How Talkpush CEO Max Armbruster grew to $3.1M revenue and 30 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is max armbruster he's the founder and ceo of a company called talk push the leading messaging recruitment platform he's a serial entrepreneur and has sold his last three companies most recently a recruitment sas company he has 17 years of international experience in the u.s europe and asia and has held strategic roles at sap cnet networks and a.t kierney max are you ready to take us to the top absolutely to the top and beyond very good i love it all right talk push get us up to speed what do you guys do and how do you make money well we're a sas uh provider and uh what we have is a recruitment software which is using messaging and chatbots to interact with candidates um so imagine you know like a slack for a slack for recruitment we're we're changing the recruitment software experience in the same way that slack you know kind of changed uh communication between companies where we're injecting messaging between the candidates and the employer yeah now look a lot of candidates when they come to an employer and they want to go i mean anything they use recruiting wise is usually setting the first impression so automating that is not an easy thing and potentially scary slash dangerous i mean how do you manage that well um the first thing is you know today if you start from the starting point of today the way people apply for for jobs is you know they they go to a career website they send in a resume and then they don't hear back a lot of the time so what we've built is an experience which is real time and where instead of sending a resume what we're collecting from people is the data that the employers really want to know like you know who are you tell me about yourself and stuff like that and i bet if you asked any recruiter you know um what would you rather have you know a resume or would you rather be able to listen to five minutes of this candidate telling you about himself um i think most people would choose the latter option so that's audio are there audio files or like little voice recordings is that how it works yeah we started the company it was actually an ivr so it was all voice we would make phone calls and collect the voice for for candidates um and then two years ago when facebook opened its api for for chatbots we were one of the first recruitment chat bots to build on on the the facebook messenger platform and what's great about these messaging apps like facebook messenger whatsapp line messenger and all the other ones is that you don't just collect text you've got you've got text audio video whatever you want um so you can really you know you can get a real full picture for the candidate and listen to them and um you know um yeah what's your pricing models is success based or is a pure play flat rate sas model it's a pure sas model uh we we invoice i mean our our price points i know like you like numbers so our our revenue is about um uh we passed the 100k mark uh revenue-wise uh is that monthly uh just this month and uh and this is and we're recording this and what is it may 10th 28th that's yes yeah april april let's say april uh april 2018. yeah um and and our average selling price is between a thousand to three thousand you know it goes up to five six thousand a month okay uh so so we're very focused on the enterprise segment and how many customers right now um 30 plus okay 30 35 that's good well i mean you you've got i mean if you take 100 grand right divided by 30 your rpo is actually about 3 300 per month right that's right that's right and what are they paying for like what's the difference between a thousand bucks a month and 10 grand a month how do you how do you drive expansion revenue it's about volume uh so because we we create so much automation you know the problem is in a traditional sas you sell per seat and uh you know like a hundred dollars two hundred dollars per seat and we've experimented with those models a little bit but the reality is one recruiter who works on our software is able to do five ten times the volume that they usually were able to do so you know we would be able to sell seeds but it wouldn't be too many seeds so we're focused on the volume um and and so we look roughly at the number of candidates that are being interviewed by our platform when i say interviewed is a candidate that went through the whole loop of you know answering questions from the chatbot and telling about who they are and and so on and and so you know roughly uh we our our bots uh our bots our software interviews uh more than between one and three thousand candidates every day currently um over a million last year so so yeah so that's what they pay for they pay for that based on their volume and and we're focused on the really high volume employers and what's growth rate look like so you're at past 100 grand today take me back a year where were you at um i we were we were 40k uh so yeah more than double that's pretty good um and bootstrap drove you raised capital i i'd love to say uh it's all bootstrap but uh no no that was not the case we i i had to raise 1.5 million dollars why did you have to raise that money well uh because i'm not an engineer and uh i got a yeah i had to build something so i was the number one sales guy for a very long time and obviously that's a great skill to have when you're launching a business but um but i needed i needed a lot of a lot of help on engineering uh and it took me a long time to to actually build the team that we have today um it took me you know from the from the moment i started to which was one year uh like 2014 late 2014. um and and before that i had already you know sort of worked on a prototype and it took me two years from that time to finding my head of engineering it took me three years to find my head of customer success um and you know that's kind of a message i want to send out to all the entrepreneurs out there that you know recruitment is such a hard task and that um it's so critical and that you never know where you're you know the next messiah is going to come but you got to keep your your eyes and ears open because there's somebody out there who's going to come and really help your business get to the next level max there's a lot of people like you great business people great sales people but they get stuck at the beginning because exactly what you said they don't know how to hire or find or get to the right engineer and much less figure out how to pay that engineer because you haven't you know you're just starting so your first you said it took three years to get your head of engineering what were you selling before that did you have a product yeah we had a product um initially it was a prototype that uh we had built with you know i i initially hired some freelancers then i had one engineer two engineers we had some turnover and then you know two years in yeah i found um i found roma our head of engineering and you know it's been uh it's been pure bliss ever since that is a