How Hireclub CEO Ketan Anjaria grew Hireclub 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...