Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. And just when you thought there was no room for yet another company to be in the recruiting. In walks, George, not, not just once. This is the second time coming into this space saying, I think I I’ve got a solution.
I’ve got something new, something that hadn’t existed before. And, uh, since the George Corolla who you’re going to meet, had started a business before he said, look, before I get into this, I feel passionate about this. It is a pain to hire. Everyone complains about it, but let me make sure it’s a real pain.
And let me make sure that people are really willing to spend money on it. Let’s make sure that I’m not going down this road and making mistake. You said I’m going to try to make money without coding. And so used, you know, what it used to be like, how many lines of code you ride or how much coding was the bragging?
No. Now it’s like how little anyway. So he did it. He and his company Dover, which now does end to end recruiting, started out by using, um, no code solutions and a lot of services, a lot of service work to help companies recruit. They got to how much money before you started writing code
George: Oh, of course I ran real code, probably play a millionaire. That’d be my guess. Maybe.
Andrew: in recurring revenue, roughly like that. I actually saw it in my notes, so I, yeah. Confirm, at least that you’ve said that several times to our producers. So,
George: Yeah.
Andrew: um, I want to find out how he did this. I want to find out how he figured out the pain that other people hadn’t figured out, how we got customers without writing code, how we got into Y Combinator, what they’re, what they’re doing now that they are coding.
We could do it. Thanks to two phenomenal sponsors. The first, if you’re listening to me, chances are you’re already using them because, uh, SEMrush is a tool that marketers use for both content marketing, social media, marketing, and paid advertising. And I’m going to tell you later why you should do.
Mixergy.com/semrush as your onboarding for them. And the second, George, I bet you don’t even know about them. In fact, I know you don’t cause I checked in with you. If you want to hire salespeople right now, different from your whole sales process, but you want to spin them up the way that you might say spin up a landing page.
Overpass has got you covered. They’ve got a marketplace of salespeople and software to help you manage them. I’m going to tell you later why you should be going to overpass.com/mixergy. But first George, I feel like we’ve got a good rapport here. Good friendship. Tell me your revenue. Let’s ruin it all with that
George: Yeah, no, that’s that’s fair. Um, we just crossed the 7 million mark, um,
Andrew: Get out.
George: think. Yeah.
Andrew: All right. Profitable.
George: Yes. Yeah. We run basically the thing at breakeven. Yeah.
Andrew: Why? Yeah. You got funding. You’re supposed to be just below. You’re supposed to be using all this money.
George: Yeah. So I think that there’s maybe like a religious belief on this, where it’s like, if you get a company kind of pointed in some direction, This is kind of keep it there. Um, I think there’s something that I personally like about running close to breaking as we have control of our own destiny. I don’t know how people sleep at night when they’re like I got six months of runway left or a year worth of runway left.
And it just sounds immensely stressful. And I don’t know if you can think about building good long-term product that way. So our take has always been like, let’s run it pretty close to any moment in time. We don’t have to like sacrifice long-term vision, what we want to build to like, you know, close the next customer so we can meet payroll.
Andrew: all right, last time you and I talked, um, I asked you what Dover does and you said something about end to end recruiting. And I said, help me understand it. You said you said something that I didn’t fully understand, but today you’ve spent some time I’m explaining this and mark and working on your marketing, how do you.
George: Yeah, so no great, great question. I think so the way it’s recruiting or is a recruiting, like infrastructure layer, we’re the platform that all recruiting solutions plug into. And then we manage that process to actually bring candidates into the company. So when I say that, you.
know, I’m talking to him in vague terms here, But basically there’s different ways to recruit candidates.
I think everyone would agree. There’s like great. You’re like email people and you hope that they’re interested in, they join, you, go throw job ads on LinkedIn. Indeed. What have you, you hope you get good people in you go, go, go to up your friend network and see if they’re interested in joining. Um, so Dover manages all three of those sources and then helps surface those best candidates for you and then moves them through your recruiting process for you as well.
So it’s kind of the discovery. Plus the process automation.
Andrew: But are you also doing the S the software that helps me manage the recruiting process? See, uh, who’s in the pipeline. Are you all. The front end with the application form and that you are you doing all that?
George: Exactly. And I think that?
that’s when you’re joking about us starting, it was really, we just started as like a service business, essentially, like trying to get this thing off the ground with no code. And it was, you know, a bunch of air table and stuff like that at the early days, the. Um, and that’s kind of, maybe that’s why we evolved into this solution that we are today, which is, we were just trying to find that customer problem and go down that path of what they needed.
