How Waldo Labs CEO Taylor Berghane grew to $1M revenue and 12 customers in 2022.

what is going on youtube you know we are just two weeks away from founder 500 in austin texas on september 1st and 2nd there's over 500 b2b sas founders all coming together you don't want to miss it ticket prices increase every three days i have it on 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 real time so check it out today it's founderpath.com and then in the upper left you can hover over our product drop down and click the event stream i'll also put 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 55 hires in two years via his agency through that process he realized how broken and transactional recruiting is so we founded waldo labs to bring empathy to the recruiting space by creating genuine matches and lower startups cost per hire they've they're building a free light applicant tracking system for startups and sourcing automation platform to allow startups to automate their top funnel hiring taylor are you ready to take to the top yeah let's do it all right 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 yeah um very familiar with that so our model is we just charge 7k a month take on your top three priority rolls at a time um that's it no additional costs no hidden fees nothing interesting okay so so can you maybe give us an example if i use your tool to hire a hundred thousand dollar junior engineer what will you make yeah so whether you hire a hundred thousand dollar junior engineer or a hundred and eighty thousand dollar engineering manager um you pay us the same just flat fee 7k a month no matter who you're hiring okay so if i hire the person today and they i guess i don't understand i'm paying you 7k per month for every month they're active no just for the duration of our contract so if you sign up with us we do month-to-month contracts with our startups um their average time to hire is 22 days but they'll typically have a handful of roles they want us to fill um so you just pay a 7k a month we take on your top three priority rolls and just for the duration of your contract with us so if you're with us for three months that would be 21k total and so what's like a startup that works with it might pay you 21k for three months how many hires are they expecting you to help with for that 21 000 bucks yes so typically three a month so nine total okay interesting um how do you create like alignment between you and the startup because if you find those nine candidates in the first month they obviously want to move quick they want to 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 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 7k for that month if you wanted to add additional roles that's just 2k per roll 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 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 head count that would all fall under one roll so we can lock those all out for you and lower your cost per hire significantly okay what about the flip side what if you don't find three great candidates in in the first 30 days is the is the group still on the hook for 7k yeah so 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 um but we've made a hire for every client we've worked with um 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 okay interesting and so when you say 40 of candidates you've submitted are hired um like we don't know if you've done three candidates or three thousand candidates can you give me maybe sort of a range this year how many candidates have you placed 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 um at least 15 to 20 different startups including current clients 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to 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 not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to 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 going out right now and you're raising your seed round well 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 data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if 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 forward slash products forward slash evaluations 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 all right let's jump back into the interview that's amazing so if you have a 40 higher rate and it's 50 or 50 are higher you've submitted about 100 leads to those 15 to 20 startups so far this year which they've hired 50 50 of them 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 higher um where the industry average is closer to 20 candidates okay okay got it cool okay this makes a ton of sense we got a bit of your back story with the agency like headache you went through but also kudos i mean assuming that you were making money here and not you know you know 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 yeah we were doing very well um it wasn't my agency i was actually one of the first um hires there so i was hired number three i believe um so yeah i did over a million dollars in in revenue for them in those two years um 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 a series a startup on the hook for that much and i like that at that time i'm like there has to be a better way to lower startups cost per higher and waldo labs was born out of that yeah that makes a ton of sense now you mentioned 10 to 15 stars you've worked with so far this year how many are still active today 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 started to expect but um really like sticking to that quality and so we maintain um really like 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 two now where everything is becoming much more stand-alone we're gonna look to maintain around 20 clients a month okay well 12 clients is seven grand at pop beach i mean that puts you just north of a million dollar run rate or 84 000 bucks a month is that about right yeah and is it sas rep i mean you don't owe a big chunk of that revenue out to somebody right it's pretty high margin revenue yep high margin revenue um and then yeah everything is coming through sas so all sas revenue as well it's amazing um when did you launch the business what year uh july of 2021 oh wow okay so fairly new and bootstrapped or be raised no totally bootstrapped yeah just over a year old i love that any plans to raise or you want to stay bootstrapped um we're talking about it just to accelerate development um hire some more software engineers but ideally we want to stay bootstrapped as long as possible yeah what is the team size today how many people uh there's four of us four of you guys and how many are engineers uh one the cto and co-founder and then we have two offshore engineers as well that he's managing oh tell me about that there's a lot of early stage software founders listening right now going i don't want to hire full-time engineers but i need more engineering help how did you find the two offshore developers so he was familiar with the firm they're located in india um because he's worked with them with other startups he consulted with in the past um so we knew that that they're pretty good i would say they're more mid-level engineering talent than senior um but they've really helped accelerate a lot of the development and feature building for version two of our platform and what is that dev shop what's the name of their site uh they're called constant info with a constant info interesting and you've liked them yeah they've been pretty good um like one experience has been better than than the other but um 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 that's awesome that's awesome now educate the founders listening right now right let's say that they don't have 7k a month yet like they're early early early stage right like less than a million bucks in revenue less than 500 can revenue i mean what are some of the tactics you're using to find high quality clients quickly high quality clients or sorry sorry candidates for your clients yeah no worries no worries um really what 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 3 but you know that you don't have the bandwidth to really bring on someone that has to ramp up um it just helps with targeting looking at candidates coming from similar size startups early start up 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 prayer approach just kind of casting a wide net because you'll often times just find yourself spinning your wheels a bit having a lot of conversations without really converting okay that makes good sense and so there's you there's your co-founder just coding what are the other two folks do um one helps with client onboarding and client management um they're like another senior to lead tech recruiter um and then the other is actually my first hire who i found um back in september of 2021 um 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 uh waldo labs platform she helps with the day-to-day um with client updates like you name it 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 yeah well 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 yeah so we we have um 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 so 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 response for your role it's all automated from there and the candidate just shows up on your calendar that makes tons of sense now talk to me about growth rate if you're doing about 84 000 bucks a month today in revenue where were you last august last august we were maintaining about five clients okay so you're like 50 60 000 a month in revenue then oh no sorry 35 000 a month yes yeah yeah so good growth okay now back to my original question so how are you guys finding new clients referrals ah interesting 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 um i had two clients who referred me another client who then referred me another client and it's just been this amazing like referral engine we've been super fortunate um and then we do some like cold outreach for for biz dev but predominantly all all through referrals through like vc connections you name it and taylor you've i mean you know i don't want to dig 2d in your financials or put you on the spot but for people on this kind of revenue you've got to be very profitable yeah we're we're doing well um we're putting everything really back into the business we're trying to keep like what we're actually paying ourselves low um and then really put all the um revenue into development and what does that mean though like let's say the four of you guys i'm making this up pay yourselves five grand a pop that's 20 grand a month an expense plus two contractors in india maybe that's another 10 grand right so it's 30k and total expenses but you're making 84 000 top line what do you do with the other 50 000 a month so the other 50 we keep in the bank um we also have like some some third-party tools and solutions that we invest in but um yeah it's about about 40k a month that we have in in like overall incredible man what what a great story this i mean this is like such the opposite of like these ats tracking systems i i i interview where the founders have raised like 20 million bucks that are like with two dollars of revenue at you know 300 million valuation like you're doing it the right way we're trying well something i've seen that's really interesting is all these agencies and recruiting firms they want to hire like a ton of head count and i i don't really get it because they want to hire all these sourcers and and individuals to do it manually and then like your overhead goes through the roof um whereas like so much of this can be automated and just made more efficient with technology yeah yeah no you nailed it you know that listen 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 my favorite business book has to be the lean startup i found it in uh i think junior year of college and just really resonated with me that's a good one number two is there a ceo you're currently following or studying um that's a good question off the top of my head i would say dan price danbury up number three what's your favorite online tool for building waldo my favorite online tool has to be trello um and notion actually probably notion if i had one yeah we use that mill and it's done wonders for organization number four how many hours i sleep to get every night uh last night i got five so between five and seven typically okay just depends and what's your situation married single kids uh i am in a relationship not married okay no that's that's fair and how old are you uh thirty thirty last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 to try everything any ideas like any concepts just try it guys he hated his recruiting fees as his last startup he launched hey wobble.io in 2021 broke 35 000 a month about a year ago now doing double that 84 thousand dollars a month helping 12 clients startups hire candidates he's given them 100 candidate leads of which they've hired about 50 of them almost north of a 40 acceptance rate there they're on something special and they're doing this the right way very profitable 40 000 bucks a month to the bottom line just four people on the team as he scales in a smart way totally bootstrapped taylor thanks for taking us to the top you got it thanks nathan have a good one one more thing before 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