How Yobs CEO Raphael Danilo grew to $240K revenue and 20 customers in 2021.

hey folks my guest today is raphael danilo he's a french entrepreneur and investor based in brooklyn new york by days the co-founder and ceo of yobs an interview intelligence platform on top of zoom yobs is backed by industry leaders like adam grant and trusted by dozens of high growth companies like nacelle hometap and nissan on nights and weekends he runs evening fund a 3 million operator fund out of which he writes 50 to 100k checks into early stage companies raw file you ready to take us to the top let's do it what came first by the way the the evening fund or yobs uh so jobs came first um evening fund is something that i started just earlier this year and we've done about 25 investments so far in 2021 and uh yeah as you said something that i do just on nights and weekends to you know kind of give back and support other founders very cool well get back in support but you need to make a return if you plan on i mean who did you raise capital from so well some of the capital so i i drew it with a partner her name is kat she's also a full-time founder of uh of a vc back company called beretto um so some of the capital is ours uh some of the capital is from friends of mine you know industry connections and then we have a couple of larger funds i can't name all of them uh but bain capital is one that i can name and then yeah there's a couple of other kind of like multi-stage funds that are lp's in the fund um and yeah absolutely and honestly like um you know we very often fit into kind of angel allocations because we only write 50 100k checks so they're pretty small checks we're not trying to lead rounds or anything and uh and it's super fun and we actually got our first unicorn a month ago after less than a year of investing um so so far it seems like it's going pretty well and you know most importantly we're having a ton of fun all right tell me more about yobs who's buying this technology and when what are they and how are they using you yeah so you know with yobs the the kind of the premise behind it is that you know interviews have the highest impact on the quality of hires but interestingly they're also you know the process with the highest error rate um you know and so it's even within the hiring process so about like 50 of interviews basically have a conclusion that doesn't end up being true post higher like we thought that this person was you know um you know very extroverted turns out they weren't et cetera et cetera and they also have the biggest impact on the time to hire like how long it takes to hire someone 60 to 80 of it comes back to the interviews and in the past like this wasn't too big of a deal because you could do multiple interviews on sites over like weeks and you could still get good candidates but now you have so much competition for talent especially because of remote work and the talent shortages and just everything that's happening at the macro level that if you're not going fast and i'm talking like three interviews max for a whole process for you know per per candidate um and you still have to be precise and you still have to be engaging if you're not like if this is not your bar um you're not going to get great talent and so this is particularly painful so this is a problem that everybody's facing you know from the smallest start up to the biggest companies as you mentioned like we work with nissan all the way down to like small startups but the companies that kind of have you know feel the pain the most are what we call high growth companies and so high growth companies are typically venture back they don't have to be but you know oftentimes they can be um so just just just jumping in for a second so so understand the platform i think my audience will clearly understand what you're doing based on that description you just gave help understand how your pricing is it per interview per month um so we actually have a free forever plan um and we just came out of beta so so right now we're not even charging for our entry level plan we're only joining today uh we so we only charge enterprises so we have some larger customers that we charge but these high growth companies we don't charge them today we'll start charging in q1 or q2 okay tell me i guess can you tell me more about the enterprise folks today how do you model their plans yeah so it's it's basically based on the number of recruiter seats that you need to have on the platform so you know we will serve recruiting teams largely but then you also have interviewers that are uh you know functional heads you know head of sales head of engineering so on and so forth um so depending on the number of people that you need you know collaborating on the platform um that's what we charge you based on but you know unlimited number of interviews um you know hs integration all of that stuff and then um in the free plan um you can you can uh basically integrate greenhouse zoom google calendar and if that's your stack then we give the tool away for free today i see so these enterprises why not give it to them for free as well are we just talking like these are like two or three of your buddies they're on enterprise things so you you know it made sense to charge them yeah no because the enterprise guys typically have um you know different requirements when it comes to you know security data privacy um there's things around like custom integrations or like small customizations and also just like the whole service component of like they may want support around just making sure their process is being run properly so you know they they have the budgets but they need a little bit more hand holding that's just the nature of enterprise sales so i want to go back to your free choices the freemium plan choices you made in a second and