And we saw, they all had a bunch of different tools and the problem that they had was like, we have all these tools can it’s flying around everywhere, but they gotta, I gotta read 500 resumes. I forgot there were two good ones. And I got to like, schedule these meetings, do all this stuff. And that’s where Dover plugged in.
So I’d say that’s all software, but you’re exactly right. Like in the first version of it, it was just like on, be shed maximum run around trying to do these things.
Andrew: But George Dover replaces all that software. Is that right today?
George: Well, I, I don’t even know if there’s like, we, we saw copies of their sources. So, you know, like, indeed for example, right, you can post your job ads up in there. They’re going to be great at getting all sorts of different folks in like entry level sales search, for example, like customer success folks.
They’re a great source for that. So the problem that you have is like, great. I throw my job out on indeed. And it’s like, Greg got like 500 applicants now. Right? How do I I’d have to go through them all. I have to like, figure out which ones actually want to talk to. I feel like schedule them, like I like to do second round interviews with them and like all that stuff.
That’s where Dover really picks up.
Andrew: Got it. And then once, what are you still calling? Are you still calling, uh, candidates and do them, all that stuff.
George: Yeah. So we do the first round fund screens for some of our customers as well. Um, who need, who need that support? Where they’re saying like, Hey, I got so many folks and we’ll develop a rubric with them on like, Hey, here’s what you want to hear from people. And we’ll ask them those questions and deliver that, deliver that, how you measure the results they want so they can decide if they wanna move that candidate forward or not.
Andrew: And that whole Kanban board software, you’ve got that whole process in your system, in your system in Dover. Got it. All right. What did you see that, you know, what everyone’s complaining about, about recruiting? Why didn’t you say it’s just a tough process. This is, this is one of the killer parts of the job, and it’s the essential thing for, for the CEO to be able to do.
George: I think everyone loves complaining about recruiting. It was like a humble brag, I think for companies where they’re like, oh man, we’re going so fast or doing so great. Everything’s awesome. We had to hire a million people and it’s like a thing that, you know, you go to the bar and yeah. Yeah, over here, some conversations with other folks like humble, bragging to each other about how great their companies are or whatever.
So I think that that’s, so I think that, I think that’s kind of like one layer of like, people always are going to complain about it. Cause it’s a fun thing to complain about at the end of the day, like, oh no, one’s good enough to work at our company or we can’t get you good candidates and that sort of thing.
Andrew: All right. So then if they’re humble, bragging, why did you say, I think I could take this off.
George: So I think the other part is like, there’s a real education element going on here around. And most of it was kind of just through repetition. We try to do it with data and help our users understand quickly what’s going on. Recruiting is a market at the end of the day. There’s a bunch of smart people out there.
You know, probably a bunch of listening to this. There’s a bunch of people who like are looking for jobs. Um, and there’s this an intersection where those people are going to meet. And I think that was like a predo frontier kind of level of like, if you remember, I was like econ 1 0 1 or whatever. You’re like trying to figure out like, where can I get exactly the right person, but they’re not out of reach for me.
And everyone has kind of become educated on their market for that. Example, this is like, every time we like onboard like a founder, they’re always, basically just, just describe how they’re trying to hire like Elan or CSEC and like, you know, I want someone who’s done a startup before they like coded it all themselves.
Like learned, really got to come into ARR, but didn’t quite work and it’s almost kind of like, okay, cool. Like everyone says exact same thing, but what are you actually going to get? Like, let’s hire to help you educate what the market’s going to yield for. You.
Andrew: Okay. I still don’t understand why you thought you could solve it, but I guess it, a little bit stems from your background. You’d already started a business in the space. It was called top funnel. It’s still called top funnel. What is tough?
George: Yeah. So they build a tool for recruiters to help them go find candidates, essentially. So there are a Chrome extension. You can go anywhere on the internet And you can go source candidates for, um, for, for your company. So they sell a tool to like large recruiting organizations.
Andrew: they’re sourcing it from where what’s, what does it look
George: Everywhere. They’ll do stuff on GitHub.
They’ll do stuff on Twitter, those stuff on LinkedIn. It doesn’t really matter.
Andrew: and
George: and they’ll basically say, great go sources, candidate form it. You just find a profile.
Andrew: Oh, you see
George: Um, it basically
Andrew: and it gives you a profile of them.
