Careerist Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Careerist.com launched in 2019 after he sold his first company, Truckerpath, which hit 800,000 truckers using it and 5,000,000 revenue in 2017. Careerist today, he put in $50,000 of his own money in a pre seed round to raise 1,200,000 seed at a 20,000,000 post money valuation, and then closed it as series a in 2022, raising 8,000,000 on a 80,000,000 post money valuation for a 6.6 x multiple. Today, 500 folks that wanna learn technology and transition into tech [00:26] sign up for Ivan's platform every month and pay $4,000. They'll do 12 they'll do $25,000,000 in revenue this year. They did 12,000,000 last year and 5,000,000 in 2021. Hey, folks. My guest today is Ivan Tsybaev. He was born in Russia and lived most of his childhood in an near on an island near Japan. He's fond of programming at school, won many competition. About the time, there was no online education. His parents were poor, so he couldn't [00:50] get a professional programming education and got a financial management degree. Instead, way more boring. Okay? His first job finance was in ExxonMobil, but after a year, decided to start his own company. He started many companies, but ultimately wanted to get into tech. In 2009, he moved to New York. Then 2013 moved to Silicon Valley to start a tech startup. They built the most popular tracker app in The US called Trucker sorry. Trucker. Trucker, not tracker. Trucker [01:13] Path, which they monetize through financial services. He sold it in late twenty seventeen and in March, cofounded the ed fintech startup careerist, where they finance, train, and place talent in tech. Ivan, you ready to take us to the top? [01:26] >> Yeah. Sure. [01:28] Alright. Tell me about Trucker app first. What was the website URL for that? [01:33] >> It's truckerpath.com. [01:35] Interesting. And how many how many truckers, I guess, would use it in your best month? [01:44] >> I would say if you ask, like, 10 long call truck drivers what app they use in The United States, probably seven or around that will tell you they use the Tracker Path app. So and we served only a long call truck drivers. So there are around like 1,200,000 of them and around 800,000 were our active users. [02:11] Did you say coal? Like the black stuff coal truck drivers? Long haul. Long haul. Oh, long haul. Long haul drivers. [02:19] >> Long haul. Yeah. [02:20] Okay. And 800,000 were your users now. Did you make money from them directly? Did they pay a fee? [02:26] >> Yes. They either paid directly or their companies paid for them. [02:32] Okay. So how much revenue was Trucker Path doing? [02:37] >> On the top, it was around, like, 5,000,000 per year. [02:40] Okay. And what year was that? [02:44] >> That was [02:47] >> 2017. [02:49] 2017. Okay. Yeah. And why do you say on the top? Were your margins really bad? [02:55] >> Yeah. So the industry is very tough. So it's kinda hard to grow, and we actually wanted to build kind of transportation marketplace connecting truckers with brokers or with shippers. And, you know, ultimately, I'll figure out that's like too too too difficult to do because the industry is very conservative and we try to attack the chicken and egg problem by serving truckers first. So we were very successful in that. But unfortunately, we're not very successful in serving [03:35] >> like the other side of the marketplace and that was like an issue. So we build it into monetizing mostly from financing products like factoring. Factoring is very super challenging in the industry. Transactions are slow. People are still using faxes to send invoices and stuff. [03:59] So what specifically were you doing if if a long haul trucker got a $10,000 job with a net 60 payday, they could give you that invoice, you'd pay them immediately, and then they'd go collect the sick net 60 later? [04:10] >> Yeah. So we paid them right away. The issue was to collect from the company. So we tried to collect within, like, thirty days usually, but it took, like, much longer because of that document turnover. There there there is also a lot of fraud in the industry. That's like another side of the problem, And ultimately, that created issues for scaling. [04:36] What was your margin? Let's say you factor a $10,000 contract. How much would you wire the trucker on day one? [04:42] >> Yeah. We usually wire 90% of the invoice. [04:46] Okay. So 9 k there, and then you've got, what, thirty days to go, sixty days to get it back from the the company. And how successful were you in in actually getting that money back on a percent basis? [04:59] >> I I don't remember really. That was long time ago, but I would say that we usually made around like 2% of the invoice net, like, after