How HirePort CEO Bram Medema grew HirePort to $281.1K revenue and 4 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is bram medina he is the ceo at hireport a platform that brings back speed scale and simplicity to external recruitment he's an industrial engineer former vc and private equity investor and serial startup founder now living in amsterdam with his wife tanya and two-year-old marcus all right brian you're ready to take us to the top absolutely nathan okay let's jump in here so um who's paying for higher port today and how are they using you yes it's a mix of companies i would say startups scale ups and also smaller corporates today um the model is very simple it's a hundred percent accurate no pay that's what most companies know in the external recruitment business so uh we decided to offer them something they understand already on top of that there will be layers with sar solutions so there's additional services that have a monthly subscription so let's talk about the sas first what are people paying like per month what's the fee they're paying per month what they get yeah it depends on the kind of integrations that they want we have applicant tracking system integrations today for mid-sized companies and smaller startups that would be about 99 euros a month and for larger companies that would for example use workday or sap success factors those are applicant tracking systems for enterprises they would pay around 500 euros a month so the sas fee is dependent on the level of integrations they want whether it's a you know startup tool or an enterprise tool 100 that's it i see okay very cool and so um what and if you split down your total revenue what percent would you say is coming from sas versus other we'll just call it other revenue yeah currently it's a small percentage from sas it's about ten percent okay um but we expect that to grow really rapidly the most the biggest part of the recurring business is actual placements taking place on the platform now let's talk about that right the success right so so how do you charge when you successfully place a candidate yeah there's a fixed fee that we charge so when there's for example a senior um engineer that's placed at one of our companies on the platform there's a fee that's around 16 000 euros and um a small part of that lands with us transaction fee and most of that fee goes to the actual recruiter who made that placement the recruiters are the heroes on our platform and i think today maybe there's not a lot of people who really love the external recruiters anymore we do have we filter out the best ones and we give them a podium to be able to deliver at the best companies right now 16 000 euros about 20 000 usd what percent of that 20 000 success fee will the recruiter typically get uh over eighty percent eight zero or one eight eight zero eighty wow okay so so i mean we're talking like 16 16 000 something like that so is the rest the other 20 goes directly to you yeah the other percentage goes to us that's what we live from so that's the most important uh revenue driver right now which is supported by the sas subscriptions i see interesting model so basically every candidate you place you're going to make 4 000 usd or something like 3 000 euros per placement yeah that's okay what um take me give me some sort of history here when did you launch the business what year yeah we launched in 2020 really a few months after covid hit so this is something that we always wanted to do i've been active in many industries but i rolled into recruitment by accident years ago we had our own agency so we have four years of five fixing actually uh years of experience in this business but we always operated in a model that didn't scale so it was high quality what we did but you just had to put more people on a payroll to scale and doesn't work anymore you know these days you see in in the platform economy that people need a exponential solution to the problems not a linear one so we decided to bundle all the forces of all these small independent players that are there everywhere and put it all together give them a platform to be able to deliver to the most interesting companies then you have something that skills instantly oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview that that eight so what you're saying is you had troubles recruiting at your agency and you said there needs to be a solution for this and then you build scratching your own itch effectively exactly the amount of people in your payroll just limits how scalable your solution is and most companies would call us and say listen i need a team of ten engineers and i need them within two months that is not something that any agency can easily easily can do um that's only something that you can do when you bundle all the forces of a lot of players and you instantly make that available talk to me a bit about the agency so what what was the agency doing yeah the agency was helping companies find tech talent for permanent unemployment oh it was also doing a recruit okay so you weren't recruiting for yourself that you were having problems recruiting for other people in an agency model yes exactly exactly that and then we run into this this ceiling you know that that made us see that the only way to do this is to use technology to unlock all that power and take away all the paints so when did you make that shift when did you launch the agency the agency we launched in 2016 2016. okay and up up and up right until 2019 so the year before you launched higher port how much total revenue did the agency do how big did you were able to grow it uh that there was a number of millions of euros okay millions and i guess translate that to number of candidates placed in 2019 via the agency in 19 that's a good one um or your best year how many did you place in your best yeah i think i think it would look at about 70 placements a year 70 placements okay and and uh were you so if you're doing millions of euros of revenue off 70 placements you're not making only 4k per placement you're really a traditional recruiter back then charging big placement fees yes you would get the full placement fee but you would also have the people on the payroll and all those extra costs of course oh i see i see interesting okay so you then pivot in in 2019 into 2020 to higher port do you shut down the agency completely or do you transfer the talent over no we shut it down we should get it done okay why not sell it i mean you're doing three million or four million in revenue why not go try and sell it yeah i think that the most interesting thing to sell you know is the client relationships and actually some of those clients we brought with us to the new platform so you always have this cold start problem let's say to get things running right and this really helped us to straight away have a number of paying customers that wanted to join that believed in what we wanted to achieve and we already had a network with other recruiters at other agencies so we...