George: Exactly. And then they’ll say, Hey, here’s the email to go email this.
Andrew: Got it. So as a recruiters on the internet, they find somebody who’s smart, who contributed to a, to a project that they like, they get their contact information, gets to send it out. So you’re in the space.
You did a little bit of the space. Then you leave the company and you say, I need to do something else. And what’s. W what’s the path that goes from, I need to do something else to.
George: It’s it’s not particularly glamorous. So I. Left top funnel. And I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do next. Um, and two of my good friends who are now my co-founders were dabbling in the recruiting space. Um, and they weren’t really sure. I was like really early days. They’d just pivoted from DUSA from real estate to recruit.
They were like about, probably about a month into it or something. And they’re like, George coming out with us, you’ve done recruiting stuff before. Like, you know, we’re all friends, let’s, let’s work on this. And for a long time, I was like, man, I don’t really know if I want to do recruiting again. I don’t know if I have this in mind.
I kind of like learned the space that I want to like jump into this again. Um, and ultimately I guess like what convinced me or got me over the line, it was like, I had known both of them for four or five years previous to that. Like max, I’d done some like side projects and stuff together before. On visa.
My other co-founder, she’s now married to my best buddy from Stanford. And so I was like a very tight friend group. They both known each other since like freshman year, but my tea and I was like, well, sure, like all coming out with you guys. And after a couple months of working with them, I was like, well, it’s kind of very good to work with two really good friends that you respect a lot.
So that’s more, what made my decision rather than like, oh man, I got like the criminal crime idea of like, how are you going to shake up this industry? Exactly.
Andrew: I, I don’t, well, I don’t know him super well, but max was on Mixergy doing an interview a few years back. He was working on a. On zinc.io. How do I explain what that is?
George: That’s a very complicated question.
Andrew: Uh, maybe I could start with this it’s software that builds. Um, it’s basically it helps people manage what they’re selling online specifically on Amazon. Right.
George: Yeah, exactly. So a lot of dropship and stuff is what they, that’s what I focused
Andrew: And so then what were you doing with him? What, what are some of the side projects you
George: Oh, so I used to have a very tiny, uh, venture fund with a bunch of friends and it was just kind of our own money and we all invested together. So him and I did some investments together and stuff.
Andrew: How much money did you put? in?
George: Um, we writes very small checks like 20 grand and the companies, it was just like, you know, 13 people got together, pulled some money and started writing very small checks together.
So it was, it was
Andrew: put in?
George: into the
Andrew: Yeah,
George: I don’t
Andrew: like we’re talking ballpark a 10, 20,000 into the fund.
George: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, I don’t know some number of tens. It wasn’t like a huge amount of money or anything.
Andrew: that money? I’m looking at your background and it seems like this is the biggest one, right? Dover is, is, is the monster.
George: Well, I was in private equity before that. Um,
Andrew: money that you’ve saved from work.
George: yeah, exactly.
Andrew: it. And instead of being another person here in San Francisco saying, I’m going to invest, but running out of money quickly, you said, let me get together with a dozen friends. We’ll all pull our money, have a fund. Got it. And you’re one of the people who help make the decisions.
George: We all were, it was just 13 of us and it was all, you know, we’d all know each other from work or from school or something previously. And it was just kind of our, you know, instead of buying a fancy car, we did this instead kind of money, I guess, I guess,
Andrew: I prefer this a fancy car loses value. This could have, this could potentially be a windfall, but more than that, this allows you to really understand the market, get to know people. What did, what are the memorable investments you made?
George: It was. So we did a lot of Publix as well, which. I don’t know how interested as to folks, but like, you know, we like would invest in Verizon and we got like a two X enterprise over like two years or something. Um, which is like, you know, obviously like the top one is like a hundred companies in the world sort of thing.
So it’s like the most sexy thing to invest in, but it was fun. And a lot of what it was was us learning how larger companies work, um, and trying to like understand, like, not only the financial, like what’s the businesses, how do they talk about their businesses? How did these things get built? Um, so it was mostly kind of like an intellectual, like learning exercise for all of us.
Andrew: What’d you just do it on a weekly basis where you get together and meet you do.
George: Exactly. It was
Andrew: club.
George: exactly, this is right way to grab it. So it was like a Monday, Monday evenings. We sit around in the living room and everyone brings their various ideas. And we had like a three-stage process to, if we want to, as a group to make an investment in whatever company. And mostly it was just, we kind of, I think our charter was like for the enrichment of the partners, which was kind of our joke of saying we might end up losing money end of the day, but hopefully we learn a lot.
