How Hirize Hit $14K MRR in 60 Days with 12 Paying Customers (Interview with CEO Esra Kaygin)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, hirize.hr launched, call it eighteen months ago. They put up their first paywall about two months ago, converted 1,400 beta signups into 80 active beta users and 12 of them have started paying, now doing $14,000 of monthly recurring revenue. Esra launched with her co founder, there's two of them, launched their I got a pre seed round done in twenty twenty two, October, a million raised at a 10,000,000 cap, now raising 2,000,000 target, helping for a 20,000,000

00:24valuation, managing dilution nicely here, they continue to grow. Again, are core API for these enterprise tech tools. If you're a big company with a thousand FTEs and you want to connect all your resumes into your instances like Oracle and SAP, they help you do that in a streamlined seamless way using AI. Hey folks, my guest today is Aggar Kagan. She's an accomplished two times Founder, VC Partner, Investor, Lecturer, Board Member and Author. She has a successful

00:49exit and acclaimed book on innovation and is now focused on building Hireize. H r, which is AI based resume parsing and a matching API. Esra, are you ready to take us to the top?

Esra Kaygin

01:00>> Yeah. Hi. How are you? Yeah. It's that's that's kind about it what you just told. I didn't know that it was that much.

Nathan Latka

01:08Well, tell us a little

01:09bit about give give us a customer story. Tell us about how a customer is using you today.

How Customers Use the Hirize API

Esra Kaygin

01:13>> Yeah. So we focus more on HR vendors and enterprise companies. So we are like, you have to think of hirize like AWS. So it's like a core API using your HR tech stack or in the tech stack of your HR startup. So we focus on HR startup, job boards, applicant tracking steps systems.

Nathan Latka

01:37Those are your customers?

Esra Kaygin

01:39>> These are my customers. Yes. And then we have enterprise customers who use our API in their current system, such as Oracle or SAP or Greenhouse.

Nathan Latka

01:53Got it. So just to be clear, a company with maybe a thousand full time employees that is hiring thirty, forty people a month might use your API to power and keep their Oracle SAP and Greenhouse instances up to date.

Esra Kaygin

02:04>> Yeah. So what we do is we parse. So we extract data from resumes and then match it. We rank the best candidate. So we are not doing this. We're not the first one who are doing this, but we're the first one who are using technology that is used in 2023. So the difference is that when I was doing my first HR tech startup, that was, like, in 02/1012, we were using AI based parsing and matching. And

Competitive Landscape in Resume Parsing

Esra Kaygin

02:29>> that was we called it AI, but it was actually keyword matching. That's not what we call h AI today. That's different. So when you do when you extract data from when you extract data with basic AI and then match it with basic AI again, what happens is that you get a lot of mistakes in the system. So the systems that we're all using today, they're using if they're using an outsourced API, which is 80%, they're using

02:59>> outdated technology to extract data from resumes and then match it.

Nathan Latka

03:05What are

03:05the most common outdated APIs people are using today that you compete with?

Esra Kaygin

03:09>> So we have Sovereign. You have Afinda, which they're, like, in the middle. They're not that bad. And then you have Archili.

03:20>> Also not that bad. Sovereign is horrible, and they are a market leader. And with horrible, I mean, they can't extract data, so they can't read non Word or PDF resumes. So what happens is that thirty percent of candidates who apply for a job, they get rejected not based on their skills or their resume, but because the technology can't read their resume. So you might be maybe a good fit for the job, but you got rejected and

03:47>> nobody knows that you just slid through the cracks or you don't even know that maybe you were good for that job and you start to look somewhere else. That's a major problem. So all HR tech startups, I love what they're doing, but what they're doing is putting a band aid on a system that is inherently broken and we're trying to fix that.

Nathan Latka

04:08And Esra, are you in the market yet or are you pre revenue?

Revenue and Customer Traction

Esra Kaygin

04:11>> No, we're in the market yet. We just started two months ago and we have 12 customers. We have now around 14 k revenue MRR. It's going really fast. It's going

When the First Line of Code Was Written

Nathan Latka

04:24That's cool. Keep on going 0 to 14,000 MRR in a couple of months. So when did you guys write the first line of code for the platform? What year?

Esra Kaygin

04:32>> 2021, December.

Nathan Latka

04:35Okay. December. Got it. So you've been at it now for about eighteen, nineteen months, something like that. How did you guys and you I guess we keep using the words we. Do you have co founders?

Esra Kaygin

04:45>> Yeah. Yeah. I do. I have a co founder. We he's the CTO. He's the genius.

04:51>> So his name is Erin. So Yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:55But you negotiate hard. Right? You keep more than 50% equity. Right?

Esra Kaygin

04:59>> How do you know that?

Nathan Latka

05:01I can just tell you're a killer.

05:04Oh, 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

05:27your 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

05:51get 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.

06:05Right? So

06:05the 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 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

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Bootstrapping and the Pre-Seed Round

Nathan Latka

07:19go 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.

07:28All right. So so so that's great. So you guys split up with going in and have you bootstrapped it or did you raise capital right away?

