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...