How Hiremojo CEO John Younger grew Hiremojo to $2.2M revenue and 200 customers in 2017.

this is the top entrepreneurs podcast where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burned each episode features revenue numbers customer counts and other insider information that creates business news headlines we went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million i had no money when i started the company it was 160 million dollars which is the size of any ipos we're bootstrapped we have like 22 000 customers with over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time major outlets like inc are calling us the fastest growing business show on itunes i'm your host nathan latka and here's today's episode hello everybody my guest today is john younger and he is the founder of over five startups he has made more mistakes than most of us could imagine he's currently the ceo of hire mojo a sas hiring automation platform with a recruiter bot he also founded akulo an award-winning pro uh sorry our rpo and was vp of hr at bank of america he has a bs in math from notre dame and was on the us national rowing team all right john are you ready to take us to the top sure all right quite a variety of things you've jumped into which is great so what years were you vp of hr bank of america because i remember i i'm guessing that's kind of when this idea started festering it was it was a from about 87 to 93 94. and it was actually when i was managing all the recruiting for two divisions about 16 000 employees that i asked the question is this really the best we can do and that's really what set me on the course that i'm actually still on today and so did you launch the company back in 95 i didn't i actually launched a company called ynet and i launched it actually in november 96 and sold it in sorry february 96 sold it in november 96 to a a company called trinet that outsources hr and payroll and how much was that sale price um that's so price well it depends on how you it was mostly in stock so it's hard to put a dollar value on it at the time how much stock was it um it was probably pushing four million dollars something like that okay and keep keep the story going there what happened after so so i stayed with trinette and we were on inc magazine's 500 fastest growing companies every year i was there for the next four years and in fact we had really hit some milestones that allowed us to ultimately get a major investment from general atlantic who ultimately took it public i left in early 2000 and ultimately started a colo so what i realized is that all of this knowledge of how to recruit is completely tribal it's still tribal today for most companies um and so one of the first recruitment process outsourcing companies akolo is like a turnkey internal recruiting department and what so what happened to that company so uh ended up growing a colo and um it struggled at first imagine having a recruiting related company right as the bubble burst in uh 99 2000 2001. so no one wanted to touch anything related to recruiting at that time um ended up getting uh through sure force of will through that period liquidated my entire retirement which is how much um i don't know a couple hundred thousand dollars at the time and how old were you uh let's see that would be that was so long ago so like in my mid-30s so you're late 40s early 50s now yep exactly so um ended up building it version one i ended up finding a group of nine unemployed developers in fremont california who worked with me to ultimately create it and we got version one out 2002 as one of the leading recruitment process outsourcing companies you can appreciate that we were given the hardest most wacky jobs possible to support because anything that was easy everyone filled so we got things like the um uh let's see there was there was a parasitic engineer for texas instruments and they wanted someone from india who was trained in college here and then wanted to move back to india that was so what did you so i want to spend most this time on your current company so fast forward on this company did you raise capital on a colo and did you ended up we ended up being the 42nd fastest growing company in america in 2006 raised money in 2007 how much uh about 4 million and we ended up getting to a place where we're hitting about 2 million a quarter and and growing quickly right when the bubble burst in 2008 uh brutal period most of the companies that did what we're doing went out of business in fact one of them hirian i called the ceo right as they were filing chapter seven and took over all their customers because it was going to hurt the industry if we hadn't done that and then it was really a little later on we got colo back on track and started higher mojo around 2015 we realized we had built a platform that had uh really grown to learn with every job and ultimately put this recruiter recruiter bot concept to work well so john what happened to akolo do you mean did you sell it you shut up yeah it's still out there oh is it part of higher mojo no no no separate company okay yeah so you that's a big gap i mean why aren't you still involved there how did you leave what what happened um i am still involved i have someone else running it but we recognized that there were two totally different businesses a cola is a recruitment process outsourcing company that like i said the turnkey internal recruiting department the technology underneath it we realize could support thousands hundreds of thousands of businesses that didn't want rpo but wanted to make it possible to fill jobs way more easily okay so we separated the companies in january 2015. and what was the size of the combined company right before you you you split it up i mean we're doing 8 million 10 million 20 million a year um it was yeah eight nine million something like that we had caught our way back okay and what did they how did you you know a lot of people think about doing this spin outs how did you structure the cap table at higher mojo oh this is you're going to laugh at this nathan because this is very unusual so imagine having a company whose cap table has an abc rounds of financing has preferred warrants with put rights a very complex cap table and so it occurred to me that to separate out the companies we wanted to end up with the final state would be two companies with a completely flat cap table so everything's common shares so to do that we issued notes to the preferred shareholders and the warrant holders so that created a note uh and transferred their stock to all common and then the new company was created by assuming some portion of those preferred nodes so the acquiring company was able to basically buy the assets in this case of the recruitment process outsourcing business with no cash out but simply by assuming notes so the the end result was higher mojo has the original um corporate structure but all common shares ocolo business services exists and is all um flat from a from an ownership standpoint and all this was done in a way that was tax neutral why would the investors agree to this because they're getting paid back whereas before there was no guarantee of getting paid back and even though they lose all their rights well they don't they lose their preferred rights but they start getting cash back that's right and they were willing to do that [Music] many of you know i am buying companies that i really really like and there's no quicker way for me to get to the bottom of what is happening on that website than using this tool called nathamoca.com forward slash hot jar h-o-t-j-a-r it basically will give me a recording okay when anybody lands on the website i'll give me a recording of where the viewer is scrolling and obviously does the basic stuff like heat maps too but i learned so much about where the users are scrolling and clicking on my site using that tool it helps me increase conversion rates make more money and grow those businesses faster and we'll have to see what happens with those businesses but i'm buying them i'm buying them very quick and i'm using nathanwacka.com forward slash hotjar for all of my website analytics you can too i work with them it's totally free you can go to nathan latka.com forward slash hot jar no credit card required again use it as much as you want nathan lika dot com forward slash hotjar i'll see you there okay higher mojo so uh you know it sounds like a more automated platform than you know the high touch model you were in before what are companies paying you per month on average or is it a performance-based model well let me let me tell you what it is first and i'll tell you the model so it's really a platform that makes it possible for almost anyone without any recruiting talent or skill to fill jobs so that that in itself is remarkable so we incorporate this robot and all of the premium four fee sites that you would typically pay a lot of money to uh i i don't want to say their names because i want to be careful about branding issues but if you want to link to something you can do that through us and you know if you feel like you've got to deal with the monsters under your bed you can probably do that with us too and that was very that was very creatively worded and if you want to build your career you can probably do that with us and so just know that we buy in bulk and just include it because at the end of the day we're solving a social problem and i'll come back to the structure here in a minute and that is that right now today there's about...