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In 2024, Distro's revenue reached $3.4M. The company previously reported $736.6K in 2023. Since its launch in 2021, Distro has shown consistent revenue growth.
Distro reached a $15M valuation in 2022, set during its Raising 2H 2022 round.
Distro has raised $3M in total funding across 1 round, most recently a $3M Raising 2H 2022 round in 2022.
| Year | Round | Amount | Valuation | % Sold | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Raising 2H 2022 | $3M | $15M | 20% |
CEO
Chad Ingram has had two successful exits. His last was Jump, a customer engagement application that was acquired by Reputation.com. Chad quit school during his final semester to become an entrepreneur and never looked back. Now Chad is the founder and CEO of Distro. He has two children and an incredible wife. He's an off-road race car driver and loves to solve problems using technology.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What's your age? | 37 |
| Favorite online tool? | - |
| Favorite book? | - |
| Favorite CEO? | - |
| Advice for 20 year old self | - |
Distro serves 12 customers.
Distro employs approximately 49 people as of 2026, up from 13 in 2023. It serves 12 customers that rely on its solutions.
Distro generates an estimated $3.4M in annual revenue.
Distro was founded by Chad Ingram.
The CEO of Distro is Chad Ingram.
Distro raised $3M across 1 round.
Distro has 49 employees.
Distro is headquartered in Lehi, Utah, United States.
Distro operates across multiple industries. Browse revenue, funding, and growth data for Distro in each sector below.
[00:00] Okay, thanks for having me Nathan and Founder Path team. I'm happy to be here and we'll wake you guys up anyway, can see you guys on your laptops and phones and all that, so hopefully we can be moderately entertaining and that you could learn a little bit about this from my story and the story of Distro. So to tell you a little bit about what we're gonna talk about, are tell you a little bit about my [00:31] background, so I was in my last semester at school in my undergrad and I was about to go to law school, I was literally two weeks away from taking the LSAT and I had this huge change of heart, I'm like, I need to be an entrepreneur. And so anyway, I started my first company in 2013 after leaving school, sold that 3.5 years later, and then in 2016 started a company called Jump and that's what's a little [01:02] bit more little bit more relevant preceding distro and having started that company, knew what I wanted to do at Jump and I wanted to study, I did study like what everyone else was doing, like I looked at Silicon Valley, I subscribed to Crunchbase, I interviewed all these people and I like put together this like perfect plan of what a business should be, what a startup should be, like, you know, so anyway, I'm having a conversation with [01:34] a friend and and this this friend tells me, or asked me like, alright, how's it going? How how's it going building this business? I'm like, oh, it's going really great. Like I'm I'm recruiting the right people from these really cool companies, we're we're raising we're raising money from these these big investors. And for a little context at Jump, we'd raised about 10,000,000 and we got to 80 people by the time we had sold in 2019 and [02:03] I gave this whole plan of all the things that we're gonna do, right, and he looks at me he's like, dude, like you got it all figured out. You sound like very, very prescriptive, and I was like, okay, that's fair. He's like, there's no one way to do anything, and like, that's also fair. And so fortunately that conversation kind of woke me up a little bit about how to how to do things and so like definitely [02:28] you could raise your hands if you want to but like who here keeps modeling and emulating everything that happens in San Francisco as the way to success? I did it. I know I know there's more of you assholes out there that have done it, okay. So anyway, the point is is that there's more than one way to get the result that you're looking for, and so I'm just gonna share a few of them that we did [02:53] at my last company a few years back, and some things that we did a little bit differently, you know, at Distro that we're doing today. So I'll tell you tell you a little bit about like what we do at Distro for for a little bit of context here in a second, but over the next little bit we're gonna talk about [03:12] some strategies and product and we're really gonna talk more about strategies. I'm not gonna give you like a lot of tactics today, maybe some ideas you might get, but and then we're gonna look at product and how know, what are some things that we can we can do in product and finance and then ultimately on the on the people side. So again, a little bit more context about Distro. So when I was growing my last startup, [03:37] we were spending like about 1,000,000 a month in total expenses and like 900,000 or so, some somewhere in that range, it's been like four years something. We're spending on on payroll and of that, about a third of that was going to our engineering team and I remember thinking like, this is crazy, and I my engineers are getting recruited like right and left. Has anybody had that issue before? Like your people getting recruited away from