So that was kind of our explicit.
Andrew: No, I think that it’s a ton of sense. There used to be clubs like this a lot in this country. And at some point we, we stopped doing it, but. What were you gonna say?
George: Oh, I was just saying, I think that happened a lot with like, I think finance used to be the place. In terms of like, if you’re like a smart person, like going to finance, there’s like a ton of innovation and stuff going on there. And I think that’s probably why a lot of these things existed 15, 20 years ago more.
I think there’s a lot of really interesting stuff happening in finance, but I think a lot of people, I think tech has now the behemoth where it’s like, if you want to do something cool or like do something brand new or innovative, like I think a lot of energy gets sucked in that direction.
Andrew: Okay. So you guys got together, you learned a lot about, about how companies work about how you think about investment and more importantly, I think to this story, you got to know the other people in the group, then you’re looking for the next thing to do your two friends say to you, all right. Why don’t you just come and watch what we’re up to?
And so you’re watching, uh, and, and Visha, I’m pronouncing your name, right?
George: Yep, exactly. Yep.
Andrew: PI and max, uh, college.
George: Yep. You got it? Yep.
Andrew: Alright. Um, And what was it that they were doing there that drew you in? What was it? That was interesting.
George: think It wasn’t, there wasn’t much interest in going on. It’s more about how they worked together and like
Andrew: it was just the way that they think. And it’s like being in that fun club with them again.
George: It was, it was like a high level of like intellectual honesty of like, I don’t know is like an often as is the answer. And I think when you’re in the really early stages of starting something, I’ve, I’ve, I call this the last phase when you’re like sitting in a room with a couple friends and you’re like trying to figure out like, Okay.
so What are we building?
We have no customers, how’s this going to work? And there’s a lot of, I don’t know it was in there. I think sometimes people pretend to know a lot more than they do to kind of get the thing pointed in some direction. And I think for us, it was a willingness to be right. That I found very inspiring from both of
Andrew: you wrong about?
George: everything, um,
Andrew: are you, if you look back, what are some of the things.
George: just like very small steps of like, how the customer, like with like, how do you sell into recruiting?
Like, like to a hiring manager? Like, what is their problem with recruiting? Like what is their pain? Um, and for a long time we thought it was like tools, or we thought it was like, oh, you like need to monitor whatever systems or whatever. And at the end of day we found out like, oh, actually, yeah, Better candidate flow.
That’s all anyone ever really wants would like to see more, better candidates. Um, and I think that, that took us a minute to figure out and there like a lot of iteration, like trying to figure that out. And the thing that I really thought working with them is like, we can go have two conversations. You’re acting as like low data environments, which is hard to like, say anything inclusively, but like, you’re trying to make the best gasses.
And it was like, uh, no one was making a religious argument as to like, oh, this is exactly why this should work this way. Sort of thing. I was like, oh yeah. Okay. I guess it doesn’t work. Let’s try the next thing. Um, I think that. Patient iteration was, and having done them from before, knowing that they were like great people that was like, this seems like even regards to the subject matter, just like good people to work with.
And like, we’re going to figure something out.
Andrew: All right. How’d you get your first customer.
George: Um, so when max is. Um, I think basically what happened, and I think is lucky as all three of us had been founders before we had like reasonable networks, um, and basically was like, so you reach out to your friends when you have like, uh, like all products when I started like, not very good, cause they just started.
Right. Uh, and our plan was like, Okay.
we’re just going to see, like we know some folks, like let’s just ask them. Pay us like do some work for them, essentially. We’re gonna try to build a product as fast as we can, like solve their problems. Um, and that’s basically how we started. So it was a couple of Max’s friends, I think were like the first three customers actually.
Um, and it was just like, cool. Let’s go, go see if we can like, build something for them. That’s valuable.
Andrew: All right. And I guess you don’t get paid unless you find them the right hire. Right. And so they don’t have that much to lose. And meanwhile, they get a few smart people working on their, on their problem.
George: Yeah. And we quickly learned from that the earliest customers actually are just paying us a flat monthly fee because they were just getting our, getting our time is primarily Max’s on it. It’s just time. Um, and it was a little bit more of like, I remember, like on Vichy, we we’d go into the office and we had like this, like, you know, coworking space and we’d be like rushing in because we were like talking about some product thing or something.
