How Clipdrop.io CEO jonnathan koch grew to $36K revenue and 10 customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is jonathan he's a founding member of talent genie and talent scraper along with clip drop dot io his latest adventure aims to turn the one-way video interview software industry on its head by exploring multiple ways to use video in the talent acquisition space jonathan you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right so just be clear you've got three companies which one has the most revenue is it clip drop um at the moment no clip drop is probably the most promising project that we've worked on um talongini is probably the one with the greatest revenue at this point in time globally so what is talent genie how do you make money there talent genie is a applicant tracking system it's a system designed basically to track your recruitment process we integrate into two and a half thousand job boards around the world so monster for instance would be a job board um and effectively integrating to the likes of social media like linkedin pinterest twitter etc or for talent acquisition purposes to track talent and then we use ai to try and process the applications as they're coming in and effectively screen the candidates as they're coming in and what's the business model over there is it sas or a typical recruitment fee or what it's a sas model um but it's the the go-to-market strategy is like the different to a traditional sas model um it's it's more sort of like a one-on-one communication that that leads to to client attraction as opposed to clients coming coming to find you um which is the traditional sas model from what uh you know what we've experienced um but yeah it's it's a good it's a good business um i think that it's got um it's got some decent clients globally we've got about 1500 clients globally now um which is obviously uh uh sorry how many globally about a thousand five hundred uh companies globally using it oh wow and and what do they pay you per month on average to use the tool for their ats it would all depend on on what's being done so it's customizable um so i mean we could build a whole lot of different components into it um to to basically cater for a need whatever the need might be but effectively um you know it could be as low as let's say you know 50 to 100 and as high as 200 as a user depending on what needs to be done well but now as a user is not a customer though right a customer can have a lot of users no it's a user it's a seat a are used so you have 1500 not customers you have 500 seats on your platform yeah currently yeah across how many brands or companies there's probably a total of about 400 different companies using it at the moment i see i see okay so we can take 1500 seats there times 100 per month you're doing 150 grand a month over there in revenue yeah well it depends so in in some cases if you look at at the i mean so i'm based in south africa in the south african context south african market is a very small chunk of what we actually um control on a global basis i think the business probably turns over about five million dollars okay got it so is that a five million run rate today which means it does about 500 000 a month in revenue more or less about 400 000 dollars a month in revenue um it all depends on where you're looking um you know the the reason we got into involved with clip drop is because uh we believe that it's far more promising yes so tell me about that i mean if i was sitting on a business that i assume italian junior is growing doing 5 million a year in revenue i wouldn't i certainly wouldn't distract myself with something new i'd try and keep growing it why was now the right time to focus on clip drop well we think that that it's it's one component of the talent acquisition um space that's been ignored and and um effectively whether where you do find one-way video interviewing type models or automated video interviewing type tools that are out in the market we think that um we think that they are under utilized um to a large degree um and price point is one of the the reasons why they are underutilized we also think that there is a massive opportunity to utilize video for multiple things all within that same space so we found seven different uses for video in the recruitment or talent acquisition space which includes the acquisition or the marketing of candidates um um or both 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 attraction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 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 you mentioned price how much is clip drop pre-revenue or do you have coil paying customers already um we've got a few a few customers not many uh when i say not many we we had a beta testing coming to an end at the end of this month uh a few of those clients have already switched over and started paying how much per month um roughly about anywhere from a 100 to about 500 dollars a month depending on the number of seats so i think 120 dollars a month for a single seat um see the the model the model is slightly different to the traditional uh model we we are a subscription based service so you could have as many vacancies as you like uh on on the platform whereas other services are charging per vacancy um and of course it comes with a whole lot of additional components as well for instance you you can um you can launch a blog or vlog and we integrate directly into social media platforms um you can direct people directly through to interviews or you can reach out to them so you can do a direct rechart using video so you you can imagine the power of of of you know the two of us sitting here trying to have a discussion over linkedin by text and the next thing someone sends a video message via text or via the but jonathan you mentioned this pricing is unlimited applicants but isn't the core value of your platform if it works i'm hiring more people and shouldn't that be what you charge against if that's the core value well we've actually kept it with the number of gigs space that you could actually use think about dropbox so um we give you about 20 odd hours of recording time per user um why do you think that's a better value metric though the number of candidates hired from a sas perspective we get paid every month well yeah but that's that's the point though right you want to serve your customers first and if sas is the best way to do that then great but you don't want to force a business model on your customers so for your customers why do they care more about storage than they do hiring people well the reality of the matter is that when you're looking at the recruitment industry site just to give you some background i've been in the industry for about 22 years volumes do fluctuate but we are basically charging the same price that someone a competitor might charge for a single vacancy now if you if you're working anywhere from five to ten vacancies a month it makes a lot more sense to use a product like ours at the same price as a single vacancy um and you know we just we understand what you're getting at where you're saying that right well you've got a whole lot of additional recruitment needs that are available sure you can buy additional space from us but we've got a very very um simple streamlined model that just makes a lot of sense for the end user they're getting greater value for um a lower price point um as it goes along with the better quality system as well yeah i mean so just for context like we've