How ProductiveRecruit Reached $904 MRR as a One-Person Side Project (Interview with Colin McAtee)

Introduction to ProductiveRecruit

Nathan Latka

00:00Hello, everyone. My guest today is Colin McAtee.

Colin McAtee

00:02>> He's building

Nathan Latka

00:02a great company called productiverecruit.com. It's college athletic recruiting software. Colin, you ready to take us to the top?

Colin McAtee

00:09>> Yeah. Definitely. Let's get going.

Colin's Background and Product-Founder Fit

Nathan Latka

00:11So were you, like, wanting to be a college athlete, but recruiting was a nightmare, and now you're, like, sticking it to this building tools to make it easier?

Colin McAtee

00:19>> Yeah. Kind of. 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, had no idea what I was doing running a business, started listening to Indie Hackers and reading and all this stuff in

00:43>> 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 kinda wanted to build a tool that I would have loved using during that process. So the site looks great. It's very clean.

Tech Stack and Site Design

Nathan Latka

00:55Did you use a no code tech stack to get this live?

Colin McAtee

00:58>> I did not. It's a it's a Tailwind. So it does use some Tailwind UI stuff, but I kinda retooled it to not look so generic like the standard Tailwind UI stuff that you see.

Nathan Latka

01:08Really it looks really, really good.

Colin McAtee

01:10>> Yeah. Thank you.

01:11>> Appreciate that.

Revenue Model and Current MRR

Nathan Latka

01:12So how do you make money here?

Colin McAtee

01:13>> 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 MRR to be upfront. So it it and I launched almost a year ago, so June fifteenth last year I launched. So, I started with a one time sale model for the individual athletes and families because they're kinda customers that only need this software for maybe a year or two. So I

Reseller Customer Discovery

Colin McAtee

01:39>> I had a price of $150 on launch, made four or five sales the first day because I had a little bit of a a pre list. But most of my revenue so I have 17 customers, 14 of them are resellers. So I've kinda 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

01:59>> 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 they don't have the budget to hire a developer. They're more of a service business. Maybe a consultant family's higher than paying a few thousand a year, that

02:21>> kind of thing. So I'm a great addition to their service offering. So that's been going great.

Nathan Latka

02:27Who are can you name one of these resellers? I don't understand.

Colin McAtee

02:31>> They're just individual people. Let's say it's some ex football player who played in college and pro, now they have a recruiting business. So to explain it, maybe they have a package that's 1,000 a year. They have you know, the 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

02:54>> trusts them and trusts their testimonials. So it's it's a they they kinda 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.

Nathan Latka

03:05I see. Okay. Got it.

Colin McAtee

03:06>> So If that makes sense. I'm not sure if I'm doing a great job.

Nathan Latka

03:09Were they were an athlete. They now run their own recruiting business. They use your software so that when when they're working with high school graduates and helping them get recruited to college, your software helps them.

03:26Colin, is that about Okay. That about right?

Colin McAtee

03:29>> Oh, I'm sorry. You cut out for a little bit. I can hear you now, though. No. I was just saying, so basically, again,

Nathan Latka

03:34that ex NFL person that's now helping high school graduates get into college, they're buying your software to help their recruiting business scale faster.

Colin McAtee

03:43>> Correct. Exactly. So they they kinda need a tool to manage all their athletes and give them some tooling that they can use themselves. So my software gives them the ability to I have a college database with all the academic stats in there. I have 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

04:06>> that up to date. So it gives the 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 a SaaS provider.

College Coach Database and Data Vendor

Nathan Latka

04:19How much of your capital do you spend to build the MVP?

Colin McAtee

04:24>> None really. So I it's just a Laravel app. I had to spend a little bit on the biggest expense I'll just get into is that data. So that's, about 3,000 a year. So that's a pretty big expense to have, but it's kinda necessary because they give me an API, and I can kinda keep that in house.

Nathan Latka

04:40Paying $3K to, and and what data are you specifically getting from the lit the database?

Colin McAtee

04:45>> Yeah. It's called Collegiate Directories. They just kind of have sourced they've so college coaches or athletic directors, etcetera, will give them their information. It's like a big just database of contact info, basically. And I, subscribe to their API because I don't wanna have that be a manual process.

Bootstrapped and No Plans to Raise

Nathan Latka

05:02Yep. Now have you bootstrapped to date or have you raised?

Colin McAtee

05:06>> Bootstrapped completely.

Nathan Latka

05:07Love that. Any plans to raise

05:09or you wanna stay bootstrapped?

Colin McAtee

05:12>> No plans right now. I'd be open to it in the future, possibly, but every time I think about it, don't really know if it it's it's for me, at least as of right now. But if if I was open to it, going off what Noah Bragg said in his interview with you, I'd be more open to a kinda TinySeed or Earnest Capital type of raise rather than a traditional VC.

Team Size and Side Project Status

Nathan Latka

05:31Yeah. How many folks are on your team today?

Colin McAtee

05:34>> It is just myself.

Nathan Latka

05:35Perfect. We love that. So one one man show, you're cranking, you're going quick. Would you I mean, what do you are you full timing on this, or is it still a side project?

Colin McAtee

05:45>> It's still a side project. So I I'm a morning person. I'm usually working on it, grinding on in the mornings, a little bit in the evenings.