like all the costs. [05:15] Okay. And how much money did you put out on your financing product in 2017? [05:20] >> We got the credit line for around, like, 30,000,000. And so we use, like, roughly around 15,000,000 of that. [05:29] Okay. And what was your cost of capital on a 30,000,000 credit line? [05:34] >> Who? Don't remember. I was quite expensive. [05:37] Like, fifteen, sixteen, 17%? [05:39] >> Yeah. Yeah. Around that. [05:40] Interesting. Okay. So you didn't like that model. It is a high by the way, we're doing this at Founderpath. It is a hard model. It is not easy. It's tough model. Yeah. So anyways, you built this company. You're doing 5,000,000 a year in revenue. Then what? You sold it? [05:52] >> Yep. [05:54] How much? [05:56] >> We don't disclose this, but the deal wasn't very good. So basically, the deal was mostly to return money to investors. [06:06] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [06:29] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [06:53] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [07:15] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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 [07:41] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second. But [08:03] if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into [08:29] the interview. Who bought it? [08:33] >> We got several offers, and actually, it was like another issue for this industry. If it was another industry, we we would be able to get much higher offers just because of large user base. But companies in this industry, they valid us for their revenue, like, specifically revenue and margin specifically. So that's why offers were, like, not that good. And we got several offers from the companies in the industry. And then ultimately, one of our investors is [09:06] >> a publicly traded company who made the best offer, and they decided to take over the company and [09:13] to continue to Alpine Investors? [09:16] >> No. It was a public company called Ranran. [09:21] Say it again. Ranran? [09:23] >> Ranran. Yeah. [09:25] Oh, interesting. Okay. And again, that website was truckerapp.com. Right? [09:30] >> Truckerpath.com. [09:32] Oh, truckerpath.com. Okay. Interesting. Alright. So you sell that company. Now take us into careerist. What does careerist do and how do you make money? [09:40] Do you want short answer or long or very long explaining the problem. [09:44] >> Yeah. [09:45] Simple as simple as the hardest. So simple as is is the challenging one. [09:50] >> Yeah. Careerist is an online education and a fintech company. Finances the enrollment of underserved job seekers in The United States, then trains them for tech jobs with software and freelance instructors, and then automates their job search. [10:08] Okay. So who I guess name a customer that might come to you. Is this someone who just graduated school that's looking for a job? [10:15] >> Actually, our sweet spot are people 25 to 35 year old with some career in the past until we can switch careers and get into the tech industry. FreshGradius, our second biggest audience. [10:31] Who? [10:33] >> FreshGradius. The graduates. [10:35] Oh, fresh graduates [10:36] >> That at you mentioned. Yeah. [10:38] Yeah. Interesting. Okay. And so someone might come to you that wants to switch into tech, and so they sign up for your platform. Are they paying you at the beginning? [10:47] >> Since we're a fin [10:51] >> fintech company as well, we offer deferred payment options. So you either can pay cash upfront or you can, like, sign up for the deferment deferred payment plan. [11:05] How much cash up front on average? [11:08] >> No. Average $4,000. [11:10] 4,000. Okay. And how many people when they sign up choose the four k upfront versus the finance version? [11:16] >> Yeah. Right now, it's around $50.50. So we're becoming more aggressive on the deferred payment options. So by balancing, like, the prices and making the terms better, But right now, it's, like, roughly the same. [11:32] If if I go the deferred route, obviously, I'm gonna pay more than 4 k. What's the total deferred? [11:38] >> The total deferred will depend on your credit score because we have tiers. So, like, roughly, I would say pay, like, around, like, 1,500 more. [11:52] Okay. Over what period of time? [11:55] >> Two years. [11:56] Okay. Got it. So for I'm I'm paying 1,500 for the right to pay this 4,000 over a three year period instead of all upfront? [12:03] >> Mhmm. Yeah. [12:05] Okay. Very interesting. Let's get into the sort of more of the the building of this application. When did you write the first line of code? What year? [12:13] >> 2019. [12:14] 2019. Okay. And when did you sign up your first dollar revenue, your first