How Hackerearth CEO Sachin Gupta grew Hackerearth to $36M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is sachin gupta he's the founder and ceo of hacker earth and has grown the company to a global sas platform with hundreds of customers and millions of users he leads the marketing team today along with sales and operations he's also responsible for product management and strategies sachin your idea takes the top all right are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right so tell us about the company what are you guys doing what's the revenue model so hacker earth is a developer skill assessment software uh we have this technology that allows anybody to come and write code in the browser and that's used by our customers to automatically screen and interview candidates in their technical recruiting process we also have a community version of the product where we allow any developer out there in the world to come in and self-assess themselves to either improve their coding skills or prepare for technical interviews so we've got both an enterprise solution as well as a community so would you sort of say this sort of a combination of like code academy plus lambda school uh well both of those are kind of focused on skilling uh through structured course courses we are more focused on assessing uh and you know kind of giving you real-time feedback on how your coding skills are and and it's more of self-paced learning i would say but the intent is the is this success metric on your platform does paypal hire the engineer they gave the assessment to in other words it's driven by the company giving assessments uh so the uh it's driven by the company who's giving the assessment so they would give an assessment through hacker then depending upon how candidates perform they would then decide whether to take them further in the recruiting process or not i see okay and then so how do you make money obviously traditional recruiting firms take 20 30 a first year salary i assume you have some form of arbitrage against that oh well we don't uh charge on say the first year salary or we don't have that kind of model uh primarily because uh you know we're not sourcing candidates we are more of an assessment tool and we fall after the sourcing stage uh we have a vr sas solution so we have a per recruiter seed kind of model so we charge for recruiter speed everyday credence it comes with a certain number of assessments on a monthly and annual basis and then depending upon the size of the organization their needs we kind of customize the plan so we start as small as one or two receipts and which which upsell kind of lever is more powerful for you guys charging based off number of assessments or number of recruiters on the business team number of recruiters because number of assessments could vary year from year year on year you know you sometimes have a slow time uh in terms of hiring sometimes you have a sudden surge so we don't really want so to introduce you know more predictability in the business it's better to prefer it's been better to price a number of liquid receipts and paint this sort of i'm sure you have a lot of different price points people are paying but give me like the sweet spot what's the average customer paying per month or per year and how many recruiters does their team have yeah so the average i would say the the right land opportunity for us is a two to three receipt that comes out to about seven to twelve thousand dollars to land uh and then we typically expand from there of course you know we've got the long tail which may just start we just wanted to receive and then we also land enterprise accounts starting at 100k where they're looking at probably 20 30 recruit receipts but the sweet spot is to anything between uh two to three recruited streets to begin with i see okay got it and then would you say that i mean if you look at all of your customers are there like three that make up you know 30 percent of your revenue or do you have a fairly even distribution we have a fairly even distribution uh i would say our top customers some of our biggest accounts would contribute only to about 10 of our revenue i think that's that's good because it gives us a little bit more between the business you know we're not at the mercy of just top free cons that's right yeah now when you add up well actually sorry before i ask more questions about today let's get some backstory here we sort of jumped right in there what year did you launch the company uh so uh you know we we started the organization way back in 20 towards the end of 2012 2013 and the core motivation for us to do hacker earth was very simple you know i i i'm a computer engineer software engineer by by education and um you know we saw uh we felt that the way recruiting is being done today it's highly arbitrarily uh not not based on skills and often recruiters as well as developers themselves are taking wrong decisions in terms of which opportunity to go after uh and you know being engineers at heart we wanted to solve that problem so that's how we kind of got into it there's a small anecdotal story a good friend of mine who was top of our batch uh you know top of the class didn't get through uh some of the top companies and we were shocked uh that you know we all think this is the guy who's gonna get into google facebook and he just didn't get through because uh you know the recruiting process of the interviewing process is in some sense broken and that was the you know the motivation for us to kind of start hacker and do you remember back in 2012 how many assessments you gave personally how many were done through your platform in year one i think we have done about 5 000 odd ass estimates in the whole year to start okay okay interesting and now today how many have you done uh so i think today on a daily basis we're more doing more than uh so that's amazing can you sum up so last year do you know the number was for last year i mean are you talking i mean what that's got to be three to a million two million assessments all last year yes so uh we on an app on a on an annual basis we are doing close to a million assessments yeah that's amazing and across about how many customers are you working with now so we're working with about 500 customers split you know distributed globally and can you sort of describe them are they all sort of what you would expect they're sort of the pay pals the googles the facebooks of the world or is there any sort of surprising cohort that's using you so uh well i wouldn't say it's surprising now it was surprising probably three four years back when we uh when we would get customers who were typically into uh say engineering when it's engineering i'm not talking about software engineering in hardware engineering or uh banking segment picked up tech pretty soon so uh actually before i answer that you know a mega trend that has taken place is obviously uh uh software software is eating the world and most of the businesses today are primarily software businesses and we saw why the you know the tech companies were obviously suspect for us uh but then we started seeing you know an airline company like a boeing uh hiring or using hacker earth or rge in the healthcare space using hacker so we saw a lot of different segments who were trying to build out their tech competencies in-house started building uh dev teams internally and then obviously you know they had to build that recruiting muscle and that's where hacker comes into the picture and of those 500 companies using you if you add up all the recruiter seats how many recruiters are using you uh so you know i i'll probably kind of be giving you a number top of my head because some of the accounts have say about 300 400 recruiters uh the larger ones uh and then you know on the on the long tail we go as small as one or two receipts i would say if we take on an average about four to five receipts uh i would say five so then we're looking at about 2 500 odd recruiters who may be currently uh active at any given point of time but if i look at the lifetime of of hackers more than 10 000 recruiters have gone through the system wow interesting and what what is sort of like now putting back on your founder hat and like hey i want to grow revenue in hacker earth mode what is the key metric for you guys is it number of assessments number of customers number of companies what is it so for us it's the number of uh admins that we onboard to the on on the platform uh and and that obviously gets tight so there are two ways you could do one is you look at growing your accounts once you land them and that can typically happen in mid market and enterprise or the other is you go after a larger customer base and say you know i'm gonna acquire ten thousand smes and each one of them is going to give me two admins each because the product is so maturely built out that i could cater to a small smp you know i just got up a call one person shop who could potentially use hacker earth and then last week we're talking to a giant who's probably going to be used across 400 500 so we're not segmenting per se but yeah our sweet spot is typically higher smb mid market tending towards enterprise so the strategy is land more accounts and then through them do you feel like you have good control over predictable expansion on historical cohorts or is that more dependent on the macro economy and if people are hiring or not uh that's a great question uh i would say there is a little bit of element of...