Esra Kaygin

07:36>> No. We first bootstrapped it and then we had an MVP and then we did a pre seed. We got like, Axel Springer and Porsche, which is APX. They invested in our first round, in our pre seed round as our lead investor.

Nathan Latka

07:49How much was that total?

Fundraising Details and APX Investment

Esra Kaygin

07:51>> So in our pre seed, we raised a million. They didn't put a million. They were a lead. But, yeah, they were the first one who were like, yes, let's do this.

Nathan Latka

07:59So That was in December 2021 or was this in 2022?

Esra Kaygin

08:03>> That was around that was in summer end of summer. So that was around October September, October 2022.

Nathan Latka

08:11So just last year. Yeah. The market's sort of contracting at that point. How were you able to get that deal over the finish line? I mean, obviously, you have a VC background, it sounds like you know how VCs think.

Esra Kaygin

08:22>> Yeah. Okay. So first first and foremost, I I mean, I worked in VC for seven years. That helps because people know you. I had an exit, so I'm a second time founder. My cofounder is a third time founder. So that helps because in that stage, you invest in people, and we were strong founders. And then I reached out to only people I know in the VC industry. So I was like, I don't have a lot of

08:46>> time. I wanna grow. I wanna go in beta. So I just reach out to people who know me, and I know them. And I can be like, dude, come on. Let's do this.

Nathan Latka

08:54Write the freaking check. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. And did you do pretty standard terms? So, like, you know, you sold 20% of the company, 5,000,000 cap, something like that?

Valuation and SAFE Terms

Esra Kaygin

09:03>> No. Our valuation was $10,000,000 and we did, like, 1,000,000 round on safe.

Nathan Latka

09:07Okay. So was it so it was a SAFE it was a capped SAFE, capped at 10,000,000. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I would say that's actually pretty darn favorable. So nice work nice work managing early early stage dilution there. That's great.

Esra Kaygin

09:20>> And and, I mean, at that time, I mean, we were we knew that OpenAI was gonna do something, but at that time, it didn't explode it yet. So everybody was still like, oh, yeah. OpenAI is queued. But it didn't we weren't there yet. AI wasn't a trend like that. It wasn't the valuations weren't that high. So back then, it was a little bit more tough. Now it's easier.

Nathan Latka

09:45Yep. How are you deciding how to invest that cash? Or another way to ask that question might be you raised it nine months ago. How much of the million do still have in the bank?

Cash Remaining and Runway

Esra Kaygin

09:53>> How much do we have left? We have like around a little bit so $202,150 k left, a little bit So over

10:03>> we still we're still we we only spend it on salaries. We didn't get salaries for us, for the managing team or the founding team, but just to get our developers in and and then build and

Nathan Latka

10:16So what does that mean in terms of full time folks today?

Esra Kaygin

10:19>> So we have seven people, full and part time. And four of them or five of them now, I just onboarded today a new one, five of them are full time.

Nathan Latka

10:31And so when you look at what your your burn is, how much runway would you say your $2.50 k gives you?

Esra Kaygin

10:37>> So we have we have around, like, six, seven months to go.

Nathan Latka

10:42Okay. Does that make you nervous in the market we're in? Like, do you see a path to growing into profitability just from customer sales, or do you have to go raise more capital?

Esra Kaygin

10:49>> I am raising a new round. I I'm just shopping around. I'm telling everybody what I'm doing. I'm in Paris now at Viva Tech, which is I don't know if you you're in The States. Right?

Current Raise and Use of Funds

Nathan Latka

11:00I'm in Austin, Texas. Yep.

Esra Kaygin

11:01>> Yeah. So you wouldn't know, but France is like, oh, we're also on the map. So you have a lot 100,000 people in the city now, 10,000 startups. Elon is coming in on Friday. So it's pretty big. So you have a you have a lot of people here, and I'm just, like, walking around meeting people. And

Nathan Latka

11:20So what are you targeting in your seat around? How much?

Esra Kaygin

11:23>> We wanna raise $2,000,000. We we don't spend a lot on salaries because we got half of our our our tech office is in Istanbul and Turkey.

Nathan Latka

11:32Oh, great.

Esra Kaygin

11:33>> So it's it's it's cheap for us to build. Cheaper.

Nathan Latka

11:38And do you think you can raise 2,000,000 and only sell 10% of the company again? Do think you get a 20,000,000 valuation?

Esra Kaygin

11:44>> Yeah. Yeah. I can.

Nathan Latka

11:45Interesting. Okay. Well, that that would be amazing. And then what's the thesis? Where would you invest that money?

Esra Kaygin

11:51>> Again, salaries, but also sales and marketing. Now we're gonna we wanna grow. We we we've proven that we've we can build. It's a good product. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't like, there are not no any errors. It's it's proved. It's tested, and now we can go wide.

Nathan Latka

12:08And, Esra, when did you launch the pricing plan?

Esra Kaygin

12:12>> Just two months ago.

Nathan Latka

12:13Wow. Okay. So in two months, you've added 14 12 customers, 14 k of MRR. Tell me about that. That's fast growth. How do you find and close the first 12 customers?

Beta Program and Converting Users to Customers

Esra Kaygin

12:21>> We had, like, a very long beta stage. So we start our first beta release was in October, November.

