How Recruitlocator CEO Adrian Russo grew Recruitlocator to $75K revenue and 300 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is adrian russo he's a talent acquisition professional who leverages a software development background to help organizations find talent he's co-founder and developer of recruit locator a sas based open web resume search tool he led technical recruiting at various organizations including the national institutes of health discovery communications and department of defense he's featured in the upcoming amazon prime docu film the art of recruiting adrian are you ready to take us to the top i'm all set so you're an actor too huh yeah apparently so yeah as i said not many times you find a developer who's also an actor those usually don't go together yeah nice it's got some i got some things coming out on amazon prime so it's really interesting that's great is you see that it's basically a distribution channel for the software product yeah it was a great opportunity i was contacted by chris lava the uh executive producer of top recruiter and now it was just an interesting opportunity to present itself to be able to talk about the product and um you know some some methodologies behind recruiting yeah okay so tell me about the product what's the company do and is it really a pure place ass company yeah it really is a pure sas company as far as a from the product perspective so you know i went out on my own for for recruiting and it started out we developed this tool um to give us you know an edge on everyone else our secret sauce you know we would use it in demos to say hey you know we're different we can find your talent and this is how we do it and the answer we got when we went out to speak to these um you know these business owners was yeah that's great we'll use your services but what about the product well at the time this was just a dashboard um this excuse me a desktop tool and so we quickly refactored it uh to a sas product so we can allow our customers to leverage it as well mm-hmm so what do they pay for this to what do they pay to get out access to it yeah it's really easy so we have um we have a free meal model where um you know people could sign up for free and try the tool uh with a limited number of searches they get um you know five searches a day and then for uh for a year we charge 250. okay two so one price point super simple easy quick easy we want to make it as simple as possible for people to use and sign up so what do they get for 250 bucks for the year yeah so for 250 dollars what we do is we have um we have six search services and basically what happens is this this tool allows people to find talent from everywhere but job boards so if you want to if you want to find talent on job boards and resume databases there's plenty of tools for that there's not a lot of tools to find talent from the open web and so what we do is we have it in a few different areas we have open web resumes which is again everywhere but job boards um we have linkedin search which actually provides a more robust search than linkedin we actually have a video out there where we beat you know linkedin recruiter search results by number and relevancy uh we have a clear job board or cleared a clear job search where you find only clear talent from the open web what does that mean i don't know what clear talent means oh sorry so clear talent is um you know talent that requires clearances whether you know whether it's a clearance top secret yeah so top seed you know only talent that has uh you know a clearance yeah and then lastly um we have another service that takes resumes from linkedin profiles so it's really easy to use you type your location into the search tool um you type in a keyword or keywords or job titles and this comes back with results and so what year did you launch the company in i'm sorry what year did you launch the company in we launched in uh 2016. 2016 okay so two years ago and then what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers on the platform so uh we just we just relaunched our sas product and we just started um taking on customers like three or four or a few uh we have 300 right now okay that's okay that's pretty i mean you're you're underselling it but 300 is pretty strong for a relaunch when do you relaunch we relaunched in july july and walk me through the strategy there why why'd you have to relaunch yeah so we had um it migrated um all platforms so we were using um you know different different platforms to manage our networking we migrated off of that and when we did that um we relaunched the tool we made it faster we made the results more relevant we increased the number of results and then we were completely revamped the ui um you know these are all things that we you know we had some feedback from beta tests uh we did a beta test with omnicom media group uh this is the feedback we got so basically we just took that feedback in listen to our customers and um you know relaunched the product okay got it so 300 customers 250 a year it's about 21 bucks a month so that means you're doing kind of about six thousand seven thousand bucks a month now today on the new products is that right yeah and go back go back a year prior to that it would have been nothing right because you relaunched it it would have been yeah nothing we we spent we spent about spent about eight eight or nine months just going through and you know working um working through some challenges i mean as you can imagine when um you know when you're when you're working with a product like this one of the challenges you have is being able to constantly get results from the web without getting um you know 503 responses and you know things like that so we had to work through that um we were able to figure that part out and then we had to kind of refine some different things you know it's interesting we thought one of the one of the features that would be great was to be able to drop a pin on a map and search you know within uh you know distance vector from that pin uh we thought it was awesome we spent a lot of time on it we thought people would love it turns out it was the one feature everyone hated so um we went through and refactored that and a couple other things and um yeah that's that's where we're at today to get your first 300 customers here i mean what was the number one growth channel you used yeah i would say the number one growth channel would be uh social media and more specifically twitter and facebook okay um you know if you look at if you look at facebook right now the um the the cost per click cost per impression is really low um so it gives you a wide reach i say and it gives you the most bang for your buck so what would you i mean make that real for us i mean so like what what would you spend on facebook to get a click would you say you know it we'd what we found is we'd we'd spend maybe 15 20 hours per post um we accelerated our posts in um you know based on the impressions that we would receive so posts that received a lot of impressions we would just accelerate you know small increments 15 you know 15 20 and we'd find that we'd get five six seven thousand uh impressions okay and how many clicks um so i'm sorry i said impressions clicks that should be clicks and then you get 7 000 clicks from a 15 spend yeah that's not uncommon that's not uncommon on facebook you know it's a really i mean that's i look i run a lot of facebook ads i mean you can tweak with quality of clicks which is a big deal depending on where you're targeting but 7 000 clicks for 15 bucks i i don't know that i've seen that before assuming they're quality clicks yeah you know they're not all quality because i was getting into the conversion data the conversion data is sometimes low um you know we might get from from those 7 000 clicks um you know we might get you know 10 15 people who would sign up so it's really low and then we look at that and even with that amount we might get you know five or six users who are you know using it actively um and how many new customers maybe like one or two you know we don't always get customers um based on that if we had if we could spend 15 20 to get a customer um we'd be we'd be making a whole lot more right now we'd have a lot more customers well so going back to my original question though so what's what's been the number one customer requisition channel yeah i mean i still think social media you know twitter twitter's another one we um we did twitter for business um you know we found that that works well um and then a lot of it's just networking but adrian sorry can you can you break this so i i wanted to break down facebook to try and tie the loop back here but you said ultimately ultimately it didn't drive customers so i'm i want you to do the same with twitter because i'm sure there's some learnings here are you actually getting customers from twitter yeah we're getting some customers um you know like i said the acquisition has been slow we've only had you know 300 since since july um so that's not a really it's not really a great deal um so you know like what we're seeing uh what we're seeing is we get a lot of people who will who will sign...