had colin sims on with isims we've had k1 and pete lamson with jazz hr who've bought many companies in this space i'm pretty darn familiar with the space i don't i mean you could have someone that's paying you for storage but it's terrible at hiring they never hire anyone right they're paying you a crap ton for storage because they turn through so many candidates is i'm that's what i'm understand why have you made a decision that it's better to price against storage than the true like value thing of an ats which is the candidate was successfully hired you know it's how do you measure that if you are an ats i mean do ats's actually charge for a higher no they don't they they charge for for that it's a platform they are an intermediary between the person that's actually doing the hiring and the person on the other end that or the the the the job board or the social media platform it's a management system so why not number of applicants tracked well you know it doesn't matter where we look you know and and i've had the opportunity to look at a lot of different systems there are not many systems that actually charge for the number of applicants that are actually being tracked generally speaking when you look at an ats for instance they'll be looking at seats some of them might capital cap it at a certain number of vacancies that you can run through the system you know we just don't we believe in the volumes gap we believe in adding as much value as we possibly can but still to be fair to the business um and we believe that we're being fair to our own business and own business model by not stretching it to a point where it gets abused yeah i mean the flip side of all this is if you're going to let people do unlimited tracking of applicants you also effectively cut off your ability to ever reach 140 150 net dollar retention because you have no way to expand customers if unless they're really aggressively driving up what you're pricing against which is amount of data stored on the platform absolutely and that's on clip drop side on the talent genie side of course you know you can only have one user access so we use single sign-on to to prevent that from from being abused yeah yeah okay very cool well so clip drop has a beta customer wrapping up now how many paid customers on the platform today well we currently have about 10 that have been converted from the beta customers so far oh wow okay so 10 times 240 rpoo that would be two seats i mean you're doing like two three thousand a month already yeah yeah that's great and how how is the org across you intelligent how are you splitting your energy and resources across this the new exciting baby versus the legacy genius that's paying for everything yeah so it's a good question um i do feel sometimes like i've got a bit of a split personality at times but i wear two different hats um but i do have a strong support team and they've been they've been stepping in and really really giving me a lot of support how many full time are on the team um for club truck give me both okay so there's a there's roughly about 11 people currently full-time um fake focusing specifically on talonchini and we've got three on the clip drop side we've already started to look at employing someone to take over some of the responsibilities around talent genie we're looking currently at exploring additional headcount in the clip drop space there's a lot of interest at the moment in clip drop we've had we have some large white label organizations that traditionally have brought in customers by the source of software from payroll type software across the board they're wanting to let one global the product but there's also a number of of governing bodies um in different parts of the world that are looking at actually promoting the tech so we think we're in a fairly good space as far as that's concerned so have you dropped today or did you raise outside capital from from the beginning i love that so how much of talent you need these dollars have you funneled in the clip drop already um that's a good question i can't actually answer you it's been a labor of love for a while so you know every now and again when additional work needs to be done you don't even think twice you just when did you write the first line of code for clip drop inside of talon genie i think you put in when did you write the first line of code for clip drop like inside of talent genie we're not we're not writers when did you write the first line of course i said sorry man about two years ago um okay and we actually came up with a with a very basic idea we just wanted to provide another automated or one-way video interviewing um platform and then we took a step back and we said well now that we have it you know we have the same thing that everyone else has got is that cool or not and we realize but it could be cooler so we sat down we said well what would be cool is you know take a little bit further we do x y and z and eventually two years later and we had created seven different uses for the same application i love that okay very cool so you're scaling clip drop down we'll see what happens um let's uh on that note wrap up here jonathan with the famous five number one favorite business book uh uh richest band in babylon number two is there a ceo you're following or studying there's a guy called brian joffe a company called bidvest he kind of started off bootstrapping his business and i believe it's currently worth about five billion dollars um very very interesting guy he plays mainly in the southern hemisphere um but i love his work he's just been he's been brilliant at what he's done number three what's your favorite online tool for building clip drop um to be honest with you i can't really tell you which one is the favorite i know when i sit down with my development team they all seem to be throwing different tools at me all the time um but i wouldn't be able to recommend anything at this point in time i'd need to speak to a few of them to find out which ones they would actually say no problem number four how many hours you sleep to get every night um i try and get anywhere between uh six and eight hours in life fair enough and situation married single kids um divorced with uh with two kids teenagers two kids two kiddos okay and how old are you i'm 46 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. that i knew what i know now it's just something you oh that you know you can't say that something you wishing to give me something specific um something i knew uh you know i really wish i really wish i knew a lot more about tech and what was coming and i really wish at an early age that someone actually said to me learn to code i think i think i'd done that at an early stage i think a lot of the things that i aspire to achieve would have been achieved a lot sooner guys his main business talent genie is broke four million bucks in revenue with 11 full-time employees and he said you know what i want to spin out and build another software tool they've launched clipdrop.io which is effectively an applicant tracking system on steroids but allow you to do video and use video in different ways during that process they charge based off storage have beta customers now signing up doing 3000 a month in revenue as they look to keep scaling it totally bootstrapped which we love jonathan thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much all right 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 you 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