05:53>> Hopefully you know, someday, it would be great for it to be full time, but it would, need to grow quite bit. Something like 10K MRR or more would be a great spot to get to.

Nathan Latka

06:03What is your full time job?

Colin McAtee

06:05>> I'm a software engineer. Been doing that for I did a boot camp about four years ago and haven't looked back since.

Nathan Latka

06:11So you're working

06:12for another company as a software engineer?

Colin McAtee

06:14>> Yes. I see.

Growth Rate and Churn Trends

Nathan Latka

06:15Okay. Interesting. So, okay, you need about $10K in MRR to do this full time. How much MRR are you adding per month right now?

Colin McAtee

06:24>> The last few months have only been about 10 per percent increase. I don't have the exact graph in front of me right now. Was just looking at my ChartMogul earlier, but it it's not really growing a ton. I kinda had a good start last year when I launched where I got to, like, 600 MRR pretty quickly. Had a a little bit of churn, which was kind of expected because I was kinda still pre product market fit.

06:46>> Now I'm kinda finding my way in the fact that I'm not seeing hardly any churn. I'm actually seeing negative churn the last few months due to expansion. And, obviously, with 17 customers, it's not really great data, but I do think I've kinda found the type of customer I need to go after, which is great.

Finding Resellers via Instagram

Nathan Latka

07:01It 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?

Colin McAtee

07:08>> That's a great question. It it's really hard to to find them with just, like, 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 to post on Instagram, so I'll go to certain hashtags like college recruiting, kinda scroll through there, there'll just be a ton of, like, little agencies posting, you know, recruiting tips and stuff, I kinda try to DM

07:28>> them. Kinda not in a sleazy way, just kinda saying, hey. I like what you're doing. Let me know if you'd wanna talk. I think we could be partners someday, that kinda thing.

Acquisition Approach and Exit Thinking

Nathan Latka

07:36Yeah. What about I mean, are you the kinda guy that likes a bunch of side projects? So if someone listening right now offered to buy this for $40,000 all upfront cash today, would you sell it and then move on to the next thing?

Colin McAtee

07:48>> That's actually funny 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 I think I wouldn't be ready to sell for a number that low. I've put a lot into this. And, 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

08:07>> think I wanna see this one grow more because I I think I could see a bigger exit. Think there's way more potential here.

Risk Profile and Full-Time Decision

Nathan Latka

08:12What's your risk profile? Like, are you guys that's good under pressure?

Colin McAtee

08:18>> I'd like to say so. I mean, I would say that, 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, found that to be really helpful and 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

08:38>> where my wife comes in and she puts puts me straight. She she's way more logical and practical at times where I'm just trying to get stuff done. You know, it's the college it's the college soccer national championship.

Nathan Latka

08:51There'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 perform sort of a comfortable lead or something more comfortable? The reason I'm asking is right now it feels It's like a comfortable side project where if you think in really scale and you're good under pressure, the right thing to do would be to give up your safety net, which is

09:10the full time gig and go full time

Colin McAtee

09:11>> on this to make so it has to be successful. Otherwise, your wife will be pissed. That that's that's a good no. 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 the safe, comfortable route right now. I think that's that's really important.

Marketing vs. Product Focus

Colin McAtee

09:29>> And, honestly, I I like my day job, so it's like I like building stuff. I have a good situation at 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 gonna grow if I just

09:47>> code. So Yeah. I do need to to focus on that more.

Nathan Latka

09:51What a great story. I mean, this is like what we live for. I love celebrating founders like you.

Colin McAtee

09:55>> So so we'll see what happens.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

09:56In the meantime, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?

Colin McAtee

10:01>> Built to Sell. Build to sell.

Nathan Latka

10:03Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Colin McAtee

10:06>> Not right now, but I I do love everything Steli Efti puts out. So I I love following him due to learn more about sales.

Nathan Latka

10:12Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a college recruiting?

10:21Colin, what's your favorite online tool for building ProductiveRecruit?

Colin McAtee

10:26>> Aside from Stripe, I I really love Laravel Forge for server management.

Nathan Latka

10:30Number four. How many hours of sleep are you getting every night?

Colin McAtee

10:35>> About six to eight.

Nathan Latka

10:37Okay. And situation, it sounds like married. Any kids?

Colin McAtee

10:40>> No kids. Just wife and a and a dog.

Nathan Latka

10:43And how old are you?

Colin McAtee

10:44>> 28. 28. Last question.

Nathan Latka

10:46What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Colin McAtee

10:51>> I wish I had realized how much I love building things and creating.

10:58>> I don't know. I was hearing the questions kinda late at the end there. I don't know if I was lagging out.

Nathan Latka

11:03No problem. But you said build earlier, build faster. Right?

Colin McAtee

11:07>> 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 entrepreneurial drive in me until right after college.

Nathan Latka

11:16Guys, productiverecruit.com, helping folks that run their recruiting business recruit high school athletes and help them get recruited into college faster. He's got 17 customers, $904 in MRR, so $10,000 in ARR. It's still a side project. We'll see what happens next. In the meantime, Colin, thanks for taking us to the top. One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call

11:40it 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, 1PM central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM central. To make sure you don't

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13:05See you.