you? Yeah. [04:01] Welcome. Right? It's still happening even though the market's been weird the last few months, but but anyway, it's it's gotten really bad and so the idea was that we could we could create another method for people to hire directly people around the globe and that's what Distro is. It's a marketplace to find, hire, and pay. So we went ahead and put the idea together in the fall of twenty twenty one and then by the spring of [04:27] twenty twenty two, we started selling in April and then in June we started having our first contract or customers that we're invoicing, and you can see here going through the revenue growth and I'll talk to you in a second about what happened in September, October kind of and some lessons learned there. So going over the first section, I want to talk to you about is thinking about creative ways and unconventional ways to test your market, to [04:57] test your product by building an MVP. So who here is a product or engineering leader? Okay, cool. With more pride, raise them a little bit higher. So you're the worst offenders of what happens here. So typically, everyone says they won't do it, but everyone literally does it. They say they won't, like, take a long time to build their product, but then another month gets added, another month gets added. Like, who who's guilty of this? You all [05:24] freaking do it. Don't lie to me. K? So whether you're building a new product or launching a feature in your product, I think the principle is the same, like don't forget this, figure out a way to launch faster. That is so important. You can drive a lot of revenue very quickly by by launching faster. I can't tell you how many startup, you know, or wantrepreneurs, whatever you wanna call them, keep telling me like, oh yeah, I'm [05:49] building my product. Well, when did you start? 2.5 ago. Okay. You've lost. You've lost before you've even began. So I'll show you some examples of that. So getting to a sellable version as quick as possible, and then funding, [06:04] talk a little bit about that, and then how to to launch now. So I pretty much already said that, don't wait like at all, like launch as soon as you can. There's always arguments that it's not good enough, there's always a reason to wait. [06:23] Okay, in the particular example of Distro, here was our challenge. We had just enough seed money that I put in to get the business started and we didn't want to wait very long. We wanted to start selling immediately. We thought a full blown product would take us about a year to build, really at best nine months, but I knew like, you know, we were sandbagging ourselves a little bit, and so I remember we took our team [06:45] together and we're like, you know, a few are founding members, and we modeled out what the product should look like, which is over here on this right side. Okay, I know you can't read all the details of it, but basically this is the user journey and customer experience. Then what we did is we tweaked it to say what components can we test manually or using someone else's product. Okay. Again, you can do this with a like [07:10] a full on product, you could do this with a feature. So we did this right away. So our engineering team got going on building our actual web application, and then we got going on building what we can do to actually test the model. It was amazing. In the first few months we started building product within, I don't know, weeks or so, we learned that what we had already built needed to be deleted. [07:36] What if we had built that for a year? We would be done. We would have already missed the boat. So think about that, how can you go faster? If you're the perfectionist CTO which I know you are because most of you are the same, like think about ways to get to the essential part of how your product creates value for distro. It was helping somebody meet somebody worth hiring, somebody who is good enough and how to [08:04] get them paid globally. So distro issues payments to people in over 200 countries, and so we had to figure that out as quickly as possible. So that's what we did and going back to that revenue graph within a matter of a few months, we figured out a way to add value and get to market fast, which would help us get it where we needed to go. So a couple other examples, these are some of the the [08:29] applications that we piece together to test this. It sounds really simple, it sounds really rudimentary, but yes, there are no code options for some of you like, you know, non programming and and engineering founders that like you can integrate these things very, very easily in an afternoon to be able to at least test some things. Do you really need to build out a full scale MongoDB or could you just throw that data into Google Sheets to [08:55] just test it or could automate some of these functions out of a CRM? The answer is yes, you can. Now there's some arguments against product led growth models that may be a little bit more challenging depending on what the product is, but for a lot of SaaS platforms this is possible. [09:15] Okay, then the last thing on this section, it's really simple. There's a lot of founders that struggle with how to get to market, very simple. Create a list of people you know and you don't know, make it 10, but get in touch with at least five