How Workable CEO Spyros Magiatis grew Workable to $69.5M revenue and 20K customers in 2024.

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think is going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is nikos muratakis he's the ceo of workable makers of the popular recruiting software used by 20 000 companies in 100 countries he led the company from its inception in 2012 to a fast growing organization with 300 employees in the u.s and europe raising 95 million of venture financing from top european and american investors all right nicos you ready to take us to the top nice to see you again good to have you back on all right so give us an update uh and for those that missed the first episode quickly tell us what the company does and are you pure play sass it's a pure play sas workable is a recruiting solution for employers mid-sized companies mostly we're operating all over the world we have about 20 000 customers what the software does is it helps you find evaluate and manage the whole process of hiring people and because just because they're all 20 000 paying customers correct that's significant growth when you came back on in may 2018 you were at 6 000. is that right that's a lot of growth yes what's happening is that we also have an smb product that is um appealing to smaller companies let's say 20 50 100 employees uh which is pay as you go um they can just go and just pay for the highest they're making so we have a lot of small customers about three quarters of our customers are companies with fewer than 100 employees i see okay so if you then took a kind of an average right of your entire base what's the average customer paying you per year per month to use the technology would you say i think the average customer when i slide to be low than g it's slightly white uh slight and i slightly bolted here i'm sorry a slightly above 10k annually yes okay that i mean that's up significant all right so last time on the show you said ac was about 3 000 across the base so you've more than tripled your average acv yes because in the last couple of years we've seen a lot of traction from mid-sized companies let's say a few hundred or a few thousand employees and these tend to come with higher cvs obviously i got it but but when you look at the average i mean if you opened up top of funnel that would pull your average down because you're getting more customers in that are paying way less you said two-thirds of your customers have less than 100 employees it's it's happening both ways actually but the fact that it's normal in such companies that affects us you get bigger companies in the mix typically the acv goes up even if you have an smb product yeah yeah well i mean the reason i'm asking is if i take 20 000 customers times that acv you just gave me i mean that would put you at like 16 million a month in revenue which i i know you're doing well but not that well i don't think no no no for a year but yeah i'm sure but yeah yeah no i know yeah so if i take 20 000 times a 10 000 ac that's 830 per customer per month 830 times 20 000 right is 16 million a month in revenue which i know is again i know you're doing well but that would be like i don't know it's it's a tenth of that it's a twelfth of that it's a twelfth of eight hundred dollars a month yeah i'm sorry we must have done something wrong in the calculation no the carbon revenue is in the tens of millions not in the hundreds of millions yeah yeah when do you when do you break 30 million in arr uh i think it's going to be this year okay so you're close i was going to say i was guessing that's what it would be about you have three months left in the year you think you can break 30. around the end of the year we're going to be somewhere there okay and what is that up from so a year ago what was the run right you finished with uh it was uh it was about to it's slightly below 20. okay so so i mean good growth not a hundred percent year over year growth though were your vc's uh not happy with that yeah absolutely absolutely because they it's it's a it's a huge market um the international part of the market is uh uh is seeing a lot of growth i mean we're seeing in asia and europe a lot of people are switching on to these sort of solutions um and there's more stuff coming down the line right now we're launching uh video interviewing capabilities with launching assessments we've launched add-ons recruiting marketing so basically the revenue of the customers themselves are growing because we're doing more for them but but again once you've raised 95 million dollars i mean at this scale i mean you want to see a 100 year over year growth right so going from 20 to 30 i imagine was not exciting for your vcs how do you manage their expectations to be honest with you you know i i think you know the the growth obviously is is one parameter but it's also you know how you're growing how much money you're spending how efficient your sales are uh so actually we're we're happy to be at 50 60 growth uh it's the whole picture of the pnl obviously yeah now when you raised that that last round was recent right because last time we came on you had about 39 40 million raised so you've raised like 50 55 million recently we we raised another 50 million last summer last summer okay we still have a long way to go with that actually to be honest with you we raised quite a bit for how much we're ready quite a bit for what compared to how much we're burning what does that mean help me understand that i mean we have a long runway even after a year uh following the the fundraise i see what you're saying when you raise that 50 million you race for like 24 months of burn versus like 12 months of burn nearly three years i mean okay that's a lot why'd you go i mean obviously you take dilution the more money you take today the more dilution you take why raise for three months a runway are three years um we got the right investors um we have a long-term plan um i think also right now the markets are pretty good for raising money so if you get a good deal you just pick up the extra money so so far in all the rounds we ended up picking up a little bit more than we needed and we needed it yeah okay now i think i'm not the only one who will say this no no there's a lot of people that would say that they're raising more than what they need right now because they think the macroeconomic conditions are really good for raising um so i mean i'm i'm not hitting you i'm just trying to understand where your brain was at um 50 million raised on for a three-year kind of runway wait that would be that mean burn is something like 1.4 million a month or at least that's what you're comfortable with is that about where you're at right now 1.4 a month quite a bit less right now actually uh at the end of the day we're burning less than that maybe a year less than okay good so i mean that's in less than 800 grand per month basically we have the ability to use additional money to do acquisitions to um invest in r d in the next couple of years there's a lot of new stuff we do yeah so i mean most is 50 million you probably still have sitting in the bank then correct exactly yeah is it all of it sitting in the bank well most of it yeah okay so when you think about acquisitions using that capital what kind of acquisitions would be interesting to you um right now we are very interested in the recruiting marketing space and what's happening with uh job sites that deviate from traditional job sites and create communities uh and have you know richer audiences in terms of the data their intent um and where you can help people actually source uh better candidates there are a lot of local ones there are a lot of vertical ones um and these are closer to ats's that they are to job sites so okay so you're looking for for more kind of hr tech tools whether it's like you know doing interviews via chat bots instead of putting a human on it or just things like that that sort of thing too interesting okay so 20 000 companies using you 70 million candidates how many hires have you placed over the past year uh over the past year it must have been something like a bit less than half a million okay and over your total life about a million hires correct about a million actually must be nearly about a million and a half thousand hires that's i mean that's that's pretty good um really good now your revenue model uh are you charging a flat sas fee or is it somehow tied to like a percent to first year salary of the of the employee you're placing which are the flat size fee um in in some of our products it would perhaps make sense to mimic the recruiter and agency uh business model but we try to stay away uh from it um it's it's it's a it's a complex discussion uh over there but but in fact what we're trying to...