How Hireclub CEO Ketan Anjaria grew to $124K revenue and 150 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is canton anjaria he is the founder and ceo of a called hireclub.com he loves helping people succeed in their careers and turn a facebook group into a startup that's increased salaries for over 2 million bucks for his customers all right get done you ready to take it to the top let's do it all right so did it start off as a facebook group it sounds like is that right yeah actually uh in 2011 i was running a design agency and i had clients like microsoft adobe and twitter and i always realized it was really hard to hire people and finding good people to hire or even getting a job yourself and i felt like normal ways of doing it weren't working so we started this facebook group and we had a couple of simple rules i invited 25 my friends the first rule of higher club was don't talk about hire club right um and uh from that very first day we had a first interview set up and that first week we had our first hire and i was like wow this is kind of cool and then eventually i kind of just let it grow on its own this is when people weren't really doing facebook communities or groups i was just doing it organically really i just needed people to hire so these products i was working on and then around 2017 we hit 10 000 people in the group and i was like oh that's cool we can do something with this um and we had helped like at that point hundreds of people find jobs where it was contractor full time and um the community was so amazing we ended up um raising a crowd equity round and our community invested our first fifty thousand dollars into building the company as it is today so it really is extremely community driven it's very diverse it's very open and it's a place where people can really talk about the real struggles they have at work so diving into this the group today on facebook is 32 600 strong i want to learn more about that first but just be clear your first you know the website today is higher club.com the first time you essentially placed a job into a business or sorry a person into a company full-time was in 2000 and what 2011 2011. okay did you do that for free or did you monetize right off the bat straight for free it was just a community thing okay talk to me about monetization so you know for a long time we kind of talked about monetization and there's there was a dearth of products in the early 2010s talking about using referrals to monetize right oh if you get a friend referred in how do you you know you can make money from that right because companies will pay 20k or something for a higher 20 um and you can get a cut of that after referral but the problem is the incentives are not always really aligned right you'll have a lot of people making referrals but you know the quality is there and we experimented with different modernization models but our first month's hdmi was really interesting um i'm a photographer by trade that's what i went to college for and we said hey let's do headshots let's offer people headshots they can book a service and a headshot is a great way to like get noticed better right and then obviously we know professional look is really important and we launched our headshots and we had five thousand dollars in sales in a month and i was like whoa that's incredible hold on so just be clear how are you doing you were having to send a photographer around the world to meet these people to take head shots no this was local this is only in san francisco to start we always started look right and we just built up this community of ten thousand people we're like hey look people are gonna need headshots it's something i'm good at and something enjoyable and our headshots are fun we had a dj we brought mimosas you know we would actually bring clothing that you could try on to style out and partner with jewelry designers and makeup artists so they could bring their stuff and you can like get all kitted out and it was it wasn't necessarily cheap it was a lot more affordable than hiring your own right and what it really did is every marketing image you see right now on our website is typically from one of our members it's their headshot that they purchase so certainly two things is a great way to test out revenue um and two it's a great way to show off your community which ended up being really diverse awesome welcoming community obviously headshots don't scale right you're in person and covet that obviously changes things as well and so what we started noticing and trying to play the modernization is that we were getting people referrals really easily right because of the trust in the group and large size of the group and the people in the group a lot of people were founders a lot of people were like people who were hiring a lot it was easy to get referrals but they would get stopped at the first interview and when i started realizing is what really is the problem with hiring right what is the problem with hiring because there's a lot of talented people a lot of people that want to hire what is the actual problem and what we started doing we started coaching the clients as they were getting referrals we would look at their resume we would talk about hey this is the thing you should bring up during this interview if you're a designer i can help them point out on their profile stuff and what we realized is people needed coaching support and that's really what made the difference right if i just give you a reference that just because that is now when i go to pricing say that is your model today 2.99 a month at a high all the way down to 119 a month at a low and they're paying for minutes of coaching calls per month is that right yep yep it works a lot like a cell phone plan you're getting extra what would you say just doing it a sweet spot and we can go deeper on the sweet spot what would you say sort of the average person looking for a job that uses you guys is paying you per month across these plans just like an average so our average is around the middle plan the 179 a month okay fahrenheit now the obvious question here is if you're trying to build a recurring model and your coaching is successful they pay you to coach them and they get a job and they cancel you because they don't need coaching anymore so do you have serious retention issues so a couple things one if i find someone in a