of them and I can with a lot of confidence, over 90% confidence tell you that if you ask these people a few simple questions, they would answer you in a way [09:46] that would surprise you. So you ask them, hey, here's a problem that I'm trying to solve and I could use your help. Do you have this problem too or have you experienced it? You're gonna say yes or no, right? You already have a hunch that they do. If they say they need help, you tell them, look, I could not, will you buy this from me? Will you help me and give me feedback on it? I could [10:07] really use the help and more often than not, they will say yes. [10:15] Okay, at financing of startup, this is really interesting. When I started my last business, we hit the ground running and I had put money in from the sale of my first company and [10:30] I immediately started to out to fundraise and learned really quickly that there's many ways to do it and somebody else taught me that I could explore debt and as a plug for founder path, right? So there's a lot of options out there in fundraising that aren't just your traditional methods and I think at least having a plan of how to do that is important and sticking to some sort of ratio or plan. Then of course managing [10:56] burn is very important, there's a way I'll show you about that and then financing through sales. Okay, going back to the first section, product. If your product is not in market and doesn't drive value on the essential problem you're trying to solve, you can't sell. Go back to that problem, get to market as fast as possible, like as fast as possible. There's always gonna be excuses to delay that, so finance through sales. [11:22] This is just an example, of of from my last business, a couple of term sheets. The one on the left is debt term sheet. I think that was for 1.5 or 3,000,000 or it became 3,000,000 and then this other one here was for our Series A which at the time it was I think it was 5.5 total is what we had raised, but these are real, these do happen and just for reference, anybody here have raised [11:56] equity or debt? Okay, cool. [12:02] Okay, so one ratio that I like to look at, this is independently, so this isn't from any particular firm that pushes this agenda, but I like to look at it like a [12:16] one third on debt and two thirds on equity. Okay, a lot of times we think about equity and we think that equity means that like, alright, if I raise debt, I have to raise traditional equity like we think about it, but that's not the case. You can raise equity from investors or you can be profitable. [12:36] You can hoard cash, okay. The more equity you have on your balance sheet, the more cash you have on your balance sheet, the healthier you are to then get debt, okay. So that's very, very important. So for us today, this is about how, we're running today at Distro. We're a little bit about fiftyfifty and if we needed to put a little bit more equity and we could at Distro we are running profitably currently. So looking here [13:03] managing burn, it is so easy going back to this like Silicon Valley method, it is so easy to just let it slide and let it slip and just let it keep burning, all raise more money. Well, what? Welcome to this Silicon Valley Bank debacle and freaking 2023 because it's totally changed. Okay? You're not gonna raise equity easily. So think about what it is that you're going to either burn or be profitable, and so for us we've [13:33] generally been pretty steady. We had a section of time in the very first few months when we sold some of these people we asked to let us give us feedback on the product and buy the product. A couple of them weren't very good and so we churn them out in that that kind of dip that you see there, which is totally fine. Finding, you know, the right customers, helps us grow and, you know, we added a [13:56] few people in that October 2022 phase, but you can see we're holding steady and paralleling our growth, sales and burn. Okay, [14:10] alright, [14:12] so we'll look at this last section on headcount. Headcount matters so much for our industry is the single largest line item on the profit and loss statement. It matters, don't screw it up. One of Silicon Valley methods I keep kind of harping on is to just hire, hire, hire, right? So five years ago when I was running my last company, it was like your bragging rights were, how much did you raise and what's your headcount? I [14:47] don't give a shit about that anymore, right? We want to be profitable intentionally and we want to have the right headcount. So it's not just about hiring to hire and so think about that. Constantly push yourself to be doing more with less. I promise you, your people can do more than they're doing right now and you don't have to slave drive them, know, [15:09] you can get them to do more and there's so many other tactics you can figure out how to do that, but I promise you the people that are doing whatever they're doing for you now, they can do more. You don't need to hire a person to tweet. [15:22] So again, going back to sticking to what is essential. One other thing that's important is focusing on your strategy and the right things. If you find yourself as a company trying to do too many things too quick, you're gonna find yourself that become less priority or less prioritized. And