista corey took off uh and started aspire ship in 2019 raised a quick 1.4 million pre-seed round on a 5 million cap really to help folks get roles and sales at sas companies coming from other maybe insurance sales roles or other things like that are looking for a career change they're doing about 2 million bucks in terms of sorry 1.5 million run rate today 700 grand last year in revenue 120 000 and 2020 revenue working with 70 companies placing over a hundred job candidates last year where he makes anywhere between six to nine thousand dollars per a successful higher corey thanks for taking us to the top my pleasure good to see you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure 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