job at a company called hire club i have done my work that's incredible you don't get paid for the placement though right we don't we we weren't we're not doing that now because again a alignment right who might who is my customer if the company is paying me the company's my customer and my goal is to get them what they want if the customer is paying me my cut then they are my goal to get them what they want right if i want to build something that's really going to make an impact on people's lives and be able to help them succeed they have to be my customer the problem is they're not your customer if you're successful if your tool works they're then not your customer so how do you solve that here's the interesting thing there are cases yes where people um do leave after they find success i'm completely happy with that right like tinder is a perfect example tinder people break up or or get into relationships all the time after meeting on dating apps doesn't mean the dating app is not valuable right or you can create revenue right it's the same similar type of model what we've actually seen though as we grew is we went from coaching just to help you find a job to more career growth coaching right so now it's really interesting our top customers a lot of them are founders a lot of them have been with us for two plus years because now they have an executive coach a business coach someone who can help them work through all the issues that you have as a founder and running a business and all that stress that entails what's really interesting our highest um ltv is over five grand so people have been on the platform for two plus years paying 300 bucks a month right and really spending a lot of time working with their coach so ketone your first customer on this sort of plan was it sounds like about two and a half years ago is that right uh we launched uh june of 2018. this plan you launched june 2018 the original lower price plan we launched june 2018 yeah yeah because you had the community back to 2011 right right yeah okay so between just to circle this story all right so from 2011 to 2018 you were making money in the community selling headshots no let me back up the story a little bit so from 2011 is when we started the group we didn't even incorporate until 2017 i didn't even try to monetize until 2017. i actually had different startups i was working on it was uh night lifestyle i was working on i was working business uh app startup that okay i understand i understand now this was a sidewalk it was just like a thing i was doing to help people and i love doing it right it was really true it was really a community right yeah i see so you signed people up starting 2017 uh you got your first sign up on this about two and a half years ago and how many customers you now have using the tool today um in terms of total customers are active after customers i think we have over 200 yeah active meaning they're currently paying you today like this month yeah yeah it's over 200. okay okay how many have you had come through and pay at least once over the past two three years i would say it's something like 1100 1200 right now 12 interesting interesting okay now the nice thing here correct me if i'm wrong i'm looking at your crunch race before you haven't raised any capital for this correct we did we actually ended up so the really interesting thing happened to us is the reason we incorporated was in 2017 a friend of mine said hey there's this new reality tv show called meet the drapers do you want to be on it and i was like what the heck are you talking about one week later i'm being filmed in front of you know these cameras with the draper family tim draper jesse draper and build ripper who are very you know well-known vcs and i'd pitch higher cover the first time and it was run on a republic which is a crowd equity campaign a platform that is fought by the founders of angelus and we ended up raising our first capital through that which our community invested we had 309 investors from that uh ended up raising our first 50k and then um after that about a year later we started range raising from angels and we raised about 500k so far got it so to date you raised 550k the 500k total okay so there was 50k from the first people and then there was another 500k from angels yeah so that would be 550 000 total yeah not 500 000 total yeah okay got it so 500 000 total raised uh today uh that's great now you've got it i mean you've got a fairly large team right there is 31 people is that right or how many on the team today oh no no no the team is only four of us i was gonna say how how on i'm backing into your revenue here because you're saying 200 customers at 179 bucks a month you're doing about 35 grand a month in revenue right uh yeah but which um where are you getting the 31 number from linkedin oh oh so here's our platform works we have career coaches who are essentially what we call providers right we have over 60 of them and some of them link on on linkedin that they are part of hire club and it says that number but employees we only have we only have four okay right and is that is that right though in terms of scale today you're doing about 30 35 000 bucks a month in revenue no because someone we've added a new plan especially because of covid um we want to recognize what people are going through and we had what we call a standby plan so there's about 50 people right now what i would say is on the 20 month plan and the standby plan what that is is like they can keep their minutes they can continue doing their coaching but they're not being charged further um in terms of getting you minutes so they're spending 20 bucks a month to continue their relationship with the coach okay and so revenue's a little lower than that then it's like 150 customers at 180 a month so you're doing like what is that 25 000 bucks a month something like that exactly exactly i see i see well then this must be profitable i mean four people i mean this i mean this is a profitable company um we are like right at the edge that we're skirting there right because there are costs right like we have we had an office that we you know got a lease for um and how much was that uh about five five grand a month yeah you can cancel that though now right no long story short i can't uh but there's a there's a different longer story you're locked you're locked in for a decade like