so if you hone in on the things that matter the most, you're gonna need less people. Just think about that for a second. [15:48] And then of course, growth based hiring. So let's go ahead and sorry, keep hitting the wrong button. Okay, so this is our revenue match with our headcount line. Okay, so the way you want to think about this strategy is and it sounds simple, it is simple, but we all break it. We find ourselves like, oh we need to grow, we need to hire more people. Stick to building a product, then have the sales necessary for it [16:16] and then once those sales are in, you can justify what to bring on and who to hire and so for us, I'll show you a couple of [16:27] slides. This is a headcount model up here on the screen and then next to that we have our our headcount model to match our sales model, and so they go hand in hand, and so as we're building sales, we invariably look at what is our headcount and, anyway, you want, I'll have my email at the end, you can email me and we can talk more about this, but it has to work. Your sales are variable and [16:52] so should your headcount be. Be smart about it, okay? This will help you manage your burn. If you do $20,000 in net sales a month and you need to hire somebody who's going to cost you $12,000, go for it. If you did 8,000 and you know you have somebody who's going to cost you 12, you need to wait another month or sell some more. [17:15] Okay, in the last twenty minutes we went over some really important things on product, finance and people, some creative ways. I know that some of these things will help you get to where you want to go, there's no one way to build a company. You can be very creative about what it is that you're building and in many different ways, follow your gut and we'd be happy to talk to you guys about Distro as far as [17:46] you're growing your team, feel free to come talk to me about it, it's helping a lot of startups grow their teams very creatively. Thank you.
All figures on this page are taken directly from interviews or are estimates from public sources and proprietary models. Not financial advice. Read full disclaimer.
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Valuation
$15M
2024 Revenue
$3.4M(Est.)
Customers
12
Funding
$3M
Avg ACV
$286.4K
Team
49
Founded
2021
| Year | Milestone | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Distro Hit $3.4m revenue in October 2024 | Estimated |
| 2023 | Distro Hit $736.6k revenue in December 2023 | Estimated |
| 2022 | Distro Hit $720k revenue in July 2022 | |
| 2021 | Launched with $0 revenue |
| Year | Milestone | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Reached 49 employees (October 2024) | |
| 2023 | Reached 13 employees (December 2023) | |
| 2022 | Reached 14 employees (December 2022) | |
| 2022 | Reached 8 employees (July 2022) | |
| 2021 | Reached 8 employees (December 2021) |
Introduction hey folks my guest today is chad ingram he's had two successful exits his last one was called jump a customer engagement application acquired by reputation.com he quit school during his final semester to become an entrepreneur and he's never looked back he's the founder and ceo today of a company called distro dot io he's got two kids and an incredible wife he's an off-road race car driver and loves to solve problems using technology chad you ready to take us to the top yeah yeah for sure for sure so are you a software engineer by trade or no no so when i when i quit school i immediately started teaching myself um time youtubing and just buying books and uh quickly learned like though i could do it i was slow and it just wasn't for me so i hired so i hired developers interesting so what is distro and what are people paying me paying you for yeah so distro is essentially a marketplace for um for american tech companies now american tech companies to to hire qualified uh software developers around the globe and to be able to pay them so distro itself is a marketplace where you can find and hire and um our technology is really based around the payment infrastructure to be able to issue payments to other other countries okay so give me an example of a customer using you and how they might issue payments yeah so let's say a customer is a you know vc-backed tech company and they've got you know a team of 10 software developers and they're struggling to keep them they're struggling to afford them they're struggling to find anybody to apply here in the us and so but but they also don't want to hire a dev shop see we're the alternative to a dev shop um so their only option is you know before distro is is to go hire a dev shop and so um but you know that comes with a lot of disadvantages like you know a lot lack of control you don't know you're hiring they're not you know they're not like in your team infrastructure they don't really understand the purpose of the products they're building things like that and so anyway um let's say you want to hire five more developers so you would be able to use distro and to you know do your own interviews and decide if a team member is the right team member for you and once you make a higher that higher is placed through distro we don't have any like long-term agreements just a user agreement um and so you would you would simply hire five developers after you've interviewed them