How Hirize CEO Esra Kaygin grew 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 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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 knew that open AI was going to do something but at that time it didn't explode it yet so everybody was still like oh yeah open AI is C cute but it didn't we weren't there yet AI wasn't a trend like that it was the valuations weren't that high so back then it was a little bit more tough now it's easier yep how are you deciding how to invest that cash or another way to ask that question might be you raised it nine months ago how much of the million do you still have in the bank how much do we have left we have like around a little bit so 20 250 50k left a little bit over that um so we still we're still uh we we only spend it on salaries we didn't get salaries for us for the managing team or the founding team but just to get our developers in and um and then build and um so what does that mean in terms of full-time folks today so we have seven people full and part-time and four of them or five of them now I just onboarded today a new one but um uh five of them are full-time and so when you look at what your your burn is how much runway would you say your 250k gives you so we have we have around like six seven months to go okay does that make you nervous in the market weing like do you see a path to growing into profitability just from customer sales or do you have to go raise more capital I am raising a new round I I'm just shopping around I'm telling everybody what I'm doing I'm in Paris now at Viva Tech okay uh which is I don't know if you you in theate right I'm in Austin Texas y yeah so you wouldn't know but uh France is like oh we're also on the map so you have a lot 100,000 people in the city now 10,000 startups Elon is coming in on Friday so it's pretty big so you have uh you have a lot of people here and I'm just like walking around meeting people and um what are you targeting in your seed round how much we want to raise $2 million we we don't spend a lot on celeries because we got half of our our our tech office is in Istanbul and turkey oh great so it's it's it's cheap for us to build cheaper and do you think you can um raise 2 million and only sell 10% of the company again do you think you get a 20 million valuation yeah yeah I can interesting okay well that would be amazing and then what's the thesis where would you invest that money um again salaries but also sales and marketing now we're going to we want to grow we we we've proven that we we can build built it's a good product it doesn't you know it doesn't like there are not no any errors it's it's proved it's tested and now we can go uh wide and Ezra when did you launch the pricing plan um just two months ago wow okay so in two months you've added 14 at 12 customers 14k of Mr tell me about that that's fast grow how did you find and close the first 12 customers we had like a very long beta uh stage so we start our first Beta release was in October November um and then we had a lot of customers you know that were testing it then so actual betas Ezra like did you when they sign up for the beta did you say at the end of six months if you love it you need to start paying three grand a month or did you wait to negotiate price until after the beta was done no I I wish I did that because I didn't I uh I started negotiating after uh after I launched which I think we would have more Mr if we if we you know yeah you can't do do everything perfect when you st your customer at the end of betas from like the most likely to pay versus the least likely to pay what column header and Excel were you sorting by was it like number of API calls in the beta program or number of team members on board in the beta program or what was the activation metric so for us it's more like when you in so it's the stage where you are where you need our API so there were a couple of startups that were using our API and they were building on our API so after three months and you build on an API and you built your own comp whole company around that API you can't go back so was it was it once those Engineers built on your API you could measure the number of API calls they were doing per day yeah yeah so they build and they're active that's 100% yes I see yeah so when they so it's like how much you integrate our product in your system that's one metric so how far how how many products you use and then how often you use it so we had like customers that were using it a couple of times a week and we're were like oh that's not going to it's not going to happen and it didn't happen yeah yeah very how many how many folks signed up for the beta program we had a lot of beta users we had 1,400 beta uh signups and then I think we had like 80 actual users 80 active users and then you converted 80 of the active ones into 12 12 of them converted customers because we're not a consumer product so I did had wide reach so I told everybody to sign up so we had 1,400 signups and then once you launch it's like well I'm not a HR vendor I'm not an Enterprise company so I think that a lot of startups when they say like oh I have this many like um you know signups that sounds great I can have 10,000 but how many were actual customers and companies that you want to do the beta with yeah yeah you you converted 80 of the 1400 80 were your like ICP your ideal customer profile and of the 80 you got 12 to pay and you're only two months in do you think you convert more of those 80 to pay over time yeah we're we're working on them now and then we also have like customers or beta users that wanted to become a customer but wait a little bit more like I said so I think these are the ones that are going to bring us a lot more Revenue we have one really big job board that's going to be amazing if it happens that's awesome I love your story we're out of time for today let's wrap up with the famous five number one asra your favorite book oh my God my own book what's the title uh disruptive innovation how to win in times of change it's get it will get released in July released in July very good number two is there a CEO you're following or studying oh God yes Bill Gates number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company uh I think um kellly kellly I love kellly I couldn't live without it number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night um five to six okay and with situation married single kids um yeah I have a startup that I'm married to and I'm dating my startup and it's also my kid and my my team and my kid not married no kiddos and Ezra do you mind me asking how old you are I'm 37 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 oh god um sleep less because you you know you know that you know after a while after 10 years you're like oh I I could do with less sleep could have more fun guys High rise. HR launched uh called 18 months ago they put up their first pay wall about two months ago converted 1400 beta signups into 80 active bet users and 12 of them have started paying now doing $114,000 of monthly recurring Revenue Ezra launched with her co-founder there's two of them they launched got a preed round done in 2022 October a million raised at a 10 million cap now raising 2 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 tools if you're a big company with a thousand ftes and you want to connect all your resumes into your you know your your your instances like Oracle and sap they help you do that in a streamlined seamless way using a Ezra thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much thanks one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1 p.m. central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares backend dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1:00 p.m. Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2 p.m. central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fund raise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at Nathan la.com forward SLS slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see you