How Ripple Recruiting CEO Andrew Myers grew Ripple Recruiting to $230.2M revenue and 75 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is andrew meyers originally from denver he studied history and was private kappa at yale before dropping out his senior year to pursue ripple match he listens to clients runs sales and is obsessed with helping students and companies find the right match again helping students find their dream job andrew are you ready to take us to the top yeah excited for it all right so look you were on about a year ago actually it was more than a year ago it was january 19 2017 at that point you had about 15 customers you were you were just starting to make money 4 500 bucks a month in revenue 300 rpoo again you had a team of about 12 people i think up there in new york city you've since rebranded tell us what the company does and give us an update on where you're at today yeah absolutely so i think when we first talked it was in the really early days for us uh you know right out of our dorm room at yale and uh yeah it's been a you know pretty incredible journey since then you know i think that revenue total uh has has definitely surged and uh yeah you know our whole mission as a company is connecting employers with the right candidates and candidates with the right job and i think the way that recruiting has traditionally worked is employers pick you know a set sample of two three four campuses and they'll you know post up there you know do an information session whatever it might be the challenge is that you're recruiting from a really really limited subset of students and you're not actively able to win over the best candidates on each campus which is terrible for diversity terrible for winning over the very best candidates possible and so what we do is basically automate that entire recruiting process and make it possible as an employer to sort of pinpoint and find those best candidates regardless of where they went to school are you finding that you're hyper focused on essentially the hr recruiting space but specifically for students in the companies is giving you an advantage over larger market players like in indeed.com or isims or these other guys completely yeah i i think we think of ourselves as the most sort of candidate centric company possible and i think it's really only possible to do that when you're deeply in touch with the sort of anxieties and motivations that are going on in you know a 21 22 year old's mind and so that's a lot of where we channel our energy and kind of how we focus our candidate experience it reminds me of like a proctor and gamble you know their most valuable customers right out of college when parents stop paying for your toothpaste and then the brand and the student then picks a brand that ultimately they might use for life like tied or things like that so you're you're getting these customers early right when they enter the job market have you seen anyone do multiple jobs with you they do one right out of school then they leave then they come back and use you again or no completely so we haven't opened the process up as much for that second job just since it's you know two years in but the vision in the long run is to basically move candidates through every stage of that job process and so what's amazing to see as we kind of look at our customer success data and see the experiences the candidates are getting on the platform we have a really strong likelihood of being able to match those candidates in their next job and because we have an effective experience when they're first looking we sort of earn the right to collect more and more data as they go through that process which then makes our matches better and better as you think about that first career transition and kind of move farther out into a career and what's the revenue model i know when we first spoke again 18 months ago you were kind of still experimenting was this going to be like a percentage of first year salary thing or a sas model and do you charge the student or do you charge the company and you were still kind of figuring that out what's the revenue model today yeah i i vividly remember chatting about that on your show so we've transitioned to pretty much an entirely annual subscription model so about 80 of our revenue is driven through annual subscriptions and that's the company is paying yeah we'll always be free for students so the company pays and walk me through like what that average sale looks like are they buying a set number of placements and what's it what's it sound like yeah so basically what we sell is unlimited hiring across a set number of roles and uh from a sort of average contract perspective and we're looking at about an average contract size of 25 30k our packages typically start at about 20k for corporate customers so that's kind of how we do pricing and again that's unlimited hiring that's unlimited hiring for a given number of roles so those packages will you know go up into you know enormous kind of six-figure contracts depending on what it can a client's actually looking for but it kind of starts at a base level of twenty thousand dollars or so and and if you have multiple companies paying for the same kinds of roles how will you handle a competitive situation where two of your customers want the same student yeah we're somewhat selective about not bringing on employers that are direct competitors for each other and part of the pitch is that it's a little bit of a competitive advantage in that process um the way that we handle it on the candidate side in the short term is if a candidate is really far along in the process with a company that's directly competitive and looks like they're a fit there we won't match them with that other opportunity but it's a little bit of that blend and balance and just making sure that we're kind of hitting that hitting that balance right across the board and so is this kind of a human-powered back end one of your people is looking at this and saying ah don't they're already talking with the competitor don't automatically match them software with these new guys or is it really no it's all code driven so it's actually kind of incredible um you know when we integrate with a client's applicant tracking system we're able to see where candidates are moving in the platform that feeds directly back into our machine learning model and our matching model in general and so in the early days we definitely had a human being there just to make sure nothing was going haywire and occasionally occasionally you'd see like a crazy match or something like that but at this stage it's you know really pretty purely algorithmically driven and the human element really only comes in when we're trying to understand our employer's preferences and just making sure they're getting awesome awesome customer service and what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers paying you yeah so we have about 75 paying customers so our models changed a lot towards focusing on these larger annual contracts and just also i think the focus is really really excellent brand so we really want to be the place where the best jobs are the best candidates are and that's really how we've kind of centralized our focus yep and then look you said you know average starting is around that 20 grand per year if you've got 75 customers i mean can i kind of back in and assume you're doing about 100 grand 120 grand a month right now yeah that's a pretty pretty accurate package that's really healthy grow up a growth up from 4 500 about 18 months ago right yeah it's been uh it's been pretty crazy to watch that surge so it's been uh it's been great when did you realize that that was the model i mean was there a clear moment where you said ah that test just worked we've got to triple down there i think what we realized is that we wanted to align value as much as possible and so if you have a placement fee you know attached to a candidate which a lot of competitors in the space have traditionally and recruiting agencies do you're kind of incentivizing at the end of the cycle oh if i can find this candidate you know from a cheaper source i won't do that and so originally it actually came from wanting to be as aligned with our candidates as possible but what we realized is having that kind of push forward allowed recruiters that were loving it to just use it over and over and over again and i think early on in a startup the focus has really been maximizing value rather than maximizing revenue and so it was consistent with that but then it also ended up clicking from a revenue perspective and you'd raised i think previously about 700 grand last time we spoke i think you have some some news here so what have you raised to date yeah so uh you know just announcing another three million dollar funding round to our first institutional capital uh to date um and uh yeah bullpen and accomplice uh led the round uh together so really excited to have uh duncan davidson and tj mahoney on board and uh providing some great support there as well i assume with those guys it was a priced equity round not a not a debt round yeah it was a price equity rate yeah yeah that's great and did you uh i mean what was that model like did you go specifically like friends you knew or did you launch a big kind of competitive process how many months did it take yeah so it was a relatively smooth process uh this time around you know met tj relatively early on in the process i think kind of on our first trip and just really hit it off with him you know i think he's got a great track record as a founder and i think just really got how big we wanted to go in terms of vision and so he...