Now they should have like run into the office being like, I need a quiet space. They’re like interview a candidate, you know, we’re like interviewing some like a random sales role or something for one of our customers. And she was just like doing the recruiter, phone screens and stuff. And like trying to figure that out, like learn if there’s like a product in that.
How do you hold a first phone screen? Uh, and trying to discover that just kind of through doing it.
Andrew: that may be the first phone screen. She was thinking maybe there’s something in the first phone screen that we could systemize that we could create software for. Got it. She’s doing the work, but also constantly in the back of her head saying, is this something that we could automate? Is this something that we could systemize?
Got it. Okay. Let me take
George: a year and a half to get there, to actually get that first round funding screen to that place. But we did, we did end up getting it from there. So it was all these things that just like early days of just doing a lot of brute force work that, you know, repetition and kind of learn how it works.
And you get to build a kind of an operational system around it.
Andrew: All right. I’m going to take a moment to talk about my first sponsor. It’s a company called overpass. Here’s the idea, George, a lot of us think when it comes to selling that we just need to create a better sales page, a better sales flow, and truthfully for a lot of products. It absolutely makes sense.
Right? If you’re trying to sell something on your Shopify store for $20, maybe with another upsell. Great. You don’t need any more than that. But when it comes to higher end sales, like a thousand dollars, $3,005,000 sale, you want to have a conversation with the customer. The customer demands a conversation with you.
The question is how can you add sales to your business sales calls, salespeople, sales, even sales emailers, where human beings who are customizing and writing the message. Well, that’s where overpass comes in. They created a marketplace where, what they have is salespeople. Sometimes it’s that hot shot person early in their career.
Who’s looking to just do work remotely to decide how much money they want to make and really take their finances into their hands. Sometimes it could be a parent who’s a stay-at-home parent. Who says while the kids are in school, I have a few hours and I’m not here to be a pushy sales person, but I’m more of a chatty sales person.
And if that’s your vibe, they’ve got that on their marketplace too. You go to overpass, you get a sense of who they are. You can hire them, you can bring them on board. You can use overpass the software to monitor the interaction, to make sure that they’re doing what they need to do. And frankly, you could spin it up.
You could spin it down. And the pricing is reasonable. In fact, I’m on there, I’m on this page and I’m about to get people right now. And I could see Nick F $12 an hour. Financial services. He, uh, he spent two years in and I could actually hit a button here and hear his voice. I’m not going to, I should also say it’s not just $12 an hour, $12 an hour and commission, right.
You’re giving them an incentive to close a sale. So if you’re out there and you’re looking to hire salespeople, you want to bring a voice to your sales process, a human being to your sales process. Overpass.com/mixergy. When you throw the slash mixer at the end, they’ll take great care of you. They’ll give you a discount that other people aren’t getting.
And more importantly, you’re just going to learn how to add this new tool to your business, to your toolset. Write it down. overpass.com/mixergy. Alright, you’re making those calls. She’s making those calls. You’re working. What’s the, at that point, you’re saying we’re going to do everything for our clients.
They just pay us per hour. How does that turn into a million dollar recurring business? What’s the next step?
George: So that’s a great question. I laugh because. In hindsight, it always sounds like, oh yeah, that’s how you got there. But in real life, it’s like, oh man, there’s a lot of iteration, a lot of struggling. So one thing that we learned pretty early on was people, the customer thinks they need, like, if you reach out to the right person, they’ll be interested in, we’ll come to join your business.
So we started with basically going through and sourcing candidates for customers and going through their interview. A candidate. So a lot of the companies are working with TV and I pull them on me to the bus, probably like most of them, like 40, even to say the most like 40% businesses plus or minus. Um, but I’m thinking of the first three customers, they’re all kind of 40% businesses as well, actually.
And they, you know, they have. ATS were a hundred cap, applicants have applied. No one’s ever reviewed them before. Um, cause the hiring manager is too busy or maybe they fall through the cracks for some reason. Um, and we’re like, okay, cool. We’re going to come in and like clean up all your stuff. Um, and when we start doing that, the first version of that first couple customers.
Okay, great. This is read through all the applications I was doing that really early days. Like I’m just a refill, the catfish applications and it, the good ones. And then next it was like, oh, okay. Well these 18 they’re called ATSs where these
Andrew: What’s ATS.
George: applicant tracking system.
