How Recruiter.com CEO Miles Jennings grew Recruiter.com to $20M revenue and 50 customers in 2021.

hey folks my guest today is evan sohn he's the chairman and chief executive officer of recruiter.com an on-demand recruiting platform that combines ai and video job matching technology with the world's largest network of small and independent recruiters evan you're ready to take the top oh that was great that was a great description i don't know where you got that from but that was good who gave me that my gosh sleek and smooth great delivery wow i must have an awesome corporate communication person that's fantastic evan how long have you been doing this when did you guys launch um so i became ceo in uh june of 2020 i became chairman of the board in may of 19 uh in march of 2019. the company uh url's been around for a while but this all really came together in march of 2019. okay what was it before that so it was always recruited.com right so it's a great name but it was really more of a marketing organization like a media company really focused at news for recruiters uh it had various training tools and resume distribution um really just fantastic seo but it was really more of a destination site for recruiters and still is it still is a destination site for all things recruiting uh what we started to do in march of 2019 was really start to monetize this huge community of recruiters and uh and hr professionals and talent acquisition professionals that really came into the platform mm-hmm well tell me tell me more about that so some of the most successful you know freight waves is a good example media business plus major sas play and they work really nicely together you start off as a media business right so let's quantify that and then go into 2019 how many uniques was the site getting in 2019 uh we were probably getting four million dollars of organic seo on a monthly basis when qualified in terms of unique views uh difficult to quantify that's a lot it's a lot you know i usually like in the dollars i'm a dollars guy man yeah that's fine with me so four million and free seo per month yeah you know so something like three to four million dollars of organic traffic on a regular basis so again very good traffic that's monthly though right not annually that's a monthly traffic so tremendous traffic we rank number one or number two and tons of things we have all this traffic and um the goal what i really saw the opportunity to do was to really reinvent the recruiting industry so the recruiting industry is 120 billion dollar industry huge giant industry uh fragmented across you know so many different ways and sectors but the reality is nathan there's two ways to hire you either do it yourself you use zip recruiter indeed linkedin etc or you do it yourself and you sorry you do it yourself or you hire someone to do it for you and if you've got a higher dude for you you would use the classic headhunter and they would charge you you know 20 to 30 of the salary to get to place the person etc that model really has not changed in decades uh and it's now time for a variety of macro reasons uh to actually change it and what we really do is we help companies of all sizes startup companies to fortune 50 companies hire talent by either giving them fractional on-demand gig recruiters on demand so think of us as fiverr uh for recruiting or talent acquisition you need a recruiter to help you recruit financial people for the next three months pay that person on an hourly basis uh not no success fee when they place a candidate do it get the right person at the right place at the right time with the right skill set and pay them for their services that's what the gig economy is all about and that's what we do plus we also have as you mentioned you know an incredible tech stack to ensure that the recruiters are doing a great job and these tools actually stand on their own we have like 50 plus clients today that are just subscribing to our software to build pipelines of candidates and how many how many how many how many brands are paying for just the sas tool 50 over 50 yeah okay 50. and is this like a premium like enterprise pricing what are they on average per month no uh they're paying anywhere from a thousand dollars a month okay two we have some people playing like 10 000 a month depending on the scope of what they're looking for we really combine ai search and email marketing into one platform so we have you know you sound like a great numbers guy nathan we have a 160 million profiles indexed in our database okay okay full diversity all searching everything and so we use our tools to find the right person to find the right group of people and then we run campaigns literally like marketing campaigns to get them to raise their hand to say i'm interested so how else evan how else are you making money today so 50 customers out of grand a month is only 50 grand a month in mr i know you're doing yeah we're actually yeah we're actually so many of them are paying a lot more than that so our software is probably doing about 200 000 a month in software okay a little over a little over 200 000 a month in recurring monthly revenue on the software side we run marketplaces so we have job boards and marketplaces like zip recruiter and indeed uh we're generating money there how much there um another you know 150 200 000 there uh our on-demand business is growing incredibly well we're doing uh really nicely there how much got over over a million dollars a month okay and what's that model i just don't know that model that model is like upwork or or you know you pay us we we take a fee and pass the rest of the one millions your fear that's a total gmb through the total total money now and it's been growing it's over a million right okay so you know it's but evan but but to be fair here i mean 12 million in gmb are on-demand is actually fairly low for a marketplace why is that not higher yeah we're growing 25 quarter of a quarter so why not faster i mean this is a very hot space right everyone's hiring why isn't that why isn't there 100 million going through your on-demand platform i uh i would agree um we are we're uh we have a tremendous demand and we're we're balancing out the answer that you ask is as a small public company and we're a nasdaq company we won nasdaq about four months ago um we are really focused unfortunately on profitability also so it's not just about growth it's really about growth and profit and so we invested about a million dollars into our business last quarter we could have invested 20 million into and grown our sales and marketing and delivery our biggest investment was really in talent delivery ensuring that we can deliver talent faster um and that's that's our throttle point now and so we're trying to do this in a balanced fashion hit profitability and we'll get there early in 22. what the percent what percent are you taking on on-demand model about 20 to 25 percent okay so you basically have three business lines each doing about 200 to 250 000 a month in revenue so you're doing 700 grand a month in revenue total something like that oh so you're taking out the you're looking at a gross profit number the other business that we have is correct many of our we have a direct hire business so often when you're are using an on-demand recruiter as a company you'll say gee i really love that recruiter can i hire that recruiter yes companies are using us as a tribe buy and that generates another another couple hundred thousand dollars in business yep so trailing 12 months again public company or 12 million bucks in revenue something like that uh 11.8 yeah that was actually trailing 12 from our q1 numbers our q1 numbers were 4.3 million so even that on a run rate was about 16 million i you know times it by four we we gave guidance that we're growing 20 uh 25 quarter of a quarter so if we did over 5 million last quarter that brings it to about a 20 million run rate and you know we're again we're very pleased with our overall growth because we're really balancing our growth with the the need to be profitable yeah what percent i i can look this up too but you'll be quicker to ask you what percent of company do you own fully diluted basis evan stone personally yeah about four percent how did you get involved did they recruit you as a ceo like just to introduce the ipo yeah no um i was brought in by one of the original investors in the company um about three years ago to sort of help out my background really is in technology operations platforms reinventing different industries and uh you know one of the they brought me in and i'm like you have a company that owns recruiter.com if it's not a billion dollar company someone someone's making a mistake totally let's go fix it yeah so you own for you're in four percent personally i personally own four percent yeah yeah yeah how much did the company raise before you came in um very very little like under 5 million probably less than that yeah okay so here's a very interesting question i mean 40 million market cap by many you i imagine we are the most we are the most undervalued company on nasdaq so what do you think you should be valued at today i would say no less than no less than 80 to 100 million and why why is that so you look at the comps right you could say that we run a marketplace like zip recruiter and indeed and they're trading at or sorry zip recruiters probably trading at you know five six times revenues um run rate revenue you look at our our rod business our on-demand business and fiber is trading at 22 times you know that...