How Intervue CEO Rahul Arora grew Intervue to $906.8K revenue and 30 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is raul aurora he's the founder and of product and growth and product and growth guy at interview dot io i n t e r v u e dot io he's been the engineer for seven years before this and took 500 plus tech interviews in 2.5 years the hiring manager to realize gaps in the recruitment process that's how he got this idea now building and hoping to help make it easier for people to hire better and faster right are you ready to take to the top yup yup absolutely thanks for being here so so real quick are you focusing on hiring any specific job title or are you helping companies hire any kind of role well well right now a strong believer in you know making something for someone before we make everything for everyone so we are starting with tech rules uh we'll eventually move to non-tech as well but right now tech is the focus for for the next few months so you're helping people hire engineers yes that's good i see okay and and give me a sort of a back backstory here when did you guys launch the marketplace and how are you making money do you use it is there a sas product embedded here or no yeah it's a it's a sas based model it's a subscription just like subscribe into netflix uh we launched it when i was working part time uh the mbp was launched uh i think one and a half year from now but it's been 10 months we have full time uh funded and uh now we've got quite an adoption from india and looking into some adoption from us as well although some u.s companies are also using it uh but companies do do pay a subscription fee to use the platform and then there is a finite number of interviews that you get and the number of team members okay and how much uh how much total capital have you raised today uh we have raised a pretty small 120k round uh yeah yeah sorry uh i think about uh five months ago five to six months ago okay got it so this year you raised 120 000 dollars now would was that from family do you remember uh yeah that that was an angel round done by an indian uh bc firm called titan capital and then a couple of u.s investors as well uh brendan rodgers who's the founder of web along with his partner hershel mehta uh and then there's another uh indian entrepreneur uh very popular who's the founder of credit i see and what was the valuation i think close to a million okay a million dollars and now were you guys pre-revenue at that point or did you have money coming in we had a very small revenue 400 a month 400 a month wow okay yeah where are you today how much a month you're growing revenue ah we are doing approximately uh 7 000 a month congratulations okay so help me understand give me a customer example why are they paying you and how much they pay um example is this company called zomato from india and uh they are paying us because we are helping them streamline the entire tech hiring process helping them filter a lot of candidates before they actually line them up for interviews and we are also you know saving a lot of lot of their engineering bandwidth because our software is very optimized to take interviews now typically an engineer would spend around an hour one and a half hour to take an interview to complete an interview in our software it is so convenient that you can wrap up the same interview in about 45 minutes without having to give any trouble to the candidate and the candidate experience is also top notch so this company is paying us around uh close to 1800 a month and that's your biggest customer that's that's our biggest customer so far but yeah there are three to four more coming up very soon so this is great and how many customers total today so we have a total of approximately 90 plus customers to be to be to narrow it down to a particular number and out of which nine zero yeah out of which out of which few of them uh were early adopters so they are kind of on a lifetime deal but uh some of them close to about 30 odd are recurring paying customers which which constitute a part of seven thousand dollars mrr yeah seven thousand an mri divided by thirty customers each one's paying about 240 dollars per month correct or about two that's good interesting okay um walk me through how you got your first you know 10 customers great our first 10 customers was quite a hustle uh i remember uh you know i was a hiding manager in my previous company and the idea resonated with me so much because there were four key problems that we faced the uh data in the recruitment was not centralized it was scattered across multiple platforms and whenever i went back to my hr to ask for hey can you tell me about this candidate uh it took them a lot of time just to search for that data secondly it wasn't very convenient to take interviews it was very annoying i was i used to facilitate one or two interviews every day and um uh you know the first 10 minutes of every interview used to go into you know wasting into uh you know preparing the run time environment and waiting for the candidate to you know uh be be hands on and be up and ready with all the tooling and that that that became really annoying so i was a hiring manager i thought that i need to find people like myself who are equally annoyed and are taking interviews every day so an ideal customer profile for me back then was a hiring manager of a hyper group team so i started finding people who who are who are look-alikes just like me and i called linkedin searching for hiring managers yeah i i did a simple search for companies who were hiring and then the companies had to be progressive so i went to their twitter handles i went to the london email them emailed them and messaged them on twitter some of them were you know quite kind enough to respond and they tried it the product eventually won one or two months down the line they ended up on boarding the product i see and you had your first dollar of revenue um this year 400 a month um and now created a seed round right yeah that's correct and and walk me through the team today how many people we are nine people team right now and a couple of people will join us in october uh so that'll make any levels engineers yeah uh we have about five five engineers in our team okay and any sales reps or no yeah we have a couple of people who does sales uh but largely largely we are you know doing a lot of uh content based organic stuff as well as you know make a lot of code outreach happens at the side as well and we are also figuring out whether my other marketing channel is sideways are you still targeting hiring managers on linkedin is that still a focus uh we are targeting hiring managers so uh the sales people they make sure that they do code email and you know they reach out to people on linkedin linkedin etc but at the same time i also make sure that i'm i'm vocal enough about what we are building our social media platform and from there we get certain sort of pull and then we get some inbound leads as well from our organic channels yeah why can't people just use zoom for this i mean the big call to action on your website is basically that people can watch candidates code live and it's a little zoom video chat with like a coding interface and you have customers like microsoft cisco workspan raccoon walmart and ibm are they all paying customers yeah most of them might be okay and so yeah why can't people just use zoom for this and then screen share oh yeah i'll tell you so typically when you get on a call with a candidate and you have to take the tech interview you ask them to share the screen and uh you know they would they would share their screen open the code editor and prepare that runtime environment and you might want to you know test them out uh across multiple programming languages it might be a java javascript to a react and preparing all those environments might take their own sql time and that's where you know zoom does not help zoom will help you you know do the video calling part of it but it won't help you prepare that runtime environment and a tech interview only requires a run-time environment especially when the interview is hands-on that's only one aspect of the interview the second aspect of the interview is you want to see the interview later on because a lot many times engineers do not submit the feedback on time back to the hiring team so when the feedback is not submitted the hiring team does not know whether the candidate has been selected or rejected and what was the reason of selection so because that is not there because zoom in a software is just there to facilitate video calls you have to go to another piece of software altogether it might be a gmail or a google sheet to submit that feedback and that is pain taking for an engineer because they they would hop on to another call or just get these in building their product so no one would submit that feedback on time our product does it all automatically when you take an interview on interview the code editor is inbuilt as well as when you're taking notes they get auto submitted and hiring managers send a notification understood and talking about your cap table how much equity do you own uh right now the founders equity is around eighty eight point something seven yeah to be exact eight percent yeah you're one of the founders correct how many founders are there uh we have a couple of founders right now how many...