How ProductiveRecruit CEO Colin Mcatee grew to $27.4K revenue and 17 customers in 2024.

hello everyone everyone my guest today is colin mcatee he's building a great company called productiverecruit.com it's college athletic recruiting software colin you ready to take us to the top yeah definitely let's get going were you like wanted to be a college athlete but recruiting was a nightmare and now you're like sticking it to the building tools to make it easier yeah kind of uh i have good product founder fit so i did play college soccer i graduated college in 2015 so i've been out of it for a little while now and i wasn't i didn't study computer science or anything in college but i started getting that entrepreneurial edge after college i tried a little consulting thing uh didn't had no idea what i was doing running a business started listening to any hackers and reading and all this stuff in this community and now here i know how to code i'm a software engineer full-time doing this on the side and yeah i kind of wanted to build a tool that i would have loved using during that process so the site looks great it's very clean did you use a no code tech stack to get this live i did not it's a it's a tailwind um so it does use some tailwind ui stuff but i kind of re tooled it to not look so generic like the standard tailwind ui stuff that uses really it looks really um yeah thank you appreciate that so how do you make money here yeah it's a good question actually something i'm really trying to focus on this summer is marketing and figuring out that pricing model so i'm at 904 mr to be up front so it it and i launched almost a year ago so june 15th last year i launched so um i started with a one-time sale model for the individual athletes and families because they're kind of customers that only need this software for maybe a year or two so i had a price of 150 on launch made four or five sales the first day because i had a little bit of a pre-list but most of my revenue so i have 17 customers 14 of them are resellers so i've kind of found myself in this space where i can actually more be a distribution company and i keep some of my partners have told me this and i realize now that i really need to latch onto this and make that the focal point of my business because i built this great thing no competitor really offers this white labeling on top of a platform like this all these resellers of mine they're recruiting experts ex college pro athletes right but they have no technical know-how they don't have the budget to hire a developer they're more of a service business maybe a consultant family is higher than payment a few thousand a year that kind of thing so i'm a great addition to their service offering so that's been going great um who are can you name one of these resellers i don't understand um they're just individual people um let's say it's just some ex-football player who played in college in pro and now they have a recruiting business so to explain it maybe they have a package that's a thousand a year they have you know the family or recruit can call them a few times a month they give them guidance on here's exactly what you need to do they might have connections with college coaches that are are you know that coach really trust them and trust their testimonial so it's they they kind of run a true services business where i'm in the business of software and giving them that software they can use to add on to their offering i see okay got it so if that's no sense i'm not sure if i'm doing it they were they were an athlete they now run their own recruiting business they use your software so that when they're working with high school graduates and helping them get recruited into college your that about right oh i'm sorry you cut out for a little bit i can hear you now though no just saying so basically again that xnfl person that's now helping high school graduates get into college they're buying your software to help their recruiting business scale faster correct um exactly so they they kind of need a tool to manage all their athletes and give them some tooling that they can use themselves so my software gives them ability to have a college database with all the academic stats in there i have um a database of over 50 000 college coaches and their their emails and stuff like that that i get from a vendor one of my other partners that gives me that data and i keep that up to date so it gives like the athletes ability to save time and money that they could spend on a big incumbent in the industry these recruiting services which i could get into where i'm just kind of a sas provider how much of your capital do you spend to build the mvp um none really so i it's just a level app um i had to spend a little bit on the biggest expense i'll just get into is that data so that's uh about 3 000 a year so that was a pretty big expense to have but it's kind of necessary because they give me an api and i can kind of keep that so how are you paying three grand to and and what data are you specifically getting from the database yeah it's called collegiate directories um they just kind of have source they've so college coaches or athletic directors etc will give them their information it's like a big just database of contact info basically and i uh subscribe to their api because i don't want to have that be a manual process yep now have you bootstrapped to date or be raised uh bootstrapped completely we love that any plans to raise you want to stay bootstrapped um no plans right now i'd be open to it in the future possibly but every time i think about i don't really know if it's it's for me at least as of right now but if if i was open to it going off with noah bragg said his interview with you i'd be more open to a kind of tiny seat or earnest capital type of raise rather than a traditional vc yeah how many folks are on your team today it is just myself perfect we love that so one one man show you're cranking you're going quick um would you i mean what are you are you full time in on this or is it still a side project um it's still a side project so i'm a morning person i'm usually working on it grinding out in the mornings a little bit in the evenings um hopefully you know someday it would be great for it to be full time but it would uh need to grow quite a bit something like 10 kmr or more would be a great spot to get to