Waldo Labs Revenue (2022)

[00:00] What is going on YouTube? You know, we are just two weeks away from Founder500 in Austin, Texas on September first and second. There's over 500 B2B SaaS founders all coming together. You don't want to miss it. Ticket prices increase every three days. I have it on an automatic accelerator every three days, and we're almost sold out. You can see there's about nine left when you go to the event bright link, about nine left, and it's updating [00:23] real time. So check it out today. It's founderpath.com. Then in the upper left, you can hover over our product dropdown and click the event stream. I'll also put it in the description here of the YouTube video. I'd love to see you there. Hey folks, my guest today is Taylor Burgin. He fell into recruiting in 2014 and made fifty five hires in two years via his agency. Through that process, realized how broken and transactional recruiting is. We founded Waldo [00:46] Labs to bring empathy to the recruiting space by creating genuine matches and lower startups cost per hire. They're building a free light applicant tracking system for startups and sourcing automation platform to allow startups to automate their top of funnel hiring. Taylor, you ready to take us to the top? [01:01] >> Yeah. Let's do it. [01:02] Alright. Cool, man. So, hey, you know, most recruiters are taking like 30% of first year salaries. You went through that. You had the pain. How do you guys make money? What's the different model? [01:11] >> Yeah. I'm very familiar with that. So our model is we just charge 7 k a month, take on your top three priority roles at a time. That's it. No additional costs. No hidden fees. Nothing. [01:23] Interesting. Okay. So so can you maybe give us an example? If I use your tool to hire a $100,000 junior engineer, what will you make? [01:31] >> Yeah. So whether you hire a $100,000 junior engineer or a $180,000 engineering manager, you pay us the same. Just flat fee 7 k a month no matter who you're hiring. [01:45] Okay. So if I hire the person today and they I guess I don't understand. I'm paying you 7 k per month for every month they're active? [01:52] >> No. Just for the duration of our contract. So if you sign up with us, we do month to month contracts with our startups. Their average time to hire is twenty two days, but they'll typically have a handful of roles they want us to fill. So you just pay a 7 k a month. We take on your top three priority roles. And just for the duration of your contract with us so if you're with us for three [02:13] >> months, that would be 21 k total. [02:16] And so what's, like, a startup that works with that might pay 21 k for three months? How many hires are they expect you to help with for that $21,000? [02:23] >> Yeah. So typically three a month. So nine total. [02:27] Okay. Interesting. [02:29] How do you create, like, alignment between you and the startup? Because if you find those nine candidates in the first month, they obviously wanna move quick. They wanna do that, but you make way less money because then they can just stop at the end of the first month. So how do you create alignment here? [02:41] >> Yeah. So a few ways. One is we'll take on your top three priority roles at a time. And so say it's month one, you have three priority roles. That's just seven k for that month. If you wanted to add additional roles, that's just two ks per role. But we're very flexible, so typically as we fill a role, then a startup will backfill that with another priority role that's coming up for them. So we work very flexibly [03:06] >> just in terms of how our startups and our clients want to hire. If they have higher volume, say you're hiring a senior full stack engineer, but you have five headcount, that would all fall under one role. Mhmm. So we can lock those all out for you and lower your cost per hire significantly. [03:23] Okay. And what about the flip side? What if you don't find three great candidates in in the first thirty days? Is the is the is the group still on the hook for seven k? [03:30] >> Yeah. So we're we don't guarantee hires. We're a top of funnel solution. So we're not as involved in terms of like the interview process and closing, but we've made a hire for every client we've worked with. 40% of the first candidate that we submit to clients is hired. And then 52% of our overall hires have actually been diversity candidates as well. [03:54] Okay. Interesting. And so when you say 40% of candidates you've submitted are hired, we don't know if you've done three candidates or 3,000 candidates. Can you give me maybe sort of a range this year, how many candidates have you placed? [04:06] >> Yeah. No. 40% of the first candidate we submit to a client is hired. So we get very calibrated upfront. So year to date, we've made over 50 hires for, at least 15 to 20 different startups, including current clients. [04:22] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [04:46] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days, and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [05:10] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is [05:32] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're [05:58] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at, and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if [06:20] you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the [06:46] interview. That's amazing. So if you have a 40% higher rate and it's 50% or 50 or higher, you've submitted about a 100 leads to those 15 to 20 startups so far this year, I wish they've hired 50 of them. [06:58] >> Yeah. So a good example is one of our clients, Alfred, had a senior SRE role. It only took us submitting three qualified candidates for them to get a hire, where the industry average is closer to 20 candidates. [07:12] Okay. Okay. Got