and found that they were a good fit for your team and they work directly for you and so and how do you guys make money in this model so what we do is we take a rake off of the payroll number so when a developer is introduced to one of our customers they just see one you know automated number to say like all right this is the cost of this developer and that's the all-in cost and so they don't have to worry about like a subscription fee or payroll taxes or anything like that so they just say all right this is the you know the one person and this person is let's say 11 000 a month and they've got is that the average of the jobs you've placed is it 11 11 a month i would say yeah between 11 and 12 you know depending on experience so these are some very high quality people you know like we just recently had you know a tech startup that hired somebody uh who was working for coinbase but through a dev shop and so how much of that 11 000 will you keep so we'll we'll end up keeping it it depends on the geography so usually in more more asian countries in india we can take a little bit more but but it really just depends on the geography but we try to get to um 25 generally okay okay so you're taking about you know maximum 3k on an 11 thousand dollar a month person that's a developer or someone hired through the platform per developer per month correct on forever and perpetuity opportunity yeah that's a lot of people i mean so it kind of is a subscription to me in that sense that it doesn't end or do people only hire these developers for three months then they stop great question so we only do long-term full-time work so if your intention is to find somebody for two months to do a quick widget or something then we're not a good fit um you know these developers are willing to leave because these are the these are incredibly high quality people they're leaving a great career where they're working um and uh you know but they they you know solving for the developers they really want to work directly with the tech company in the us they don't want to go through a project manager you know in their country at a dev shop they want to they want to learn from the cto 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 raised 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 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 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 so how how many companies today do you actively have at least one developer you Currently serving 12 customers know inside of i think we're 11 or 12. so we started so i we founded the company um last fall and so we're less than a year out and then we started selling like earlier this year and it's going Monthly recurring revenue really well so we just we're just a hair under 2 million of era currently that's great so let's just reverse into that math right so 12 12 folks how many live developers do you have right now into those 12 companies good question so we are 25 or so 25 or 26 okay 25 over 26. yeah and so i guess you're getting that run right because you're taking 26 times you know you know 2 500 per each one you're doing 60 70 000 a month on revenue there will be that would be top line so that's the full marketplace charge so like the full salaries and everything so the way we recognize revenue is we take the whole thing in oh well that's gmb yeah yeah so that's a little on the edge but i mean it's a fact look if you're if you call yourself a marketplace the term for that is obviously gmb but your cut your rake is you're doing it you're almost at a million dollar rake run rate yeah you're exactly right yeah yeah exactly right it's just been kind of an interesting conversation with some vcs that we started to meet with about you know how gaap plays into this like do do we you know because we we don't escrow the whole money we actually receive everything and so because of that technically we do have to you know recognize the whole thing but then that plays on valuations like how does that mess with evaluation if we look at the entire gross number you know as revenue versus the the the take on on everything so we'll see how it shakes out you know as we haven't raised institutions well what what what evaluation numbers are are folks thrown in front of you um that's a good question um i don't know if i should answer that question because we're in process right now but um well it's only gotten worse over the past three months it had i mean to be shocked if it's gotten better you know yes but i would say it got the worst a month ago everyone was the most spooked a month ago right now everyone's like kind of well all right the market has stopped really falling and we're just kind of sitting and waiting and then most of the early stage investors are saying well it's affecting the late stage guys it's not affecting us so much but i will say this multiples are down we all know that so multiples are down so you know i think that it's going to settle you know somewhere between 15 plus at this stage yeah how much is 15 million post rep post money uh pre movie yeah pretty much Raised how much are you looking to raise so um that's a good question so we think the three will get us to where we need to go um we could definitely take a smaller number because you know a little bit more context we're profitable