Andrew: Ah, okay. That’s those Trello like boards where you get to keep track. Okay.
George: exactly, exactly. Right. So they’re the ATSs. And then we learned like, oh my gosh, these guys have APIs. So we start building. So we, our next thing is like, Okay.
cool. Let’s pull the data out of them and see if we can do this. Like still Georgian spreadsheet instead of flipping through the UI, like Georgian spreadsheet, didn’t throw them now.
Andrew: Oh, so you could take all the data. So basically the way these work is a candidate will apply. They’ll upload their, their resume. You’re saying that this software will let you let you George and this company that becomes Dover, suck the data out and then extract it in an organized way. So you can put it into a spreadsheet.
George: Well, the organization was not so much there for them. That was the hard part of figuring this out. But at first it was just like, I’m just reading a PDF resumes, then it was like, okay, cool. How can we turn those? Like, and I’m just trying to get through hundreds of these a day. Right? It was like miserable work.
Andrew: Yeah, but by the way, aren’t you, aren’t you, the person who told me that you went to a job where you had a stack of resumes and the boss said, let’s take half of them and throw it in the garbage. Right. Well, you want have to tell that story.
George: Yeah, no, this is a, this is also like part of the inspiration for recruiting in general, Because I think so much of it is luck, which is unfortunate for both the company and the candidate, or it’s just like, you may not get the best person and the best person may not get noticed. Um, so this is a goofy story.
Um, so this is three jobs different. Was that a startup? We were about a hundred people then. Um, I was on the finance team and I was tasked with hiring a financial analyst. Um, And so what I did, I threw up the job out on, I think I put it up on like LinkedIn and indeed like warrants for the websites. And I got like, I think like 200 applicants over the course of like a week.
It was like nuts. Um, and I’m like, this is the first time that really hard. And when I’m trying to be like super thorough and diligently do everything. So I’m just like reading all these resumes. I’m flipping through them on my screen and I’d spent many hours. My boss comes by when he’s like, what are you still looking at?
Resumes, man. And I’m like, yeah. And he’s like, what’d you gotta do. And I’m like, why would I print them off? That seems like ridiculous. And he goes, you got to put them all out and put them on a desk and take the top half and throw in the trash. And I was like, why would I do that? He goes, you got to do it because those are the unlucky folks and you want to work somebody unlucky.
And obviously he was like being facetious in this, but that really kind of that story really sticks with me. It was like, this is how a lot of recruiting decisions get made, which is there’s a lot of arbitrary luckiness things has to happen.
Andrew: Because who can sit and read through all those resumes and get the meaning of a person, right? If you think about my resume, it doesn’t really at all. Not really. It doesn’t at all capture what I’m doing. And so you were then. There, these, the software that our clients are using is spitting out these PDFs.
I need to make sense first you reading it, but then you say, I need to make sense of it in some way. How do you turn that into data? You can make sense of it.
George: Totally. So a lot of it.
was like, firstly, how to structure that data. I’ve saying that great. Like what are the different sections of a resume essentially, and trying to break it down to a scientific level and also trying to enrich it with other data sources as well. So, okay, great. They may not, maybe they said this on like, you know, their GitHub account or they like wrote all those Kobe.
Didn’t mentioned that they’re like big Python users in their resume or something like that. And the customer is really hung up on, like, I need them to have like a lot of Python experience.
Andrew: how do you, how do you extract that data from the PDF in the first place? And then how are you enriched?
George: Exactly. So there’s like unique identifiers across the person, right? Like some of it can be as simple as like an email address. And it’s like, there’s only one email address per person and you can match it. Or like maybe it’s the get hub URL in that, in that resume, right. That links to it. And you can map off of that or something.
Some people have really bespoke names and you can map off those things as well.
Andrew: I know you’re doing manually or you’re using something like what Clearbit to do it
George: No, that’s all we can. We’re able to pull these different sources. We have a bunch of different data providers we use to.
Andrew: But when you were doing it back then, and just
George: Oh back. Oh, oh, a hundred percent, man. I’m just like looking on like, I’m like logging into my gov account, like Sandler hunter. What did this guy do over here? Like I’m doing,
Andrew: just manually doing it. There was no software. Is there software that will take a PDF and extract all the key data and put it into a, into a spreadsheet.