your backstory but before that so give me sort of an average right what was an enterprise account going to pay you per month to use the technology yeah so our our enterprise accounts are in the five figure annual contract values i mean it it depends but it's kind of like 10k per year onwards so roughly a thousand dollars a month yeah up to like five thousand dollars a month what would how many how many recruiters do someone paying you a thousand bucks a month likely have um probably about a dozen i would say like you know okay like 10 plus um when we work with high growth companies they typically have like up to 10. so enterprise typically kicks in when you start to have like you know 10 15 plus people on your recruiting team yep that makes sense give me the back story here when did you guys launch the business yeah so so you know we launched uh three years ago and it's funny because so i'm someone from france originally as you mentioned and um my background is 2019 right yeah exactly yeah um 2018 actually is when we when we uh incorporated the business okay and like so before kovid like i was always working remotely for startups like i worked for an israeli startup remotely while i was in la and like we worked with some european companies with my co-founder we're both european transplants in the us so we've always done the remote hiring thing and so we've always kind of felt the pain of interviewing over zoom and not being able to collaborate efficiently and effectively when you're interviewing people remotely like you have to consolidate your notes you have to make sure you're capturing the key moments and it's it's pretty hard and so we we came up with this idea of like well what if you could actually record conversations transcribe them make it really easy to like you know grab the key moments share them and then you know as your recruiting team starts to do this more and more and more um you know kind of like what gong.io does for for sales calls you can actually start coaching recruiters the same way that with going you can start coaching your sales reps based on like what closes more deals where is the same thing like what closes more candidates what engages them the most are you licensing someone else's like call flagging or call tagging technology or have you guys built that in-house so the the transcription technology uh we work with a couple of different vendors because that's pretty sort of table stakes um and then the the whole technology to sort of like look into what's happening in the transcript and the call that's that's ours that's proprietary i see i see how many folks on the team today we have 12 people on the team okay how many of them are intense engineers uh about half of them okay six and we have a couple of phds in organizational psychology we're kind of like domain experts in interviewing and assessments so they're they're deeply technical you know in their own way just not you know software engineers per se so you get going in 2018 you're experimenting um what was it like you remember closing your first customer and who was it how'd you get them yeah it was crazy because actually nissan and another huge huge huge fortune 500 company were our first customers um so nissan i think was like number two or number three how did you get nissan it was so i actually knew someone who worked at nissan at the time who's not who's not there anymore and we went to a conference and one of their colleagues heard about us and they just like very organically like that person reached out and we ended up making a pilot happen but what was interesting is like we totally kind of skipped the whole you know work with startups and then work your way up to enterprise we did it you know exactly the other way where we started with fortune 500 accounts which had its pros um naming me that you can get really big contracts really quickly i think like as an advice i guess to other founders on this front like you know just get ready to get bogged down and also it's like a lot of customization and some stuff that like when you're on your road to product market fit you probably don't want to waste your time doing um so i think that's one like flag i would raise when you're going after like big big enterprises as first customers so nissan was number one or number two and then obviously you're now two years later scaling up how many enterprise customers are you serving today uh 20 plus and then on the free plan we have dozens of companies using us yeah yeah yeah but but all those 20 ones again those are the enterprise folks you alluded to earlier where you are charging them per recruiter per seat yeah okay can i take that our poo you told me earlier of a thousand bucks a month multiplied by twenty thousand about 20 000 bucks a month right now in revenue um yeah that's that's about right yeah okay and just to calculate growth rate where were you exactly a year ago do you remember yeah so we we roughly 3x since last year um and then the free plan is something that we launched um two months ago exactly two three months ago so the the strategy for us has been really about like really playing the long game so i think like we probably could have 5x this year or more um if we fully focus just on revenue but you know i think like we're in a space where it's basically a land grab like there's a couple of other companies that raised a bunch of funding to do you know something similar is what we're doing but there there are those companies just name one or two of them um you know there's a company called clovers out of la that just raised a good amount of funding from like you know pretty solid investors um and a couple of others and you know they're they raised like you know 10 to 30 million you know roughly is the range so still pretty early um but you know kind of like the stage after and