How Kiratalent CEO Emilie Cushman grew Kiratalent to $6M revenue and 1K customers in 2018.

everyone my guest today is Emily Cushman she's the founder and CEO of a company called Kyra Talent she founded the company in 2012 and since launching the company she's been named the HSBC women lead woman leader of tomorrow I don't have Canada's top 100 most powerful women Emily are you ready to take us to the top yes all right tell us about the company what skier Talent do and how do you make money all right so Kyra talent is the Supplemental application platform for universities so what that means is when you apply online normally you will put in your grades and your test scores we do everything else so things like the essay time video interviews timed written assessments portfolio elements really things that look into more who you are as a person not just how you did on some test with universities primarily mostly graduates as opposed to undergraduate and mostly professional programs like business schools med schools Health Sciences and engineering and how I'm trying to memorize unfortunately I'm too far removed from when I went through my college application I'm trying about how these things were processed before you so what are you competing with what's the legacy solution with a paper-based system where you actually mail and application since then that's been brought online so usually now you'll go to a school's website you'll click apply now and then you kind of just fill out or upload a bunch of forms so we've turned this into more of an experience that's a lot nicer for the applicants and it includes a lot more of this you know rich multimedia content like it's know who you are and and are you charging the applicants or the schools we filled it with schools directly so we saw the university admissions team okay and give me a general sense of like the different packages you offer and what's maybe the average admissions team will pay for this tool yeah so pretty average is we'll get a program maybe it's an MBA program or a master's in finance though 2,000 applicants and they'll pay about 20 grands and that's an annual contract value got it so 20 grand and the limiting factor on that is you can accept about a thousand applicants via this over the net goes over the year yeah that's pretty standard okay very good and so are most of the programs that you're working with kind of these online only universities or no you work with a lot of kind of work and mortar ones as well we actually work with all brick and mortar universities okay good I only have maybe one online program but for the most part these are schools these are schools like U of T you know Yale Notre Dame and you know they want more out of their application they've seen that test scores are not indicative of success so they're trying to look at other factors that you know can allow them to see who's actually gonna be successful once they show up on campus and once they graduate and go to get a job and walk me I want to get more the backstory here but it's on a timeline but how many campuses have you scaled to today three hundred three hundred great and then again put that on a timeline would you launch so we started the company in 2012 so it's been six years now the first year and a half that we were in business we actually sold to corporations so we've got about 40 corporations on board including names like Cola or some life in Canada and so some big names but we just found this sweet spot in higher ed and you know there was really no one doing this at the time so we saw that as our blue ocean and we just doubled down it'd be a minute tech company so really since EdTech was like 2014 that was the same if you have 300 customers paying that ACV you just mentioned I think my mat that comes out to about five hundred grand a month or something like that is that accurate yeah so I mean this is a big moment for you to realize I need a shift from these big logos to just doing and doubling down on on schools essentially what was that moment how did you know when identify that as a sweet spot hey you know what you know we had been selling into corporate for a while and we kept coming out and this is actually back when we were just a time to video interview player so that was our original product to market so we weren't always the full supplemental we were just the one piece but it was time to video and you know and we sold that into corporate we started coming against same players over and over and it almost became commoditized really fast and then on the side you know we had these schools that were actually coming to us and they were saying hey you know we really we want to incorporate like a video essay and this is kind of like that it's like an asynchronous video platform so we had you know U of T they were the first school that came to us and you know Canadian business school and a pre-competitive so of course once we got U of T you know Ivy and queens were next in line and after a couple months we just thought you know what we're banging our heads against the wall trying to compete against these other commoditized video products went over here we literally have you know check clients coming to us and you know they're signing up front on three-year contracts they're a pleasure to deal with and they're actually using our cold product you know they're not saying oh we want to run some pilot or oh we want to you know just use this piece over here they're using our full products right away in you know they think I just think they get it so it was it was a pretty clear decision I say are they paying the three month contract are you all up front so 20 40 60 grand all up front or no they pay annually but I mean when we were selling at the corporate need to like fight tooth and nail it was well why don't we just pay you know 10% now and you know like the headache total headache okay so 2015 you launch you get sorry 20 I think 2012 to get started on this how do you decide to bootstrap or raise capital so we ended up raising a bunch of capital we did our first rounds well we did a couple rounds we did a an angel round of three hundred thousand we did a seed round of just over two million and then we actually had a leadership change so our investments brought in a CEO to come in and run the company for couple years and in that time we had a different CEO here there was another 6 million put into the business so number 8 million in total that we had raised however the CEO did not work out so he we had to exit the business I came back at the end of 2016 and at that point we made a decision to become more of a profitable company so now we're operating breakeven will turn the profitability in from the next month and it's a whole different way of operating did you actually leave the company or you just assumed like a CEO well or something while he was running it yeah it seemed a different role kind of just bounced around different departments traveled a lot why why did so this is by the way this happens all the time and nobody talks about it so I'm hoping that we can have a great conversation here and pull some learnings out why when you're only 2 or 3 years old dude the investors say I imagine they probably like we're only giving you this money if you bring in this CEO why do they feel that yeah I mean a couple of reasons I mean I think the main reason was that myself and my co-founder we were you know 19 to 21 we started the business and first-time entrepreneurs in Canada and I think investors said you know we want someone older and experienced who's done this before before we put in this type of check sighs so you know step aside and you can learn from this person and go there so why'd you roll over why not say you know what screw you we don't need the money you know what I mean I think at the time and it wasn't that long ago but it was still you know five or six years ago and in Toronto the landscape was still it was still early so we started at a time where accelerators were very new and there weren't that many here and you know there were not a lot of companies that were getting angel and seed funding so we were one of the few and so yeah it's like we just didn't have a lot to go off of we were young and we didn't have tons of other companies to look at and say oh well here's what they did and they did it differently it was kind of well I mean everyone's encouraging us to raise this money and I mean we've been operating under the you know under the assumption that this is the right thing to do like this was also five or six years ago when you know people would glorify fund raising right like this was this was kind of thing it still is a little bit like I think we're getting better but like people really glorified like oh you made it you know you raised that you raised X million so I think part of it was just the culture that we were in at the time we were young and we kind of just said okay well I mean this is the right thing to do how old were you at the time you did this exceeded the like our first phrase where we got you know the seat where the CEO ended up coming in afterwards I was fine when we do okay that was the two million or the six million so right off the bat like we were around for...