customer? [12:21] >> Actually, same month we started. We started in April, and we got first paid customers in April. [12:28] Oh, wow. How'd you get tell me how you did that. [12:31] >> Yeah. It was funny. I'm a fan of Tony Robbins, and I couldn't figure out the company, and then I went to the Tony Robbins event. So I changed my state and got understanding of how to do things. So I might [12:48] You walked on the coals, you burnt the hell out of your feet, and now you know how to get Yeah. [12:51] >> Exactly. And and then and then I motivated the team to work, like, really hard on building the code. [13:11] >> He wrote, like, the the first version of the quote enough to get the first customers, and we start selling a week after that Tony Robbins event. [13:21] Did you guys split equity fifty fifty? [13:24] >> We have three co founders. I I'm a majority shareholder, and then I have two other co founders that have equity stock between them. [13:36] Okay. So you you own more than 50, and they split the other 50%? Okay. Very cool. But you didn't tell me how you got the first customer. Was it a Facebook group? Was it a tweet you sent out? Where did the first customer come from? [13:47] >> Yeah. That's another interesting story. So while marketing was for free, we used the Facebook groups. Especially, I like the women groups. So I couldn't post from my own account, so I took my wife's account and I started posting from her account on those groups. And I got a lot of interest, and, yeah, I I think the first customer was from the women's group. [14:15] Name name two of the groups that got you a lot of customers. [14:19] >> Women in the Bay Area and Mama's in The United States. [14:25] Mama's in The United Mama's in The United States. Interesting. Yeah. Now did you work with the group owners to make an affiliate agreement or you did did you just post and hope they didn't ban you? [14:35] >> Yeah. One group, they allowed the paid post, so I paid them, like, very small money for the paid post. Think I think it was, like, $20 or or yeah. Something like The second group didn't allow the paid post. So I just, had to tweak a language. So it was kinda question slash advice, and I posted from my wife's account. [15:00] Since 2019, how many customers have signed up? [15:05] >> Since 2019, I think it's around 6,000 customers right now. Yep. So we have 500 new paid customers every month now. [15:20] But and how many how many new free sign ups do you need to get 500 new paid? [15:24] >> No. Everybody pays. Everybody pays. So you don't [15:28] have it's not a premium go to market model. [15:30] >> Yeah. Yeah. It's not freemium. We give you, like, one class for free. We have some free webinars, but that's only for client acquisition. [15:39] Yep. So how many this isn't really a recurring model because they pay and then they're done. Is that right? [15:45] >> Actually, no. They can come back to the platform in these scenarios. First, you start with some simple tech job. So we help you to get into, you know, kind of simple career path like software tester, for example. You start as a manual software tester initially. You don't need to learn like any coding and then we help you to get the job and then you come back to the platform to grow. So it can become like test [16:18] >> automation engineer and that's how you come back. Second scenario is that we have job application automation tool. So we build the software that automates your job hunting. That's why our graduates, they come back to the platform to use it like when they're ready to switch jobs. You know, like, usually people switch jobs within like two or three years. And also people come back as kind of evangelist of the platforms. So they bring referrals, we pay them [16:53] >> referral fee. And that's one of our biggest marketing channel when our old customers bring new customers. [17:01] What referral fee do you pay? [17:03] >> $3.50. [17:05] Okay. So if someone brings you a new customer that pays $4,000 to sign up, you'll pay the referral partner $350 immediately on day one? [17:12] >> Yeah. [17:13] Oh, interesting. How much how many people When [17:16] >> they when they pay us, so as soon as we get the payment, there are a few days where we can get issue the money back if the person that doesn't like the program, and then we pay the referral fee within [17:32] >> a week. So, yep. [17:33] I see. Within within a week. [17:34] >> Just to be clear. How [17:36] many how many how many affiliates have driven you at least one sale that you've paid them at least a dollar? [17:42] >> Come again? [17:44] How many affiliates have driven you at least one new paid customer? [17:49] >> Yeah. So I would actually reverse the question how many people bring those