How GetRocket CEO Anant Chaudhary grew GetRocket to $600K revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is abhinav agarwal he is the ceo and co-founder of rocket previously he was the ceo and co-founder of renzo which was required by surveymonkey vp at zynga a product manager or pm at amazon a consultant at mckinsey attended hbs and princeton before jumping into startup world abhinav you're ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely all right so talk to us about rocket hr tech is you know very crammed how are you standing out you know it's interesting we started um this company just because we were trying to solve a problem that we had with our own hiring and our own startups you know i've recruited at companies as large as mckinsey and amazon and then as small as my own startup which raised a three million seed round but nobody knew about us right so the problem we're solving is for us which was how do you hire great talent quickly and the way we want to stand out is by making a full stack solution you know i think there's a lot of people who just want to use a tech approach to this problem we don't think that's going to work what we think is going to work is sort of a humans combined with good technology kind of like what compass is doing what atrium is doing that's our solution yep and so walk me through how folks are paying is it a peer play sas model it's not it's sort of a combination i think um you know it's fun fans the gamut there are some people who want that pure play sas model i would say they're actually in the minority in this business because they're very very afraid of all the bad players that are out there you know you think about your recruiting typical recruiting agency it's only right below comcast in terms of negative or low nps scores right you know i think it's not quite as bad as your cable provider but but not not that far off right and so historically there's been a great sort of desire to align how much you pay with kind of performance and so that's kind of you know in the pure place sas model you just get some sourcing you get some candidates that's great you pay a monthly fee but most of what our clients are interested in are actually kind of performance oriented models are now even retained models the difference is just you know if you hire a typical recruiting agency they're not going to have any engineers on staff they're not going to have any people who've actually done the role themselves right so i've done product management for 10 15 years my co-founder has done marketing and growth for an equivalent amount of time our cto has done sort of technology for the last 20 years and so we're able to train our recruiters given that experience which most agencies just don't have so when you look at i'm sure you have customers of all different sizes but the average customer per year is paying you about what would you say what's your sweet spot they're paying us about 80 to 100 000 a year and what are they getting for that how many hires um you know our typical uh percentage fee is anywhere from 20 to 30 of uh first year base salaries so they're getting anywhere from three to four hires a little bit lower if they're in the bay area or new york city and the comp is higher uh a little bit more if you know we have some clients all the way in missouri city and in missouri city the average pay is 80k right and so the placement can be only 16 to 20k whereas in san francisco or average placement becomes anywhere you know around 35 to 40. so do you i mean is any of this truly sas or you've basically just made the traditional recruiting process and business model you know tech enabled essentially you know so what i would say is that it can be sas for the people who want to have it right and so the difference is that many people so for the people who want to pay that way they can get all of our services on a monthly fixed price saying they don't need to pay us any time extra if they hire or don't hire the person right and we have some clients who are doing that too right we have some small startups who like that predictability if you're thinking back to sas what does that really mean i'm getting this it's predictable i know how much i'm paying i can start at any time i can stop at any time right and i'm paying a monthly fee and we have some clients to do that i think the challenge for many people has been that they don't know if it's going to work out or not and so they prefer to pay them performance so we think of it more as innovating on the go to market model uh than anything else right it's the same thing if you think about atrium's evolution for the longest time they've had to go out and do the same thing as billing you on a per engagement basis because until they've proven themselves that's what people want to buy and then over time you know i just saw that email from hdmi was last week or the week before introducing their monthly subscription plans right because now that they've proven themselves clients people are more willing to take the bet so i think we're making that same transition over time and we've had clients like thrive global you know they spent 150k with us last year and then they came back and their ceo said hey let's turn this into predictable stream uh payments so now so so when did you launch the company what year uh we started in late 2016 2016 and how much time did you spend you know between the first line of code and your first dollar of revenue uh about four months okay and and how much cash should you guys think into that mvp um so we were a little bit lucky um you know we've got a successful startup before that been acquired by surveymonkey so we ended up raising uh 2.9 million right out gate you know we spent a few months iterating on the idea and once we were locked and ready to go we raised that that seed round so it's not really fair to say we built it on very little amount of money but i think our mvp was out within uh you know two or three months so if you and we have two or three engineers so all under like 50 to 60k we have okay and how much total have you raised in the company to date two point nine it is the 2.9 okay yeah um so i mean what's the right amount for your next raise you said you wanted to raise now um we're probably going to target towards the end of the year i think the race uh it's all about what we use the money for which is open new offices so we've got the last two and a half years you know we've had our offices so we just opened up our las vegas location so we're going to work with companies like caesars and gm all the gaming companies and real gaming casino companies as well and so the next step in the company is just opening up more offices i think we're going to target somewhere from 7 to 10 million in the next round but uh it all depends on the market conditions yeah and how many customers today we have about 100 customers today okay and are those all i mean when you look at something like churn in your space how do you measure that did you say yeah i think there's a very easy way to say uh think about churn which is the client has an active role but they're not using you uh and there's no excuses on that but that's just what it is sorry i don't understand if a client has an active role but they're not using you what does that do you consider that role because you know companies will go through these days off hey they just don't they're not hiring right now so if you imagine a small startup they might do a burst firing of four to six hires then they might just stop because they don't want to hire anyone and so they're not using you actively that's not really churn they just don't need to hire right now if they have an open role they're hiring actively they're just not using you that's the real definition of churn in this in this space i'm guessing your next question is going to be what does turn look like for us you know typically over the last couple of years our churn has been anywhere from two to three percent monthly or annually annually on a logo or revenue basis uh revenue basis okay so does that mean three percent of your customers that did at least one hire through you last year will not return this year uh yes if we're projecting forward yeah something like that yeah okay interesting um i mean can i even take i think this is too high can i take 100 customers times again a hundred thousand dollar acv average you just told me i mean that puts you like 800 grand a month right now on revenue i don't think you're that big now i think what ends up happening is the difference between median and average in this industry is very large right and so what ends up happening...