i think like the strategy that a lot of the folks in the space are taking is focus entirely on the enterprise accounts and i think like you know it makes sense i understand why they do it but i think there's such a huge long tail of businesses that don't want to shell out 10 to 20k today but may want you in a year or two and capturing them today because they already feel the pain in something like a free plan and you know tapping into more of like a product like growth go to market i think in the long run it could be the winning strategy and so while everybody's focused on like enterprise sales and you know paying tens of thousands of dollars to advertise at conferences we're taking more of uh you know hey let's be the easiest company to do business with so you go on our website today like you can sign up for free book it on board and call or explore yourself like we're trying to be super super easy to work with and that's that's basically the strategy and have you got wrapping away about two or three minutes left here so we'll do this and then jump into the famous five but in terms of uh funding have you stayed bootstrapped or did you decide to sell some equity and raise as well yeah so we we bootstrapped for a while um and then we we just raised rc round earlier this year um so we ended up raising two and a half million um mostly from you know angel investor operators who obviously as i mentioned like i'm a big believer in the whole operator investor model i think it's you know you know oftentimes like the most value-added investors so was there a lead in that 2.5 or was it like a 20 you know hundred thousand dollar checks um it wasn't twenty hundred thousand dollar checks but we didn't we didn't have like a strongly we raised on safe notes so it was it was basically just like you know we set the terms and then we brought in who we wanted to bring in um and then uh had a couple of you know cool kind of like superstar angels like adam grant come in um who've been awesome to work with and then when you're obviously thinking about funding um minimizing dilution is obviously important so you're doing a note so cap's important most people on a seed run are doing you know effectively 10 to 20 percent if they convert it up the cap where you serve in that same standard range exactly okay pretty big safe i mean that means you it was like a 20 million dollar cap or 18 to 20 million cop something like that that's pretty large yeah i mean i think like especially in 2021 like you know especially if you have traction um and you're you're you've proven that you're you're hitting on some of the themes that will be you know no-brainers over the next few years you have a good team and you've shown traction i think like investors understand that um some of these markets are going to be land grabs so you got to move quick and so in the long run you know they're every investor and we think about it the same as investors like we're looking for these like 1 billion or 10 billion companies when we're doing venture investments because 80 of companies are going to die at that startup stage so whether you pay 10 or 18 million on a cap is not really like that's not what's going to make or break it um well i mean more about optionality though right i mean you basically put yourself on a track where you have to do something faster either hit growth faster or you end up dying faster right so why is it important to have that like short-term focus versus you know buy yourself time be default alive be casual positive and play the long game i think like as i mentioned like playing the long game in the sense of for example raising venture funding is what allowed us to play that long game in terms of like having a free plan which i think in the long run is what's going to allow us to win because while everybody's going to be focused on charging 10 000 for a product that probably isn't worth it we're able to play that longer game acquire users give them a free version of the product like get them hooked and then over time start layering on more and more of those features more and more integrations that actually make the tool really worth it um so i think like the the like raising venture dollars allows you to tap into strategies that like long run can actually work out better um so just as you said it's more about optionality and i think you can also do it the bootstrapped kind of like look for you know profitability way and you know we see a lot of great businesses do that too all right rafaella wrap up here with the famous five one word answers if you can number one favorite book uh zero to one i would say number one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i think jason lemkin not a ceo anymore but a great guy to follow number three what's your favorite online tool for building jobs whole story is awesome number four how many hours i sleep to get every night i'm anal about that i would say seven or eight hours nice and situation married single kids my current situation yep uh girlfriend not married yet no kids running around just a dog all right and how old are you i'm 23. 23. last question somebody wishing you when you were 20. ah sleep more guys there you have it yobstec.com helping you do interviews more effectively faster and make sure when you end them there's good strong follow-up with a tech stack that they integrate directly with doing caught seven thousand bucks a month about a year ago now twenty thousand dollars a month so three x year-over-year growth scaling they just closed 2.4 earlier this year close to 2.5 million seed round and call it an 18-20 million dollar evaluation as they look to continue to scale raphael thank you for taking us to the top appreciate it man one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 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