How The Muse CEO Kathryn Minshew grew The Muse to $10.9M revenue and 600 customers in 2024.

good morning everybody my guest this morning is Kathryn Minshew she is the CEO and founder of the muse dot-com a career platform used by over 50 million folks to find a job learn professional skills or advance in their careers and by hundreds of companies looking to grow their employer brand and to hire now Katherine is a Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review contributor and she's spoken at MIT and Harvard along with the Today Show and CNN she's been named the smart CEOs future 50 innings 35 under 35 a Duke alum Katherine worked in Rwanda with the Clinton Health Access Initiative before founding the muse and was previously at McKinsey & Company Katherine are you ready to take us to the top thank you for making the time so tell us first for those folks that are not familiar what is the muse and specifically what's your revenue model how do you generate money yeah so the muse was founded to be the most trusted and beloved place for people to navigate their career what does that mean it means to be function essentially like a marketplace we have over 50 million people who use the site every year to find a job get to that next step talk to a career coach get advice learn a skill anything that's related to taking charge of your career and sort of living the life that you want and then on the other side we have over 600 companies from Facebook Dropbox slack to HBO goldman sachs marriott businesses large and small and we help them with hiring an employer branding so the way I like to think about it is you know the sort of old way of doing things was a company could just put up a job description and expect that some of the most talented people in the world we're gonna line right up to come in that's no longer the case if you want really great people you've got to compete for them because everybody else wants them to and so we help these companies figure out first of all what is the story what is it that they have to offer great candidates how do they survey their top people and understand what are the core elements of their employer brand their value prop to employees then how do you tell that story through photo and video through amuse profile we have a lot of different ways companies can do that especially kind of you've gotten these great stories from employees sharing those to a broader audience and then finally having to distribute that so how do you make sure that anywhere a company's trying to hire they have the ability to reach those candidates and to get more context and assets in front of those people to help them decide whether working at Goldman Sachs or New York life or Facebook is the right place so should we think of you more like a LinkedIn recruiter or like a media brand that makes revenue from impressions so it's a I don't know if you've heard the sort of word going around New York Tech these days but it's a sass enabled marketplace that's probably close we do compete fairly directly at times with LinkedIn with indeed with Glassdoor but interestingly we do also in some ways work well with them like we've found a lot of companies that will use their news assets and the reviews platform and embed it or link it to some of these other platforms and it makes the entire kind of some work better than the individual parts and so for those that are not familiar with a sass enabled marketplace right help us understand and give examples in specific in your business right what part is the marketplace and what part is the sass component yeah so most companies sign up for an annual subscription to the muse and that can be anything from you know four to five figures for an SMB or a small mid market company all the way up to six figures for a major fortune 1000 makes the average Kathryn that's a good question so right now the average is between twenty and thirty K okay but the the enterprise number of enterprise deals is rising quite a bit more quickly than our mid-market business so I think you will continue to see that go up we're also we look at sort of average by category um in that case you have associate very different things based on the employee account do you mean like a financial sector category versus a no because we work with businesses of all sizes within a specific industry more like the the employee count of a company our legacy mid-market or enterprise so when your satirising it says it's not by industry it's by team size industry has other effects on the site but the biggest one in terms of contract size is simply how large is your company how big are your recruiting needs somebody that has 50,000 employees it's going to be radically different than somebody with 500 employees that's crazy that everywhere in between so back to your question about a SAS enabled marketplace essentially we have these businesses of various sizes that subscribe to the muse it's an annual subscription and through that they get a range of different tools they have the ability to literally have a profile on the muse site and hire from our community but also we give them a number of tools edible sort of widgets for lack of a better word I need a better word for that and measurement and analytics dashboards that allow them to understand how they're doing across different pieces of their recruiting funnel and optimize not just the recruiting they're doing on the muse which is the marketplace component but on their own career site through their own social channels etc so the marketplace is literally on the news com where companies can post job listings and profiles and we have again this sort of audience of millions that might apply directly but for us we realized that we were essentially wanted to build some of these products that we started out focusing on their existence within the marketplace and take those to a much yeah to a much broader audience and actually I'll give you one example quickly we have a business we're working with that has I want to say they have between 50,000 and 150,000 employees I should know exactly but who are we talking about can you share no I'd rather that's okay some of our larger clients are sensitive if we don't get there approval you know to you know talk about them in the press I can also be more candid if I if I haven't identified the client they are recruiting for really sought-after talent they need to build up data science engineering of course a wide variety of sort of technical and product related positions they're having trouble competing with some of these newer and more digitally savvy companies and so not only are they recruiting via the muse and hiring people through our channels but they have a pre-existing social media presence of tens of thousands they have a talent community but they're not doing a lot with but has I think something north of a hundred thousand members so how do we not only help them recruit through the Mutis because we've got a great population a lot of women a lot of Millennials a lot of digital natives but how do we also then help them take those lessons and apply it to these existing channels but they may have built up previously as a fortune 1000 company but they're not optimizing and and officiating from really effective and so are these ways any marketplace right everyone talks about chicken-and-egg right and all the analogies for you specifically did you did you get the traffic you know the fifty million people coming first with content or did you launch as kind of a platform that's really sexy company profiles and then say oh my gosh we have to figure out to get traffic here we started with the individual users the people although in this sort of span of the company's history they were both started favored early so when the amuse when the muezzin issue a launch to 2011 sort of late 2011 September we just had career related content tools and resources for individuals and we didn't roll out our first company profile until we had a hundred thousand people a month using the site and you make not making any money at that point B or is it ad driven no no no we've never had on the site okay I think banner advertising has no place your guys's site is too beautiful to be destroyed by this vomit it's so let me ask you the question though right so you you went several years then before you introduced this revenue model how did you support yourself where'd you get the cash from yeah so we actually had a hundred thousand users a month in about six months okay so it was not all that much time the early cash came from my savings account yeah so when I started the business my co-founder and I kind of looked at our bank account so we said alright based on expenses and things we need to make you know set aside for the business this is how long we can last and we got really close to the end was that when catherine was at scamming we was at a scary and actually scary position for you or had you dearest it was terrifying can you quantify it like how much did you have in savings and how much did you put in like I mean were you literally at the brink well so when I left McKinsey I had twenty five thousand dollars savings and I was thinking about possibly starting a business but I didn't have an idea I was in love with yet and so I got this offer to move to Rwanda and work for the Clinton Health Access Initiative on vaccine introduction and that was essentially a net neutral offer so what they said was we'll give you the flexibility of only working for us for six months and we will give you this incredible incredible experience but they said as a result we will pay all of your expenses fly you there housing food etc but we're not going to pay you a proper salary above and beyond that...