it. Cool. Okay. This makes a ton of sense. We got a bit of your backstory with the agency headache you went through, but also kudos. I mean, assuming that you were making money here and not using VC dollars or something, a 52 person agency had to have been doing over a million bucks of annual revenue. Tell me more about that agency. [07:29] >> Yeah. We were doing very well. It wasn't my agency. I was actually one of the first hires there. So I was hire number three, I believe. So, I did over $1,000,000 in in revenue for them in those two years. But that's where I saw that recruiting is broken because I hired the head of mobile for a series a startup, and they owed us a $60,000 fee. And at that point, it just didn't feel good to have [07:55] >> a series a startup on the hook for that much. And I, like, thought at that time, I'm like, there has to be a better way to lower startups cost per hire. And Waldo Labs was born out of that. [08:06] Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. Now you mentioned 10 to 15 startups you've worked with so far this year. How many are still active today? [08:13] >> We have about 12 clients that we maintain regularly. It depends 12 to 15. I mean, obviously, August is a bit slower when it comes to hiring, but we've really wanted to focus on delivering the volume that startups expect, but really sticking to that quality. And so we maintain really what we feel is a number of clients that we can deliver above and beyond for. And then with our platform and how we've built out and launched version [08:43] >> two now, where everything is becoming much more standalone, we're going to look to maintain around 20 clients a month. [08:49] Okay. Well, 12 clients at $7k a pop each. Mean, that puts you just north of a million dollar run rate or $84,000 a month. Is that about right? [08:55] >> Yeah. [08:56] And is it SaaS revenue? I mean, you don't owe a big chunk of that revenue out to somebody. Right? It's pretty high margin revenue? [09:02] >> Yep. High margin revenue. And then, yeah, everything is coming through SaaS, so all SaaS revenue as well. [09:07] That's amazing. When did you launch the business? What year? [09:10] >> July 2021. [09:12] Oh, wow. Okay. So fairly new and bootstrapped. Have you raised? [09:15] >> No. Totally bootstrapped. Yeah. Just over a year old. [09:18] I love that. Any plans to raise or you wanna stay bootstrapped? [09:22] >> We're talking about it just to accelerate development, hire some more software engineers. But, ideally, we wanna stay bootstrapped as long as possible. [09:30] Yeah. What is the team size today? How many people? [09:33] >> There's four of us. [09:34] Four of you guys. And how many are engineers? [09:37] >> One. The CTO is co founder, and then we have two offshore engineers as well that he's managing. [09:42] Oh, tell me about that. There's a lot of early stage software founders listening right now going, I don't wanna hire full time engineers, but I need more engineering help. How'd you find the two offshore developers? [09:49] >> So he was familiar with the firm. They're located in India because he's worked with them with other startups he consulted with in the past. So we knew that that they're pretty good. I would say they're more mid level engineering talent than senior. Okay. But they've really helped accelerate a lot of the development and feature building for version two of our platform. [10:10] And what is that dev shop? What what's the name of their site? [10:12] >> They're called Konstant Info, with a K. [10:15] ConstantInfo. Interesting. And you've liked them? [10:18] >> Yeah. They've been pretty good. Like, one experience has been better than than the other, but he has done a great job, our co founder, CTO of coaching up the engineers to get them kind of where we want them to be. [10:31] That's awesome. That's awesome. Now educate the founders listening right now. Right? Let's say that they don't have 7 k a month yet. Like, they're early, early, early stage. Right? Like, less than $1,000,000 in revenue, less than 500 k in revenue. Well, I mean, what are some of the tactics you're using to find high quality clients quickly? [10:47] >> High quality clients or candidates? [10:49] Sorry, sorry. Candidates for your clients. [10:51] >> Yeah, no worries. No worries. Really what I always recommend is getting very dialed in, in terms of the hard requirements of the role you're hiring for. So for example, if you're hiring a senior software engineer, just say your tech stack is React and Python three, but you know that you don't have the bandwidth to really bring on someone that has to ramp up, it just helps with targeting, looking at candidates coming from similar sized startups, early [11:20] >> startups so you know that they can work autonomously, that they're used to kind of like managed chaos and can take that ownership versus just doing more of the spray and pray approach, just kind of casting a wide net because you'll oftentimes just find yourself spinning your wheels a bit, having a lot of conversations without really converting. [11:41] Mhmm. Okay. That makes good sense. And so there's you, there's your co founder, just coding. What do the other two folks do? [11:47] >> One helps with client onboarding and client management. They're like another senior to lead tech recruiter. And then the other is actually my first hire who I found back in September 2021. And and she's been amazing. She literally is a jack of all trades. She helps manage a lot of the candidate matching we do in the Waldo Labs platform. She helps with the day to day, with client updates, like you name it. [12:20] That's very cool. Now be honest with me here. How much of this is sort of a human powered back end right now? You want it to be more software, but how much of it is