affiliates. So an average number is five, but we have some people who bring us like, probably 100 people. [18:10] Mhmm. So each affiliate brings you five on average, but that's why I asked. Right? Who so Yeah. You have big affiliates that bring in, like, what, a 100 new customers a month or something? [18:20] >> Yeah. Because some of our old customers, they start blogging, so they became influencers themselves, and they grow their brand, and they can, you know, like, bring a lot of customers to us. [18:32] What's the name or the website of the blog that drives you the most customers? [18:36] >> Yeah. It's the guy called Cyrus. He built a community called Black Intech, and he graduated from our sales engineering course. So he learned how to become a salesperson in tech. And then he started blogging, and he's very successful in kinda giving advice to diverse customers, specifically African Americans. [19:04] What's the website of the Black and Tech community? [19:07] >> I forgot. You can Google it, and you'll you'll find it out. [19:11] I can't find it. How do you what's Sirius'last name? [19:15] >> Cyrus. I forgot his name, but if you Google Cyrus and Black and Tech, yeah, you can find out. Okay. [19:25] Cool. Yeah. I I can't find it. I'm typing those in. I can't find it. But but [19:28] >> it would be interesting to study. [19:30] It'd be interesting to study, Isman. Is it c y r u s? Yes. C y r u s. Okay. Cool. Great. Let's move on. Take me back to sort of like revenue. Right? So last year 2022, what was total revenue? [19:47] >> Last year was 12,000,000. [19:49] Okay. And that's actually collected revenue. That doesn't include people on the 4,000 with deferred future payments. [19:55] >> Yeah. It's only cash revenue. [19:57] And then how much the year before that in 2021? [20:01] >> Five. [20:02] And the year before that? [20:05] >> One point 7. [20:06] $1.07. Okay. So your first year in business then in 2019, you did what? 500,000? [20:12] >> Think around 400,000. [20:15] 400,000. And have you done all this? Ivan bootstrapped? [20:19] >> I put my own money initially, and then a year after that, we raised some money. So totally, we raised around 10,000,000 from y combinator and few other investors. [20:31] Give me the full history. So in 2020, how much did you raise? [20:37] >> We raised 1,200,000 initially. [20:40] Okay. And that was, like, your pre seed? [20:43] >> Actually, I was seed. So I financed the the pre seed. So and the the valuation on that round was around 20,000,000. [20:52] 20,000,000? Mhmm. Post money. And when you put money in before the pre seed round, how much did you personally put in? [20:59] >> $50,000. And then also I gave some loan to the company. It was additional, like, $200,000. [21:07] Why structured as a loan instead of all equity? [21:11] >> We had some deferred payments. So at that time, we experimented with the model called income share agreements. So basically, we allowed a lot of people to learn for free, and then they paid us back when they get the job. [21:28] Yep. Are you still doing this is a very popular sort of factoring thing right now. Are you still doing sharing income share agreements? [21:35] >> Yeah. Unfortunately, regulators are not big on this model. And right now, there are, like, issues. It's hard to collect on them, so we have to stop that. Yeah. [21:46] Yep. Lambda School is is there too. Okay. So 1.2 seed round in 2020, then what? [21:54] >> And then after that, from the end twenty twenty twenty one to the end 2022, we raised, like, another 8,000,000. [22:08] And what was the last money that came into that 8,000,000 round? What was the valuation at? [22:14] >> It was 80. [22:15] $8.00. Did that feel fair to you? 80,000,000 valuation? [22:20] >> Yes. [22:23] >> For the market conditions, you know, like, the market is not good these days. Yeah. Otherwise, it would be bigger. [22:30] Yeah. It's a six x multiple on your 12,000,000 in ARR. So I would say that's that's not a bad thing. That's not a bad thing. [22:35] >> That's fair. Yeah. That's fair. [22:37] What do you think you do this year in revenue? [22:41] >> This year, we target 25. [22:46] 25. Interesting. Well, it'd be very interesting to see what happens. Tell me a little bit as we wrap up here about the team. How many folks are full time helping you out? [22:53] >> Yeah. And one more thing to mention that we're actually profitable. So we turned profitable in August of last year. So we [23:00] need to [23:02] >> our profitable. [23:02] >> Yeah. [23:03] How much profits last month? [23:06] >> So we make around $3.04, $500,000 per month. Last month was $300,000. [23:15] What do you do with that money? [23:16] >> Profit. We just [23:21] >> use it as a reserve, and then we're going to use it to push more our deferred payment options. [23:29] Yeah. Your own debt your own debt fund. Right? Yeah. Alright. 