How Hirewire CEO Chau Nguyen grew Hirewire to $2.4M revenue and 4K customers in 2017.

started working on the prototype for higher wire launched their first beta in Atlanta in early 2016 grew that very rapidly I think he said about 2,000 employers that got on the platform over 100,000 people looking for jobs of which they placed 20,000 into a new job they're now scaling they've turned on Revenue he's thinking here shortly they'll be doing about 200,000 bucks in monthly recurring Revenue because restaurants or other employers pay them 50 bucks per month up to 100 bucks per month depending on how many folks they want to hire and how quickly they want to do it 4.1 million bucks raised again team of 18 based out there in Atlanta this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per to 5 and6 million he is held bent on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit soul Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka this is episode 740 be sure to tune in tomorrow morning well you'll hear from Todd Johnson who tells us how we sold his company for $15 million and now he's tackling healthc care patient doctor relationships hello everybody my guest today is Cho W he's the founder and CEO of a company called hwire an OnDemand hiring app for hourly workers in his previous Venture he hired over 20,000 people and quickly realized the hiring process was broken and ripe for disruption he launched lached tire wire in 2015 and has raised 4.1 million bucks in funding to solve this problem Joo are you ready to take us to the top I'm ready where were you working where you hired 20,000 people McDonald's or yeah not quite uh but uh close I was uh I was in my previous Venture it was called Campus Special and we were an online food ordering deals platform for college kids and so we were in 165 cities we had 500 colleges and we had uh 4,000 sales reps that would go meet with the merchants and we had about 15,000 street teamers that would go promote our products on campus so we had to hire every single one of those people and so I had that company for about eight and a half years and um sold it to a public company a couple years ago and so in that process I just learned what it was like to Source candidates interview screen hire and uh it was quite a process a very broken process so when did you launch that company how old were you I was 25 the time on my dining room table that was 2005 that's amazing okay so what are you today I am 36 36 that's great so you built that company for 8 years um we won't go too deep into it but generally speaking I mean what' you grow it to we have an employee account what were you doing in terms of I guess Revenue the year you sold it yeah yeah we're doing about 15 million in Revenue okay and employee head count in the 40s and I imagine your biggest cost there obviously there's a lot of headcount there I mean was it a profitable business or is that why you sold it it actually was so that was a bootstrap company we didn't raise any capital and uh we were one of the fast growing companies um for four consecutive years U through ink magazine and it was actually a very profitable business so uh which is really interesting because we built that uh we never had any investors never had to worry about cash and uh sold it um what what did you sell it for it was uh about 25 million okay and how did you negotiate the price based on 15 million Top Line yeah so really it was kind of an interesting time where um I think growth was a bigger deal than Revenue so we had strong Revenue growth we had strong iida uh and great margins but no one cared about that at the time so um that was 2013 when we're in the process uh so yeah it was really just a u you know what the what the buyer was willing to pay and what the seller was willing to to sell at did you feel depressed after you sold your baby you know it was bittersweet I mean you wake up every day obsessing and and just worrying and and working hard at something for almost a decade and then one day it's just not yours anymore so it was bittersweet but uh I was really proud to have built it uh up and and served a lot of customers and uh so it was a you know it was a proud moment you're making my audience hate you they're going he can't be depressed he just basically put 25 million bucks in his bank account he's not allowed to be upset right yeah did you you obviously didn't have investors did you have uh kind of an equity pool that you gave your kind of leadership team or did you own 100% of the company when you sold it yeah you know I owned 100% of the company and um that business was you know it was a lifestyle business turned into a technology you know uh fast growing startup um it was just a you know one of those things where I didn't have a plan and one day I woke up and I had a great business and we doubled down worked really hard and grew and and we attracted acquires that's great yeah yeah so it's uh it was a good first kind of warmup and uh now I'm in my second Venture that's very cool okay so let's talk about higher wire which is the new Venture so did you launch this immediately or did you wait a year or two yeah IIT well I stayed on board um for about a year with my acquir I bet that was painful yeah you know it it is painful in that uh it's hard to go from being you know your uh your CEO you're calling all the shots you're Nimble you're fast and then you become part of a bigger organization I definitely learned a lot of things while I was there but I always had the itch obviously to go out and do my you know next next thing so I took almost a year off and spent a lot of time in that time thinking about what am I good at that is a problem that needs to be Sol where I could leverage my past experience and not start from scratch and so because I done so much hiring and I was very comfortable Building Technology products and and acquiring and building local marketplaces it really made sense to go after the hiring problem specifically though at the hourly level where it's high turnover uh kind of entry level um you know uh wage uh earners that make up like 77 million people in the US and so when this uh concept popped up I just fell in love with it more and more and then I just couldn't resist and so pulled the trigger about a year and a half ago you raised Capital why why are you going a different route this time yeah you know it's funny because uh when you build a bootstrap company and then you go out and you raise Capital you see the Stark differences right so uh with this business we felt that we out the gate really needed to invest heavily in the product and technology and so we needed a great engineering team um and uh we raised it before we even had a prototype so 2 million to start and then additional 2 million last year uh so about 4 million so far on the initial like what did you do a note or priced Equity round convertible note on both okay got it so you have not had a priced Equity round just caps on the notes that's right got it and what is the so how do you make money on this thing how do we you make money yeah yeah yeah so essentially Highwire is a marketplace where job Seekers and employers uh can connect and it's really mobile first so they're using their mobile mobile device to speed up that process and uh you can kind of think of it like a Tinder Uber for jobs in that you know there's pictures there's video there's chatting and you know our next uh release is really focused on on demand hiring and so think about it this way as an employer if I have a need for say I'm a restaurant which is one of our Big Industry focuses um if I'm a restaurant manager and I need to hire somebody I can basically select who I need to hire when I can interview and we push candidates to them immediately and we get paid based on a membership so they pay a monthly subscription plus who the people looking to hire or the restaurant owner the the employer and then the job Seekers is free uh for them to uh to find a job okay so defining this Marketplace in terms of buyers and sellers your sellers are the job Seeker selling their their services the restaurant owner is the buyer looking to hire the job Seeker you got it okay and so you do you take a cut like a first like a salary or anything like that or it's a flat fee to the restaurant owner yeah it's we don't take a cut um so we're not really like the staffing agency model um we are really a Marketplace model where they're paying to get access to these candidates and paying a membership fee okay now so so I mean do they pay as they what if someone says I want one candidate versus someone that says I want a thousand candidates they pay the same flat fee no they can pay as they go too so um so let's say you're a small operation and you don't really need to hire a lot of people and you only use it a few times a year you can do a pay of you go model and then there's different tiers so you know your McDonald's for...