human powered at the moment? [12:28] >> Yeah. Well, that that's the funny thing about AI. Everyone says they're they're doing AI, and typically, there's just a bunch of people behind the scenes. [12:35] Yeah. [12:36] >> So we we have the matching is still manual. Like, we do that on our end when a positive response comes in, we match them in the platform. But from there, like, all the email outreach, everything in the platform after that is all automated. We're building out a Greenhouse integration right now, that will all be even further automated. But once the candidate hits the platform and you get that real time notification that you actually have a positive [13:03] >> response for your role, It's all automated from there and the candidate just shows up on your calendar. [13:09] Mhmm. That makes tons of sense. Now talk to me about growth rate. If you're doing about $84,000 a month today in revenue, where were you last August? [13:15] >> Last August, we were maintaining about five clients. [13:19] Okay. So you're like $50,000, $60,000 a month in revenue then. [13:21] >> Oh, no. No. Sorry. [13:22] 35,000 a month. [13:23] >> Yes. Yep. [13:24] Yeah. So good growth. Okay. Now back to my original question. So how are you guys finding new clients? [13:30] >> Referrals. [13:31] Ah, interesting. [13:33] >> It's it's wild. Like, honestly, when I started Waldo Labs, I was not trying to build a business. I was just doing it contracting on my own. I had two clients who referred me another client, who then referred me another client, and it's just been this amazing referral engine. We've been super fortunate. And then we do some cold outreach for biz dev, but predominantly all all through referrals, through, like, VC connections, you name it. [14:02] And, Taylor, you've I mean, you know, I don't wanna dig too deep in your financials or put you on the spot, but four people in this kind of revenue, you've gotta be very profitable. [14:10] >> Yeah. We're we're we're doing well. We're putting everything really back into the business. We're trying to keep, like, what we're actually paying ourselves low and then really put all of the revenue into development and [14:24] What does that mean, Like, let's say the four of you guys, I'm making this up, pay yourselves $5k a pop. That's $20k a month in expenses. Those two contractors in India, maybe that's another $10k. Right? So it's $30k in total expenses, but you're making 84,000 top line. What do do with the other $50,000 a month? [14:37] >> So the other 50, we keep in the bank. We also have, like, some some third party tools and solutions that we invest in. But, it's about about 40 k a month that we have in in, like, overall [14:52] It's incredible, man. What a great story. I mean, this is like such an opposite of like these ATS tracking systems I interview where the founders have raised like $20,000,000 that are like with $2,000,000 of revenue at, you know, a 300,000,000 valuation. Like, you're doing it the right way. [15:08] >> We're trying. Well, something I've seen that's really interesting is all these agencies and recruiting firms, they wanna hire, like, a ton of head count. And I I don't really get it because they wanna hire all these sourcers and and individuals to do it manually. And then, like, your overhead goes through the roof, whereas, like, so much of this can be automated and just made more efficient with technology. [15:31] Yeah. Yeah. No. You you nailed it. You nailed it. Taylor, we're rooting for you. In the meantime, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? [15:39] >> My favorite business book has to be The Lean Startup. I found it in, I think, junior year of college and just really resonated with me. [15:47] That's a good one. Number two, is there a CEO you're currently following or studying? [15:53] >> That's a good question. Off the top of my head, I would say Dan Price. [15:58] Dan. Yep. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Waldo? [16:02] >> My favorite online tool has to be Trello, and Notion. Actually, probably Notion, if I hadn't. Yeah. We use that internally, and it's done wonders for organization. [16:15] Number four. How many hours of sleep do get every night? [16:18] >> Last night, I got five. So between five and seven, typically. [16:23] Okay. Just depends. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? [16:27] >> I am in a relationship, not married. [16:31] Okay. No. That's that's fair. And how old are you? 30. 30. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [16:39] >> To try everything. Any ideas, like, any concepts, just try it. [16:44] Guys, he hated his recruiting fees. This is his last startup. He launched heywaldo.io in 2021, broke $35,000 a month about a year ago, now doing double that $84,000 a month helping 12 clients, startups, hire candidates. He's given them a 100 candidate leads of which they've hired about 50 of them, almost north of a 40% acceptance rate there. They're onto something special and they're doing this the right way, very profitable, $40,000 a month to the bottom line, [17:06] Just four people on the team as he scales in a smart way. Totally bootstrapped. Taylor, thanks for taking us to the top. [17:11] >> You got it. Thanks, Nathan. Have a good one. [17:15] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on three hungry buyers. They try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM [17:40] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded Founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. Make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big fundraise, [18:03] a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up [18:24] for that at nathanlatka.com slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. [18:43] We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.