what is your full-time job i'm a software engineer um been doing that for i did a boot camp about four years ago and haven't looked back since so you're working for another company as a software engineer yes i see okay interesting so okay you need about 10 grand in mrr to do this full time how much mr are you adding per month right now um the last few months have only been about 10 percent increase um i don't have the exact uh graph in front of me right now i was just looking at my chart mogul earlier but it's not really growing um a ton i kind of had a good start last year when i launched where i got to like 600 mr pretty quickly had a little bit of churn which was kind of expected because i was kind of still pre-product market fit and now i'm kind of finding my way in the fact that i'm not seeing hardly any trend i'm actually seeing negative trend the last few months due to expansion and obviously 17 customers it's not really great data but i do think i've kind of found the type of customer i need to go after which is yeah it makes good sense do you have a database of those folks or is it manual linkedin searching to find the ex-nfl player now running his own recruiting firm that's a great question it's really hard to it to find them with just like a straight like linkedin type of thing i've i've done a decent job finding them on instagram at times it seems like a lot of them like to post on instagram so i'll go to certain hashtags like college recruiting kind of scroll through there and they'll just be a ton of like little agencies posting you know recruiting tips and stuff and i kind of try to dm them um kind of not in a sleazy way just kind of saying hey i like what you're doing let me know if you'd want to talk i think we could be partners someday that kind of thing yeah what about i mean are you the kind of guy that likes a bunch of side projects so if someone listening right now offered to buy this for forty thousand dollars all up front in cash today would you sell it and move on to the next thing um that's actually fun you brought this up because this has been a topic conversation recently i have been approached by a company i'm not gonna name them but i'm not sure like i think i wouldn't be ready to sell for a number that low i've put a lot into this and um even though i am kind of the kind of guy who maybe would like a lot of side projects i do just love building things i i think i want to see this one grow more because i think i could see a bigger exit i think there's way more potential here what's your risk profile like are you a guy that's good under pressure um i'd like to say so i mean i i would say that uh what's the best way to put this i'm very good at just making decisions quickly whether they're always good or bad i'm very good at pulling the trigger i think a lot of times as an entrepreneur i found that to be really helpful not to overthink things but obviously there's times where it's really helpful to sit down and put the quality time and thinking through so that's where my wife comes in and she uh puts puts me straight she uh she's way more uh logical and practical at times where i'm just trying to get stuff done you know it's the college it's the college uh soccer national championship there's two minutes left you're down two to one you need the tie to go to overtime do you live for situations like that or are you more professional of a comfortable lead or something more comfortable the reason i'm asking is right now it feels like a question it's like a comfortable side project where if you think you can really scale and you're good under pressure the right thing to do would be to give up your safety net which is the full-time gig and go full time on this to make so it has to be successful otherwise your wife will be pissed that that's that's a good question that's a good point yeah i think i'm definitely in this current if i were taking the sports analogy and putting it in this business definitely more of the safe comfortable route right now i think that's that's really important um and honestly i like my day job so it's like i like building stuff i have a good situation at work so i think just building it slowly i do though i'm doing the classic thing where i'm focusing too much on product and not enough on marketing so i'm trying to put split up my time and actually focus more on that because honestly that obviously as you know the business isn't going to grow if i just code so yeah i do need to to focus on that more well what a great story i mean this is like what we live for i love celebrating founders like you so so we'll see what happens in the meantime let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh built to sell build a cell number two is there a ceo you're following or studying not right now but i i do love everything steli fd puts out so i love following him due to learn more about sales number three what's your favorite online tool for building a college at recruiting colin what's your favorite online tool for building productive recruit um asides from stripe i really love level forge for server management number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night about six to eight okay and situation it sounds like married any kids no kids just wife and uh and a dog and how old are you 28 28 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 um i wish i had realized how much i love building things and creating um i don't know i was hearing the questions kind of late at the end there i don't know if it was lagging out no problem but you said build earlier build faster right yeah i i was a i was a college athlete i all sports is all i had known up to that point and i didn't even know i had this kind of entrepreneurial drive in me until right after college guys productiverecruit.com helping folks that run their recruiting business recruit high school athletes and helping get recruited into college faster he's got 17 customers 904 dollars in mrr so 10 thousand bucks in ar it's still a side project we'll see what happens next in the meantime they'll call him thanks for taking us to the top 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 comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end 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 p.m central additionally remember these recorded 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