How Deephire CEO Steven Gates grew Deephire to $22.8K revenue and 8 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is stephen gates during college he went through 24 hackathons 200 job applications zero callbacks and made a recruiting hack basically a vc from awarded a grant plus they raised some pre-seed to launch their current company deep hire they're 1.5 years in and they had no traction pivoted to video interviewing platform from pilot feedback and now they're closing paying clients won another grant with an angel match within two months and now focus on getting to the beautiful 10 000 per month mark as soon as they can stephen are you ready to take us to the top i am let's do it all right so where are you at today on that trek to 10 grand a month so right now we're doing about 1 000 in monthly recurring revenue that's great so let's break down kind of the back story here the first thousand can be the hardest sometimes so when did you actually launch the company what year uh so we launched in 2017 i think officially we incorporated in april 2017 so that's right after that whole hackathon stuff um and then since then we actually had three co-founders uh we did the whole summer thing right like get a good house together the three startup bros do the whole the whole shtick uh by the end of the summer it turns out we only have uh we have to get rid of one co-founder so i was gonna say how it's like the hunger games how many how many founders survived right yeah exactly two thunder survive um and that was that was one good learning by the way it took longer than you would expect to like actually make that clean break it took way longer than you would expect why stephen why'd it take longer then after that uh during that time um the fun relationship the it wasn't like a super clean break right on the relationship side it got a little bit um you know a bit ugly and then just because back then we're really bootstrapping i mean even though it's like 35 000 like nothing though is that is that what you guys had raised from grants and stuff 35 grand oh yeah 35 grand total so that's what that's what carried us to to last week and last week was when we closed the 50 000 kind of like bridge round oh congrats now was that it was that equity or debt or venture debt or what uh which one the 35 50. the 50 it was 25 000 convertible from an angel and 25 000 from a grant award thing that i had to go through well that's great okay so about 85 grand into the company to date which is which is nice so congratulations you're feeling good you have some extra runway now what now how much runway though what's the team size say is it just you two yep just us two and we're hiring so there's a few specific programs around here that um we can hire some interns for especially cheap on our end so we're experienced with that but two co-founders and then any interns they can get yeah so i want to walk through kind of how you're doing this because a lot of students or people stuck in corporate are listening going okay like how do i jump out and do what steven's doing and get my first grind of revenue we'll come back to that in a second but first give us some product context here what's the product do yeah so are you curious about the whole pivoting structure and how we pivoted or as of right now start with where you're at today and we'll go backwards cool so today um so just like how we're skyping right now and you do a lot of these podcasts every single time right so imagine if you could automate yourself out of it so you just have a list of questions and you send that out to people to kind of log on click your invitation link to log on they answer the questions on video much like i'm answering your questions right now now i know you're being a bit creative and you're asking your own questions so you can add those as well so that's basically what we're doing for recruiters recruiters they're little professional networkers right they do 30 minute phone calls all day every single day and a lot of those phone calls if the candidates just are they're like prospecting so the candidate just is plainly not a good fit first two minutes you can kind of tell you can't just hang up the call and go on right you got to stay out through the call the entire time so that's the huge time savings that's why that's really the one of the biggest value process for recruiter is hey use deeper fill out your screening questions on this interview link send out the invitation people log on answer your questions on video and then we and then you get back the results and video profile and then we do some extra stuff to some extra recruiting specific things to kind of help the recruiters drive client decisions faster yeah so like the candidate can basically say okay first question tell me about yourself the candidate can look at their webcam wherever they are in the world answer it that video gets uploaded and then your recruiters can kind of talk amongst the team like on the sidebar on their back end about what they thought about that canada is that right yeah 100 and then the other key part the killer whole thing because there are other apps that do that other web apps other companies that do that uh the reason why i think we're getting traction why people are responding really well now is because we're focused on the uh the the the client and the recruiter relationships so they're the for the client you know some guy to hire the recruiter to fill a position uh this client's like a vp of sales let's say and he's hi he needs like an entry entry level sales rep he's got 10 priorities hiring for that sales rep is like his 15th priority right he doesn't take the time to do it so and then but for the recruiter closing that placement that's a 5 000 check for the recruiter so he cares a lot right i mean that's his revenue that's how he makes money that's his business yeah that's interesting so we need stuff there to automate and kind of do a drip campaign to the clients and get them to respond and kind of tease them along get feedback from them and that's like those two combos what are people paying on average per month for this uh they're paying 150 per seat per month okay 150 per seat per month and how many customers have you scaled to today um so that would be we're around like eight or eight eight or ten eight or ten seats about eight seats great yeah so i can have that's where you get the thousand bucks a month eight times about 150 right right and and how so walk me through how you got those first date i mean are you just hustling and literally how did you find the first recruiter that started paying you so literally find so we found a lot of recruiters that are willing to mentor us and kind of give feedback in our local network i mean you know a lot of people say that your first sales come from a local network we found a lot of people are willing to mentor us was great but we found no one that was willing to actually pay for it which was a little bit less great um so to literally find our first customer uh she's awesome we love her hanging with suzanne she's in she's in london actually and we found her by going to facebook groups and there are specific recruiting groups each of them have like 20 000 30 000 people in the group so uh some of the groups they do stuff like feature member of the day right kind of like you do where they talk about you know they're here their metrics and here's what they do and here's what they focus on if you have any questions reach out to them so that's what we did we reached out to every single person that they that they had featured um we got a lot of calls out of it like a really really high response out of it because obviously they want to talk how did you get their emails uh it's part of it's part of the feature man that says here's suzanne letting from okay she does xyz this is her phone number she's interested in you know abc interesting okay very good so it's a lot of uh cold facebook message then set up a call set up a demo right after that and then usually because of people in the groups they're they're much smaller deal sizes you know at max it's like a it's like a boutique firm with like 10 recruiters so in terms of you know selling it's a pretty small deal size pretty small customer so their decisions are way faster the first customer we closed in like a week i think that's great all right let's go back to the kind of the founding story here right so like getting out of the gate so first off when you raise the first 25 grand and obviously you've just raised additional capital um let's go back to when the other co-founder was still there did you guys just split it right down the middle in the bro house it was 33-33-33 yeah we we started out i think with like um russell and i equal partners and then the third guy he had like 25 because we had some legwork before then but then he said so like ah okay sure three three three three right down the middle okay and then so okay so when did you realize it wasn't gonna be a fit like did the third one just like stop like responding on slack or he stopped being engaged what happened um so there's there's always like red flags right like but back then russell and i have mentality of well we can work through it right founding is like a marriage by the way back then we...