How Hirize CEO Esra Kaygin grew Hirize to $168K revenue and 12 customers in 2023.

guys High rise. HR launched uh call it 18 months ago they put up their first pay wall about 2 months ago converted 1400 beta signups into 80 active beta users and 12 of them have started paying now doing $14,000 of monthly requiring Revenue Ezra launched with her co-founder there's two of them they launched got a pred round done in 2022 October a million raised at a 10 million cap now raising two million Target hoping for a 20 million valuation managing delution nicely here as they continue to grow again they are core API for these Enterprise Tech TOs if you're a big company with a th ftes and you want to connect all your rums into your you know your your your instances like Oracle and sap they help you do that in a streamline seamless way using AI hey folks my guest today is Agra Kagan she's an accomplished two times founder VC partner investor lecturer board member and author she has an a successful exit and a claimed book on Innovation and is now focused on building higher eyes. HR which is AI based res resume parsing and a matching API Ezra are you ready to take us to the top yeah hi how are you um yeah it's that's that's kind of about it what you just sold I didn't know it was that much well tell us a little bit about give give us a customer story tell us about how a customer is using you today yeah so we focus more on HR vendors and Enterprise companies so we are like you have to think of high-rise like um AWS so it's like a core API using your HR text deck or in the text deck of your h HR startup so we focus on HR startup job boards applicant tracking St systems um those are your customers these are my customers yes and then we have Enterprise customers who use our API in their current system such as um Oracle or sap or Greenhouse got it so just to be clear a company with maybe a thousand full-time employees that is hiring 30 40 people a month might use your a to power and keep their Oracle sap and Greenhouse instances up to date yeah so what we do is we parse so we extract data from resum��s and then match it we rank the best candidate so we are not doing this we're not the first one who are doing this but we're the first one who are using technology that is used in 2023 so the difference is that when I was doing my first HR Tech startup that was like in 2010 12 we were using aib based parsing and matching and that was we called it AI but it was actually uh keyword matching that's not what we call H AI today that's different so when you do when you extract data from when you extract data with basic Ai and then match it with basic AI again what happens is that you get a lot of mistakes in the system so the systems that we're all using today they're using if they're using an outsourced API which is 80% they're using outdated technology to extract data from resum��s and then match it what are the most common outdated apis people are using today that you compete with um so we have uh Sovereign um you have aenda which they're like in the middle they're not that bad and then you have archili um also not that bad Sovereign is horrible and they are a market leader and with I mean they can't extract data so they can't read nonone Word or PDF resum��s so what happens is is that 30% of candidates who apply for a job they get rejected not based on their skills or their resume but because the technology can't read their resume so you might be maybe a good fit for the job but you got rejected and nobody knows that you just slid through the cracks or you don't even uh know that maybe you were good for that job and you start to look somewhere else so that's a major problem so old hrtech startups I love what they're doing but what they're doing is putting a Band-Aid on a system that is inherently broken and we're trying to fix that and Ezra are you in the market yet or are you pre-revenue no we're we're in the market yet we just started two months ago um and we have 12 customers um we have now around 14k Revenue mrr um it's going really fast it's going on going 0 to 14,000 Mr in a couple months so when did you guys write the first line of code for the platform what year uh 2021 December okay December got it so you've been at it now for about 18 19 months something like that how did you guys and you I guess we keep using the words we do you have co-founders yeah yeah I do I have a co-founder with he's the CTO he's the genius um um so um his name is Eden so but you negotiated hard right you keep more than 50% of equity right how do you know that I can just tell you're a killer 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 287 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 valuation 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 founder paath dashport 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 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 rais they sold 22% of 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 the 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you 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 founder path.com products SLV valuations or if you go to founder path.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 all right so so so so that's great so you guys uh split going in and have you bootstrapped it or did you raise Capital right away no we first bootstrapped it and then we had an MVP and then we did a preed we got like EXO Springer and Porsche which is apx they invested in our first round in our precede round uh as our lead investor how much was that total so in our preced we raised a million they didn't put a million they were a lead uh but uh yeah they were the first one who were like yes let's do this so that was in December 2021 or was this in 2022 that was around that was in summer end of summer so that was around October September October 2022 so just last year yeah the markets sort of Contracting at that point how were you able to get that deal over the Finish Line um I mean obviously you have a VC background so it sounds like you know how VC's think yeah okay so first uh first and foremost I I mean I worked in VC for seven years that helps because people know you I had an exit so I'm a second time founder my co-founder is a third time founder um so that helps because in that stage you invest in people and we were strong Founders and then I reached out to only people I know in the VC industry so I was like I don't have a lot of time I want to grow I want to go in beta so I just reach out to people who know me and I know them and I can be like dude come on let's do this write the freaking check yeah yeah that's awesome and did you do pretty standard terms so like you know you sold 20% of the company 5 million cap something like that no our valuation was $10 million and we did like one million round on safe okay so was it so it was a sa it was a capped safe C to 10 million yeah okay I mean I would say that's actually pretty darn favorable so nice work nice work managing early early stage solution there that's great and and I mean at that time I mean we were we...