How Thalamus CEO Julia van Broek grew Thalamus to $3.1M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is jason reminic he's an md mba ms and is the ceo and founder of thalamus the premier cloud-based recruitment platform for hospitals and physicians he began his residency interview season stuck in new york city during hurricane sandy if you guys remember that and after three cancer interviews and spending weeks trying to reschedule he and his co-founder brainstormed a better way to manage medical residency recruitment since then it's what he's been committed to innovating around physician recruitment to ensure the right doctor is recruited to the right hospitals to treat the right patients jason you ready to take us to the top absolutely good to be here thanks for having me you bet so so what's the model here so does this act like a recruiting agency where you take a percent to first year salary or is it like a sas platform it's a sas platform so we manage a very sort of byzantine very complicated frustrating process of students applying from graduating medical school to their residency training positions around the country and previously this is all done manually by email and phone call and our platform works and that hospitals use it either single programs being internal medicine pediatrics obgyn et cetera or entire hospital enterprises it integrates with the common application system central clearinghouse everyone's using to accept applications they pull their data in they invite the candidates to interview applicant gets an email to create a profile and then they're brought to a calendar within seconds to schedule their interviews in real time kind of like open table but instead of booking a restaurant they're booking a residency interview back on the hospital side it's a process-specific appian tracking system it allows them to manage the process score candidates build face sheets and eventually decide what they're going to match the hospital the hospitals pay yeah and so what are what's the average hospital paying you right now per month to use the technology so it's an annual license it ranges uh depending on the size of the program um anywhere from uh a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars hospital system-wise that can be tens of thousands up to hundreds of thousands depending on uh what hospital and how large it is well just simplify that for me right if you take your average hospital what are they paying you per year uh probably around 50 75 000 okay and how many people are they placing for 50 000 bucks a year probably they're interviewing probably depending on the size about 40 or 50 000 people uh and from that they'll place around between thousand and two thousand okay got it so it's almost if they're paying 50k a year it's almost a dollar per interview and then they're placing a thousand to two thousand of those interviews you wanna do the math that way sure yeah well yeah i mean because that's your key value metric right is number of interviews done right or something like that yeah we're actually trying to decrease the number of interviews given that this this kind of niche market but that's an interesting discussion in itself that's a ton of people by the way i mean 40 to 50 000 interviews by one hospital in a year that's the challenge and so hospitals may have 150 programs in various specialties of various sizes and right now over the last five years five to ten years the number of applications a single candidate is sending out has increased by 5x it was around 15 when i applied in 2012. it's now jumped to 70. and so applicants are spending thousands of dollars to have their data sent to different hospitals and then hospitals will interview uh depending on the size of the program anywhere from fifty to a thousand candidates per program uh sometimes to fill as few as one to let's say ten spots and so we've done a lot of research that's showing that about depending on the specialty between 15 and 35 of interviews could be eliminated overnight and everyone could end up in the same place anyway and that's the amount of over-interviewing that's going on right now as well i see when did you launch the business what year uh 2012 uh 2013 uh i was just starting my my medical residency and started it back then very cool so your first customer signed up obviously and then how many customers are you serving out today we're surveying over 2 000 residency and fellowship programs across 200 over 200 hospital systems oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for 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hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview okay so 200 hospital systems got it so i mean can i take 200 hospitals times 50 grand a year you're doing like 10 million a year in revenue uh not not that much we're we're in the in the kind of the four to five range we're talking about this year still yeah that's still nice traction what was your first um which year was your first million dollar year do you remember the first million dollar a year was the first pandemic year um was that 2021 2020 2020 so it was uh the entire process shifted to virtual and we extended our platform to include a virtual interview a platform uh that it that not only builds the schedules for everyone and handles that volume of interview but also then creates all the video links builds the schedules and everyone can you can just interview and not have to move people in and out of breakout rooms we built our own video platform and uh that really accelerated the growth business so just to confirm if you're doing between four and five million revenue right now let's call it a run rate of 4.5 million you're doing something like 375 000 bucks a month in revenue yes right around there cool yeah and how many across all 2000 programs and all 200 hospitals how many total interviews were done over the past 12 months uh total hospitals that were done over the last 12 interviews interviews uh interviews we sent out about 200 000 invitations to interviews probably completed about 150 000 of those okay 150k interviews interesting um over 20 over 20 million minutes of video interviews as well okay got it i guess the reason i asked you said it earlier that someone paying you 50 000 bucks a year is doing 50 000 interviews but if you have 200 customers times 50 000 interviews right that should be a number of interviews and like 10 million interviews you just told me the last 12 months you did a total of 150 000 interviews it's a big difference no so the hospitals are um not all of the hospitals are necessarily using us for all of their interviews but that's how many people they're interviewing oh i see yeah i see i see so of the 40 to 50 000 that one hospital might do in a year how many might they use you for i'd say the largest hospital is just doing about 10 or 20 000 interviews with us i see i see why don't they use you for all of them it varies depending on size and just the number of people that they're interviewing overall so i mean but if you're if you're providing a lot of value then people are happy why wouldn't they want to get the whole system on you as fast as possible it's it's technology adoption and just changing practices that have existed from prior who are you replacing we are replacing emails and phone calls predominantly and some older software systems that don't integrate with the other other platforms interesting okay so again...