How Waldo Labs Hit $84K/Month in Revenue with 12 Clients and 4 People (Interview with CEO Taylor Burgin)

Nathan Latka

00:00What 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

00:23real 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

Guest Introduction: Taylor Berghane and Waldo Labs

Nathan Latka

00:46Labs 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?

Taylor Burgin

01:01>> Yeah. Let's do it.

Nathan Latka

01:02Alright. 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?

Business Model: Flat $7K/Month Recruiting Subscription

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

01:23Interesting. 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?

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

01:45Okay. 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?

Month-to-Month Contracts and Average Time to Hire

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

02:16And 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?

Taylor Burgin

02:23>> Yeah. So typically three a month. So nine total.

Nathan Latka

02:27Okay. Interesting.

02:29How 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?

Alignment Incentives and Flexible Role Pricing

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

03:23Okay. 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?

Candidate Quality: 40% First-Candidate Hire Rate

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

03:54Okay. 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?

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

04:22Oh, 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

04:46your 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

05:10get 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

05:32not 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

05:58going 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

06:20you 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

06:46interview. 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.

Client Example: Alfred Hired from 3 Candidates

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

07:12Okay. 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.

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

08:06Yeah. 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?

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

08:49Okay. 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?

Taylor Burgin

08:55>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:56And 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?

Taylor Burgin

09:02>> Yep. High margin revenue. And then, yeah, everything is coming through SaaS, so all SaaS revenue as well.

Nathan Latka

09:07That's amazing. When did you launch the business? What year?

Taylor Burgin

09:10>> July 2021.

Nathan Latka

09:12Oh, wow. Okay. So fairly new and bootstrapped. Have you raised?

Company Background: Founded July 2021, Bootstrapped

Taylor Burgin

09:15>> No. Totally bootstrapped. Yeah. Just over a year old.

Nathan Latka

09:18I love that. Any plans to raise or you wanna stay bootstrapped?

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

09:30Yeah. What is the team size today? How many people?

Taylor Burgin

09:33>> There's four of us.

Nathan Latka

09:34Four of you guys. And how many are engineers?

Taylor Burgin

09:37>> One. The CTO is co founder, and then we have two offshore engineers as well that he's managing.

Nathan Latka

09:42Oh, 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?

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

10:10And what is that dev shop? What what's the name of their site?

Taylor Burgin

10:12>> They're called Konstant Info, with a K.

Nathan Latka

10:15ConstantInfo. Interesting. And you've liked them?

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

10:31That'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?

Taylor Burgin

10:47>> High quality clients or candidates?

Nathan Latka

10:49Sorry, sorry. Candidates for your clients.

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

11:41Mhmm. Okay. That makes good sense. And so there's you, there's your co founder, just coding. What do the other two folks do?

Taylor Burgin

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.

Team Structure and Offshore Engineering

Nathan Latka

12:20That'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?

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

12:35Yeah.

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

13:09Mhmm. 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?

Taylor Burgin

13:15>> Last August, we were maintaining about five clients.

Nathan Latka

13:19Okay. So you're like $50,000, $60,000 a month in revenue then.

Taylor Burgin

13:21>> Oh, no. No. Sorry.

Nathan Latka

13:2235,000 a month.

Taylor Burgin

13:23>> Yes. Yep.

Nathan Latka

13:24Yeah. So good growth. Okay. Now back to my original question. So how are you guys finding new clients?

Taylor Burgin

13:30>> Referrals.

Nathan Latka

13:31Ah, interesting.

Growth Through Referrals and Cold Outreach

Taylor Burgin

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.

Revenue Snapshot: $84K/Month with 12 Clients

Nathan Latka

14:02And, 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.

Taylor Burgin

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

Profitability: $40K/Month to the Bottom Line

Nathan Latka

14:24What 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?

Taylor Burgin

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

Nathan Latka

14:52It'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.

Taylor Burgin

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.

Automation vs. Headcount Philosophy

Nathan Latka

15:31Yeah. 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?

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

15:47That's a good one. Number two, is there a CEO you're currently following or studying?

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Advice

Taylor Burgin

15:53>> That's a good question. Off the top of my head, I would say Dan Price.

Nathan Latka

15:58Dan. Yep. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Waldo?

Taylor Burgin

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.

Nathan Latka

16:15Number four. How many hours of sleep do get every night?

Taylor Burgin

16:18>> Last night, I got five. So between five and seven, typically.

Nathan Latka

16:23Okay. Just depends. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Taylor Burgin

16:27>> I am in a relationship, not married.

Nathan Latka

16:31Okay. No. That's that's fair. And how old are you? 30. 30. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Taylor Burgin

16:39>> To try everything. Any ideas, like, any concepts, just try it.

Nathan Latka

16:44Guys, 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,

17:06Just four people on the team as he scales in a smart way. Totally bootstrapped. Taylor, thanks for taking us to the top.

Taylor Burgin

17:11>> You got it. Thanks, Nathan. Have a good one.

Nathan Latka

17:15One 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

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