right now um so you know how profitable if you don't Profits mind me asking how much goes to the bottom line monthly so we'll net you know 15 to 20 000 a month right now a month okay that's pretty good yeah so what like well one of the advantages that we have is that we can utilize our own infrastructure you know to save money with a global team and so though we have a you know we've got a you know decent head count here in the us for our size was like five or six of us you know one one person's part-time but um then we also have team members also you know offshore near shore use you know through distro and so we can take advantage of those same economics and so our payroll number is significantly lower than somebody else in in our same you know phase and so there's five of you full time today though yeah yeah well in the us and we have three total so there will be eight of us so far eight okay are you the sole founder are you 100 so i have two co-founders um and uh great co-founders last company i founded i own i owned the whole thing initially and that was a little stress collection have had co-founders so i've got two great co-founders cto and a com you split equity evenly or that you have a little more no i have more for sure okay okay yeah for sure so i initially funded the company you know i i brought them in after you know kind of developing the idea initially but they're really great people and you know both of them were kind of at that point where they're like i need to go do something that i've got ownership of as opposed to just joining the employment line and they've done really well they've been how how much have you put in did you put in person in the business you don't want me asking so about 250 is what i said it's like how did you get so right like people are gonna be wondering where where did i get all this money from originally for me so yeah sold two companies prior to this so there you go yeah racing isn't cheap either yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so um great lessons learned you know had you know it was great lessons learned but i i you know we sold right before the pandemic and then um like was forced to just kind of be at home and it was like all right now we're going to be home with the family so great yeah and you're saying you know we got really really bored and i was like no we got to do this again and i had this idea because you know so much of my network they're just struggling so bad i mean you know talking to a friend who who um well this is actually one of my co-founders friends but he's the founder of another company and he had a senior software developer who wasn't even like crazy he had like seven eight years of experience and he was making like 150 and he got picked up by twitter for over 300 grand to work remotely in the same geography like how you can't compete with that yeah there's really nothing you can do about that and it's only getting worse so so how are you able to get those engineers just because you're going to india or argentina or somewhere else yeah so we're finding so our first cohort of you know customers like earlier this year you know we we suspected it was going to be more of a cosplay so we started going to to india you know really seeding our database to get more applicants and developers um but what we found is that it wasn't a money thing um though they're saving money they were really concerned about you know just getting the right team members with the right experience and time zones so we're finding that most of our customers right now are and the ones who are in process to hire because we have we have more that haven't hired yet um there's like another six or seven right now we're working with on that side and um they they're focused on south america so we've been really successful in south america but it's more expensive for sure yeah i guess yeah interesting what i'm trying to figure out is like the way you describe the business like part your part remote.com which we use that's for managing our whole team in any country around the world but they don't help us hire yeah but they don't help us hire and find engineering talents like the other side of your business is like part recruiting firm effectively and i assume you do onboarding and tests and you do like erp related stuff or like applicant tracking systems sorry sorry stuff right kind of like so our product is going is is getting like we haven't we're in process to build some of that so there's some like ats like basic features but we're not wanting to build like a full crm for that like it's we're trying to keep it as essential and simple as possible like we don't want to chase a lot of different product you know themes and so you know for us like it's like all right nail the complication of hiring somebody like getting an offer on boarding that sort of thing like nail that and also nail the payments you know um but certainly you could go to deal or remote or something and try and do that if you knew how to gather the right candidates and assess them and and that sort of thing yeah so i'm going to ask you a strange question here i'm going to see how how courageous you are if you want to play ball or not tell me how someone would go around you if someone wants to use your playbook for finding engineers in