i have to tell you nobody likes to talk about it but that is typically what happens it's like a freelancer from top towel you spend five grand to build an mvp uh you close three customers they break the mvp then you have to go you know you go to your local college you hire two cheap interns who you know you think you can get by on you realize they're not good enough and then you know two years in you have more sales and you can afford an engineer and maybe raise some capital so true so true and and the miracle thing about this whole thing is that the guy found me you know even though i'm i'm supposed to be the expert in recruitment um the guy found me so how do you find you i think it was on angel.com there's a lot of great talent that's interesting angel.com very good and what's team size today um 35 people okay where and where's home where's home base well uh we're we're very distributed uh team so we've got four offices already uh one in manila one in delhi one in mexico one in san jose costa rica and then san francisco um so where we have the most head counts is in asia today um and our latin america office is growing rapidly as well so i mean home base for me is an airport lounge tell me about last few economics questions here before we wrap up with a famous five uh tell me about your churn churn uh negative revenue churn five ten percent so we're growing our our accounts and uh yeah i regret we lost one or two logos last year so you know when you say negative five percent revenue turn you mean it's net negative revenue churn and it's net negative is negative five percent i mean yeah there's double negative i don't know we're growing we're growing our install base um so revenue is growing five ten percent just keeping the existing with the existing customers okay and then what's what's revenue churn what revenue do you lose uh well uh i'm i'm giving you the uh the summit so okay so you might you might expand ten percent lose five percent so your net is positive five percent in terms of retention okay good that's right that's healthy and um and what are you spending to acquire these customers well uh we were you know for initially it was me doing sales uh and now we've got a team of six people uh six seven people that we've recently onboarded uh so so that's mostly the the model you know with enterprise when people are spending ten thirty thousand dollars a year they wanna be able to meet someone shake their hands and you know uh do the deal so so we're we're building our sales team and what's the fully weighted i mean would you say it's like you know you know 10 10 grand 30 grand 10 20 grand i i know you love numbers so i got them right here uh 11 000 um yeah 11 000 cac and an ltv of around 62 right now that's great how do you calculate that ltv oh uh i asked my finance manager uh yeah i mean we we did uh i don't have the maths in front of me but it's a yeah it's a discounted uh model and and you're about to say payback period before i cut you off yeah six months six okay that's that's really healthy um where are you spent this money that you're spending to acquire the customers the 11 grand is that mainly commissions and things on your sales team are you doing any direct paid stuff for leads on facebook google et cetera uh no paid stuff so far um it's you know i'm going against the model which is saying you build marketing before sales and in fact i'm going reverse i'm doing customer i build customer success team first then now i'm building the sales team and then when i've got that you know perfectly ironed out i'll work on building the marketing machine i like it hey it seems to be working for you last question glassdoor 1.2 billion is that overpriced no wow it's such a great asset i mean it's it's the one sort of marketplace that figured out how to get people to come back to it all the time so i think i think it's a wonderful asset um i'm a little bit paying that same price you think that's a fair price yeah yeah if i had 1.2 billion i don't know what i'd do with it but yeah i think maybe i'd do that i don't know i don't know what their revenue is do you know i don't no so i don't know i should consult a ceo on the consolidation of this uh of this job board industry is is a little bit scary for employers though because you know they really only have like a handful of people to choose from these days so um you know the employers they have to advertise either with you know google or indeed or um or linkedin and there's basically only three or four vendors now that cover the whole market so um it's a little bit scary for them and i guess it's it's a simplified sort of landscape um and and for now companies like glassdoor will continue to operate independently but they have less choice so it's a little scary all right last few questions here one word answers number one what's your favorite business book um favorite business book uh i love the the most human human by brian christian and um i'll give you another one which is on my desk right now high output management by andy grove number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now i love uh reading joelle gascoigne from buffer um and um i love uh you know someone who was on your show laura roder from meet edgar um two people i i follow yup they're good number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business beside your own yeah we we were addicted and still are to whatsapp uh for desktop it does everything that slack does but for free uh and it's got a small edge over slack which is you can send audio notes to your your people so you can send it all so much easier and and people you know when you when you send a voice people can feel personality they can feel empathy they can feel that you're they can feel things so uh so that's a huge advantage and we we love whatsapp for desktop number four how many hours of sleep to get every night um so i used to be on five and i think now i'm on six because the business is doing better that's good and what's your situation married single have kids um married with labrador no kiddos yet and how old are you 40 years old all right max last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew you know i wish i could tell me back then to learn how to code so i could i could get that the initial product out a little faster in the initial days of talkbush i had a feeling you were going to say that launched in 2014 again talk push helping people scale their recruitment make their hr teams more efficient by using their chat bots to get the first couple of conversations going with potential applicants they're now at 35 people remote team have 30 customers paying on average three grand you know or more per month to do about 100 grand right now per month in revenue that's up from 40 grand per month just 12 months ago net negative revenue turn of 5 super healthy they're paying about 11 grand to acquire a customer with a six month payback period great economics max good luck we're rooting for you and thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan