How Waldo Labs CEO Taylor Berghane grew Waldo Labs 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...