argentina right what would they do honestly their only option right now is to go is to go to either fiverr or up work and then try and circumvent them but that's what you're doing no that's not what we do how do you do it so we we've we've figured out a pretty awesome way to hire in-country uh native recruiters and so who i didn't give you in our head count um you know so so we're much more successful in doing that um than us like okay so one of our competitors um they they started out right before the pandemic that grew through the pandemic which was you know great for them you know really lucky time um but but they've really focused on on a different aspect of technology that's focused on more the assessment side and they're doing that because they are spending their way through you know marketing digital marketing you know adwords facebook whatever to to gather applicants but the problem is is that only the less qualified people are applying they're really qualified people are happy where they are they're being recruited right so chad how do you find that rockstar recruiter in argentina who's gonna go find the best engineers how are you finding the recruiter so through through our recruiters currently and so so we have we have a small team of recruiters that that are able to do it natively the problem is is if i was to do it here in the us and they see that i'm in the yeah yeah it wouldn't work it wouldn't work how did you get so your answer my question was well we already have a network and they bring in other recruiters but how'd you get the first one again just use argentine as an example or india whatever you want to use i don't know if i want to share okay i didn't know if you would play paul for this later it's okay it's okay but but the funny thing is once you have a recruiter they can get another recruiter right of course you know how to get the first one as the question i know i know but that's our secret sauce okay fair enough i don't think people are going to go around you there's a lot of work there brother just pay you two or three cabins it is but there's another thing so a lot of people so all vcs i've talked to even some customers that have asked us well you know like circumvention is your biggest problem right well we haven't had that happen yet and at some point it might happen but they always think about that from the american tech leadership perspective which is well if i want that person directly i can just go get them right and you know if i circumvent you know disro somehow but but you're not thinking also about the perspective of the software developer who needs stability who has a very expensive lifestyle because these people are making a lot of money for their countries right and so they they need to be able to trust that they're working with a company who's not just going to disappear one night and not pay them yeah so we provide like a lot of comfort and stability to to them so anyway they don't want to circumvent it would be very very infrequent yeah that makes sense to me it makes a lot of sense hey look we're out of time let's wrap up here with the famous five number one last book that you read oh the last book that i read actually it's right here seth godin ah good one classic yeah number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um you know this is going to sound so cliche but i love elon musk not cliche that's cool i'm super super cliche but yeah number three what's your favorite online tool for building distro besides your besides distro um right now i would probably say semrush we're using that you know as we're starting to get into digital marketing yeah number four how many hours you sleep to get every night five usually five okay and what's your situation married single kids married with children how many kiddos i've got two kids a three-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl oh man you're a busy guy how old are you i'm 34. 34. last question excuse me something you wish you knew when you were 20. people's opinions don't matter [Music] guys there you have it distro launched just in the fall last year specifically help you find great engineers all around the world hire them in their country pay them manage them all through distro he's got 12 companies using him right now who are who are actively employing 26 developers he has found for them through the platform he you know the average salary there's 11 000 per developer so the gmv going through chad's marketplace is effectively over two million dollar run rate his take rate is out they try to get to 25 so their take rate is about to cross about a million dollar run rate he's hearing valuation of the marketplace thinking about raising 3 million on a 15 pre we'll see if he gets it done but profitable today taking 20 grand the bottom line every month he's been there he's done this before invested 250 to give his own money in the business to get it going we'll see where it goes next chad thanks for taking us to the top awesome thanks nathan 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 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be in the comments for the next 30 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 got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya
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