How Intervue CEO Rahul Arora grew 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 two there's two of you guys okay so two co-founders did you just put the 88 equally no no it's not equal you have more yeah yeah tell me tell me about that is that a weird conversation hey come join my team but i want to keep more equity no it's not it's actually not it's uh it i i like to be fair there and you know uh bases whatever you put on the table and you know how much fire you have in the belly and what you're going to do what things are you going to handle it's that sort of a conversation it's it's never that i want i always would like to you know own a smaller part of a watermelon than owning a larger part of a grape that's my mindset but yeah to be honest i like to be fair there there will be more people joining in for sure on the capitol do employees right now sorry employees own any of the company right now yeah they all the employees have esops so they they do have uh indirectly they do have a part of the company so if on a fully diluted basis how much equity did team members own right now uh ten percent ten percent okay so that's 98 of the business so the 120 000 what about that equity what are the investors owned oh no so the founders equity was inclusive of esops actually but if i if i not include the esops it would be 78 but because esop is very cool okay how are you telling me about how you're managing cash in the bank so how much cash in the bank today um close to whatever we raised uh it's it's almost that much amount only because uh we almost made no sense at all so how much cash in the bank today it is it is close to 100k or more than 100 i would say i tell you the runway you like how much are you burning per month we're burning about um every time you ask me this question i have to convert it in dollars so i i just take a quick step back but we are burning about uh fifty five hundred dollars a month right now but it will go to sixty five hundred so are you looking to raise more capital here shortly or no your state you're not raising we are we we are looking to raise a round north of six million or in the coming in the coming days so you want to raise six million dollars at what valuation uh we have not really decided honestly that we in in the coming ten days we would be finalized on that number but we have decided on number that we want on board for sure because we have backtracked it to the to the team members that we need on board to you know speed it up more so you want to raise you're deciding the next 10 days how much you want to raise in the valuation but you know the amount you want to raise is 6 million yeah that's good so let's say you only want to sell 20 of the business that means you have to raise it like a 30 million dollar valuation but your revenue is only seven thousand dollars per month do you think you get investors to pay you know a significant multiple yeah i mean uh the the whole value of this thing is sometime in the future that's one second is largely all of these things are a function of the kind of product you're building and a high in the hiring industry an assessment tool is born every day and there are so many other tools that that exist today and people think that it's a saturated market and the product is almost commoditized but here's where the difference is i largely think and we are strongly biased as a unit that the product is not at all commoditized we are far away from a product that that would disrupt the hiring industry and to build that sort of a product we need talent on board and we are we we have all we have just started i would say and all of those things are in the future if you raise six million dollars it's gonna be very dilutive i mean think about it if you raise six million you're doing eighty four thousand dollars a year right now in terms of run rate divided into a thirty million dollar valuation that's a 357x multiple so if you raise six million 30 pre right that's you selling you know call but between like 15 and 20 percent of the business but that's a massive which i don't know you'll be able to get i think like maybe someone gives you a 12 million valuation and gives you six million you're selling 33 of the business i mean do you really want to take all that dilution yeah i i would just give some examples of the company that have pre-revenue and have raised 10 million dollars and they are companies from us and there are companies in india give me a few examples so i i would just name a few companies right uh they have raised bigger bigger rounds i i would just name this company who just raised 38 million dollar round uh from from india and then there are companies who have raised what's the company i i actually forgot the company i met them in an incubation uh at an incubator uh the name of the company have almost forgotten uh they were trying to make this uh gmail uh clone they were trying to revise uh what what email systems have done and there are so many other companies right uh companies at the likes of i've seen this company from india called workduck which is bound today is about a 10 million dollar round why does any of this matter though right like these are these are very extreme outliers you're referencing and there might be some no it does not it does not what i'm referring to is that the market needs that sort of that sort of an investment right now because tech talent is expensive that's number one uh second of all you need to you need to have uh you know at least a couple of years of runway with that sort of money and about 25 folks on road to to to get the boat sailing and get the product to a level where you want it to be well yeah maybe but i mean like look at a company like qualified right they're at a three million dollar they're not raising at a 40 million valuation they're much larger than you uh and they serve the same market it's basically a coding tool for like the developers and onboarding ats system uh used their community to arbitrage their growth so they didn't have to raise a bunch of capital i'm just curious like why don't why don't you go why don't instead of focusing on raising i'll take four months of your time why not just focus on closing more customers you know getting up to two million one million dollar runner and then going out and doing another raise yeah we have about five people in the engineering team today and about uh only just three of them are full-time and couple of them are interns so uh the kind of features that we want to build and those those are big big differentiators it won't just you know improve the product ten percent it will take us from zero to one those sort of features are way into the future and we cannot just build them in three to four months of time cool okay that'll make sense you know your numbers though you must listen to the show or something sorry i'm just saying you know all your numbers very quick you must listen to the show or something no i'm just used to all of these numbers because they are on my fingertips so because most of these times i i just keep uh you know in my back of the root i keep thinking about how much runway is left how much do do we need to raise more and how fast do we need to go all this time you know all this is in my subconscious so it's mostly like that and yeah i do watch the show i do watch the show oh nice why so why did you want to come on you knew i was going to ask you all these numbers oh no no i i knew it i do i do watch the show i know you're sure has has this pattern i do love it in fact there are a couple of my team members who who watch it and they knew why i was going to be on this podcast and and they wish me luck and they said dude it is too big like [Laughter] well i think you did a great job let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book oh my favorite book so far uh the mom test the mom test yeah number two is there a ceo you're following or studying elon musk number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business online tool for building the business wow that's interesting i don't know i'm just using a whiteboard right now uh if my background was off you could have seen a whiteboard which is like showing you a complete flow but yeah i don't have any tool in mind to be honest there are so many of them i don't have any favorite whiteboard works number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night oh four uh four at the bare minimum i try and if i'm too lucky seven not more than that situation married single kids i am married i don't have kids i don't have plans to uh for the next three years how are you all i am 29 29 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh wow i wish i had access to some capital so that i could have materialized my twenty in a way such that i was a billionaire today guys there you have it raw with interview dot io launch back in 2019 now doing seven thousand dollars a month in revenue helping hr teams give live coding assessments where you can see the candidate coding live along with a video thing tag and save it for later for doing everything related to candidate management in the developer space they've got a team of nine people right now going to raise 120 000 in a pre-seed round earlier this year at a million dollar valuation 30 customers today looking to scale might be raising six million here shortly we'll see what happens roll thanks for taking us to the top thanks a lot nathan it was great one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder 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