300,000 there. And then okay. So that's profits. And sorry. Remind me how many paying customers do you have today? Like, paying something, you know, once every four quarter or something like that? [23:44] >> Everybody pays. So we have 500 new customers every month. So, like, this year, we estimate, like, 6,000 customers. [23:54] Yep. Yep. Yep. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Take me into the team a little bit. How many folks are full time? [24:01] >> Over 300 people. [24:04] Oh, you have 300 people full time. Holy cow. Yeah. Yeah. How many are engineers? [24:09] >> 50 engineers and what's good that most people are outside of The United States. So we have only about like 20 people in The States and everybody else is remote. That helps us not only to save money, but also to hire best talent in those other areas. You know? [24:29] It's really [24:30] >> hard to compete for the talent. [24:32] Here. Yeah. 12,000,000 in revenue, 300 full time. You're paying an average of $40,000 salary. So 20 in The US. Tell me the other regions where you have concentrations of employees. [24:41] >> We have salespeople in Latin America and India. We used to have developers in Russia and Ukraine, but because of war, we had to move most of them. So right now, most of people are in Turkey and Armenia. And those are engineers, some people in marketing as well. And, yeah, we have some tech support on Philippines too. [25:07] That's amazing. So it's crazy you can profit $300,000 per month on a million of top line revenue monthly and still pay 300 people. That's that's great. Do you spend anything else on marketing and sales or is it all your affiliate model? [25:18] >> No. We spent every month, spent around 500,000 on marketing. So we're still aggressive on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other sources of paid marketing. However, our biggest channels are organic and those affiliates. [25:37] That's crazy. So if you have 500 k of of paid spend plus 300 k of profits, right, so that's 8,000,000 or 800 k there, you have a million top line. Right? So that only leaves $200,000 left to pay salaries divided by 300 people. What is that? That's like $650 per month per person on average. [25:54] >> Pretty much. Pretty much. Yeah. [25:56] Very cool. Alright. Let's wrap up here, Ivan, with the famous five. I I guess I should wrap up. And before I wrap up, is there anything I missed that you wanna make sure you chat about? [26:05] >> No. Not really. Everything you need to ask, feel free. But yep. [26:12] Alright. Famous five. Number one, favorite business book? [26:17] >> Hard Think About Hard Things. [26:20] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [26:25] >> As for the CEOs, [26:29] >> I would say, Tanya Robbins. That would be the funny. Though he's not a good example, but, yeah, I I I started other SEOs, but still, like, more more more most most of advice I get from, like, Tony Robbins seminars and his coaching. Yeah. [26:49] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building careerist? [26:56] >> ChatGPT, let's say. [26:59] Alright. Number four, how many hours of sleep How many hours of sleep do [27:02] have a night? [27:03] >> Seven, eight. [27:04] That's good. [27:05] >> And situation, married, single kids? [27:08] >> I'm married with two kids. Two kids. That's my wife. [27:11] That's great. And how old are you? [27:14] >> I'm 36. [27:16] Okay. Last question, Ivan. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20? [27:20] >> I wish I went for the Tony Robbins seminar earlier. [27:28] Guys, there we have it. Careerist.com launched in 2019 after he sold his first company, Truckerpath, which hit 800,000 truckers using it and 5,000,000 revenue in 2017. Careerist today, he put in $50,000 of his own money in a pre seed round to raise 1,200,000 seed at a 20,000,000 post money valuation, and then closed it as series a in 2022, raising 8,000,000 on a 80,000,000 post money valuation for a 6.6 x multiple. Today, 500 folks that wanna learn [27:54] technology and transition into tech sign up for Ivan's platform every month and pay $4,000. They'll do 12 they'll do $25,000,000 in revenue this year. They did 12,000,000 last year and 5,000,000 in 2021. Ivan, thanks for taking us to the top. [28:08] >> Thank you. [28:10] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, 1PM [28:35] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [28:57] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up [29:19] for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We [29:39] got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.