12:31>> And then we had a lot of customers, you know, that were testing it back then.

Nathan Latka

12:36So Were they actual betas, Esra? Like, did you when they signed up the beta, did you say at the end of six months, if you love it, you need to start paying $3 a month, or did you wait to negotiate price until after the beta was done?

Esra Kaygin

12:47>> No. I I wish I did that because I didn't. I I started negotiating after after I launched, which I think we would have more MRR if we did it if we, you know You can't do no do everything perfect.

Nathan Latka

13:02When you store your customer, that's at the end of betas from, like, the most likely to pay versus the least likely to pay, what column header in Excel were you sorting by? Was it, like, number of API calls in the beta program or number of team members onboard in the beta program or what was the activation metric?

Esra Kaygin

13:17>> So for us, it's more like when you it's the stage where you are, where you need our API. So there were a couple of startups that were using our API, and they were building on our API. So after three months and you build on an API, you build your own company whole company around that API, you can't go back. So, like, there

Nathan Latka

13:38though. Was it was it once those engineers built on your API, you couldn't measure the number of API calls they were doing per day?

Esra Kaygin

13:44>> Yeah. Yeah. So they build and they're active. That's a 100% yes.

Nathan Latka

13:49I see.

Esra Kaygin

13:50>> Yeah. So when they so it's like how much you integrate our product in your system. That's one metric. So how far how how many products you use, and then how often you use it. So we had, like, customers that were using it a couple of times a week, and we're like, oh, that's not gonna that's not gonna happen and didn't happen.

Nathan Latka

14:09Yep. Yep. There and how many how many folks signed up for beta program?

Beta Signup Numbers and ICP Filtering

Esra Kaygin

14:14>> We had a lot of beta users. We had 1,400 beta sign ups. Wow. And I think we had, like, 80 act actual users.

Nathan Latka

14:2580 active users, and you converted 80 of the active ones into twelve twelve of them converted to customers.

Esra Kaygin

14:30>> Because we're not a consumer product. So I did had wide reach, so I told everybody to sign up. So we had 1,400 sign ups. And then once you launch, it's like, well, I'm not an HR vendor. I'm not an enterprise company. So I think that a lot of start ups when they say like, oh, I have this many, like, you know, sign ups that sounds great. I can have 10,000. But how many were actual customers and

14:56>> companies that you wanna do the beta with?

Nathan Latka

14:58Yeah. Yeah. You you converted 80. Of the 1,400, 80 were your, like, ICP or ideal customer profile. And of the 80, you got 12 to pay, and you're only two months in. Do you think you convert more of those 80 to pay over time?

Esra Kaygin

15:10>> Yeah. We're we're working on them now. And then we also have, like, customers or beta users that wanted to become a customer but wait a little bit more, like I said. So I think these are the ones that are gonna bring us a lot more revenue. We have one really big job board that's gonna amazing if it happens.

Nathan Latka

15:29That's awesome. Well, I love your story. We're out of time for today. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, Esra, your favorite book?

Pipeline and Future Revenue Potential

Esra Kaygin

15:36>> Oh my god. My own book?

Nathan Latka

15:37What's the title?

Esra Kaygin

15:40>> Disruptive innovation, how to win in times of change. It's get it will get released in July.

15:46>> Released in July.

Nathan Latka

15:47Very good. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Esra Kaygin

15:51>> Oh god. Yes. Bill Gates.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

15:54Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your company?

Esra Kaygin

16:00>> I think Calendly. Calendly. I love Calendly. I couldn't live without it.

Nathan Latka

16:07Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Esra Kaygin

16:10>> Five to six.

Nathan Latka

16:11Okay. And what situation? Married, single, kids?

Esra Kaygin

16:15>> Yeah. I have a startup that I'm married to and I'm dating my startup, and it's also my kid and my team and my kids.

Nathan Latka

16:22I'm married, no kiddos. And Esra, do you mind me asking how old you are?

Esra Kaygin

16:27>> I'm 37.

Nathan Latka

16:29Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Esra Kaygin

16:33>> Oh, God. Sleep less.

Nathan Latka

16:38Guys, there you go.

Esra Kaygin

16:39>> Because you know that, you know, after a while, after ten years, you're like, oh, I could do with less sleep. Could have more fun.

Nathan Latka

16:49Guys, hirize.hr launched, call it, eighteen months ago. They put up their first paywall about two months ago, converted 1,400 beta sign ups into 80 active beta users, and 12 of them have started paying, now doing $14,000 of monthly recurring revenue. Esra launched with her co founder, there's two of them, they launched their I got a pre seed round done in twenty twenty two October, a million raised at a 10,000,000 cap, now raising 2,000,000 target, helping for

17:13a 20,000,000 valuation, managing dilution nicely here as they continue to grow. Again, are core API for these enterprise tech tools. If you're a big company with a thousand FTEs and you wanna connect all your resumes into your instances like Oracle and SAP, they help you do that in a streamlined seamless way using AI. Esra, thank you for taking us to the top.

Closing Summary

Esra Kaygin

17:31>> Thank you so much, thanks.

Nathan Latka

17:33One 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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