most triple net leases right yeah yeah i'm only locking for a year which is fine but um we we also one thing we do that's really important is we every customer connects through us through text messaging and what we found is we're using twilio and twilio is not cheap the twitters are probably our biggest expense we love them it's fantastic software it's expensive and um what we do is we create a transparent channel where you can text your coach and your coach can text you but you don't know each other's numbers right that creates a lot of safety it also creates a lot of trust and what can happen is that when you sign up and you start working with a coach it's immediate conversation you don't have to go through some app you have to download anything and customers love it because what it is is very transparent and i think a lot of people talk about how do the coaches get paid they get paid based on how many minutes customers signed up for right yeah from us so what happens is we charge x amount for the plans and then they get paid 70 an hour or 70 of whatever we're charging whatever is lower so each month what is your what is your expense that you have to pay out to coaches or this must be like 10 15 grand something big right it it varies because if the coach did not use all their minutes for that client for the month and then then there's no charge right right right um it varies anywhere from 5 to 20k depending on it's a very flexible billing system yeah it's good uh and you've given people the ability to sort of work right through your platform you create a bunch of jobs which is nice or some side incomes um walk me through your acquisition here we've got about three minutes left in the show so how do you get customers like what is your cac delander new customer so here's what's interesting we don't do any ads well there are other forms of attack besides advertising right right so majority is our facebook community and our mailing list right we focus on those things we we're doing events obviously before covid right we and we do live streams as well that work really well so every week one of our coaches is a live stream with me we talk about computer talk whether it's like career success during covenant how to make a resume how to negotiate salary et cetera right um and those live streams actually do a lot because you get to meet the coaches you get to see what they're like but um it's really a lot for the community i'll post content in the community other companies will post jobs in the community we'll have amazing discussions about everything from gender bias to racism to homework that people give their companies for getting hiring and that creates a level of trust that i think other companies don't have so um you know the cac is really what i would say in community marketing right community outreach and how many engineers are on the team before uh three oh it's three engineers so it's mainly engineer are you an engineer yes i'm an engineer that's why okay so you include yourself in the in the four total number on the three engineer number yeah yeah yeah yeah it's fascinating okay so what's next for you guys is it more customers or higher price point or what so um one of the things we're trying to figure out is um an expansion of the market so you you might rob a good point earlier with something called hire club and let's say you want to get um wellness coaching or you want to get fitness coaching or you want to get nutrition coaching right um or you want to have business coaching that's not necessarily the hiring right what we're actually working on with our platform is letting any kind of coach coach right regardless of what it is right um you could do a coaching session on on how to cook certain meals right and what we're trying to do is because everyone's isolated and being their income is being affected we think we can build a platform where anyone can teach others amazing things in person right or at least real time um synchronous learning right because that's essentially what we've built in our code base right we allow right now it's one more vertical which is career right but we actually think there's a lot more potential to offer a lot more verticals because it's not just career that you want so if you really want to think about it it's and we might get that on a subscription level right so i could have my so like in the last week i've had a call with my nutritionist i've had a call with my therapist and i had a call with my career coach got it so coaching coaching at scale is certainly an exciting vision we obviously are rooting for you there let's wrap up here with the famous five number one guitar favorite business book oh i don't know if i have a favorite business book i'm not gonna skip it number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um mikkel from zendesk all right good one number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides yourself or besides your own oh 100 stripe strands number four how many hours a sleeper i get every night not enough with the number it's probably around six six that's not horrible and what's your situation though married single kiddos i'm divorced uh my daughter is 21 and uh doing her gap year now oh very cool okay so one kid oh and how old are you i'm 43. 43. all right take us home here what's something you wish your 20 year old self knew your past is not your present and you should always just go for it guys there you have it katan building higher club started in 2011 as a side project built this space up today there were 30 000 people strong just adding value and as a side effect in 2017 launched a tool that helps people looking for jobs get sort of job coaching and consulting but they even stay with the firm even after they found a job founders do this to have someone to talk to he has an army of coaches that help him out they're doing they have about 150 folks actively paying 180 bucks a month for the platform so call it 25 26 000 a month in revenue all organic onboarding via the facebook group and their email list as he looks to scale 550 000 raised to date and about to get into many more verticals of coaching and consulting catan thanks for taking us to the top thank you 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 2pm central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or 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