George: um, There are, and there are varying levels of goodness on that. We’ve ended up building a lot of stuff around this, um, to like structure, resume data. We had to build it in house eventually, but like, there are things where you can like, oh yes, somebody like you can write civil projects is as well that like plot a phone number or email address or whatever
Andrew: Got it. And so in the beginning you were doing that and putting it into air table and then is that right? So every time a client would get a new candidate, your, you first started reading it. Then the next step was let’s pull some software together that will extract the relevant data and put it in an air table where you in the beginning.
And we’re looking them up the way I might, if someone emailed me and saying, who are they? What have they done? And then adding it to your air table. You then create a software that would do that and pull that into air table. And now you’re starting to deal with structured data. It’s still Georgia evaluating it, but it’s now Georgia evaluating structure data.
And I’m guessing once you have structured data, you could eventually say we can have software evaluate whether this is important or not. Got it. Okay.
George: That was, yes, he’s rebuilt the whole business in that, in that paragraph. That’s exactly what happened. So it was like good. It structured, then start learning like how to evaluate folks. Um, and how do we match with that hiring managers looking for.
Andrew: This seems like it seems so elegant when you said no code solution. Like, oh, of course. No code. It’s great. But in reality, we’re looking at chaos that has order, but also. Someone needs to pull out the meaning from it. And it’s still you in a spreadsheet, pulling out the meaning and saying who on the Kanban board that is our hiring process should get to move from one step to the next.
And you’re using the spreadsheet to tell you that and eventually to trigger a, move, a message to, to move their card. One step over in the Kanban boards to your client knows it’s timed. Right? Got it. Okay. That’s that’s what you’re trying to do.
George: That’s exactly right. And, and you’re talking about that, like, come on bone of like moving those people across. That was that process when I was trying to describe it and you actually discriminate a very elegant way now, so it’s like, they’re at a stage. Do we advance them or not? And what does that trigger point?
Does that make that decision for that? And that’s what Dover is also around. Like, let’s make sure, oh, the hiring manager decided yes, they passed my take home assessment. Right. Great. Let’s schedule the next round interview for them. So that’s where, you know, after doing a bunch of scheduling, you kind of like learn the processes.
Like how do you schedule an interview? How does this work? What’s.
the best way of doing this? What are the systems around that? And that’s that really, that process driven part of our software.
Andrew: Okay. But throughout what you were doing when you were doing no-code is pulling data from what your client already has, structuring it, evaluating it, and then pushing it back through the system that exists. And then. What of this can be structured better and what could be analyzed by software instead of human beings.
And that’s the work that you did. It’s still a lot of work to get to a million dollars. I’m guessing that you also had, um, that you also have, that you also made money when you close a sale, that you were basically becoming headhunters at that point, right?
George: So we never really did the whole like, pay for hire thing. Um, because what we were doing was a lot of like cleaning of people’s stuff and all this process automation as all that we’re kind of talking about is that Trisha, what a head hunter does, a head hunter is more like. So you hire a head hunter, they’re going to charge you 20% of a higher, um, it’s typically kind of what the market yields.
So as you
Andrew: 20% of the hires first year salary.
George: year salary, so these things are often are in the, you know, if you’re hiring like an engineer making 150, like you spend 200 twenty-five grand thinks the math on that for 30 grand, if you’re paying 20%. Um, so it’s pretty expensive work essentially, but they have, uh, they’ve a really difficult business contingency recruiter.
They’re called contingency that had hunters, um, They have a very difficult business because none of the companies are invested in them. They have like a candidate pool they’re working with, are they like five or 10 really great folks they’re working with. And they’re just trying to put them in any company that can so they can get paid.
Um, and it’s a very, very tough business because the companies don’t treat them very well. Um, because it’s all like hyper transactional. Like I didn’t pay you anything. If you hire me someone great. I’ll pay you. If not, which I assume you’re gonna fail. That’s where I’m gonna pay this exhibit.
Andrew: All right. So then how do you get to, to a million dollars? W what were you charging? How many clients did you have?
George: Yeah, we probably had, I don’t remember the number of clients. I think we had, we were charging about $5,000 a month, um, for it. And we were basically like offsetting, you know, hiring a person going through and like trudging through resumes basically, and doing outreach to candidates and scheduling all these things.
And at the beginning it was like, we started to get some software. I say, like there was no software. It was like very, very limited software going on in this getting up to a million. Like there was like, you know, there were some. Between, you know, air table energy sheet that went to, uh, um, to, into Google to send out an email, like some of that stuff going on, we were using like a, a tool that had, um, an email tool called reply that IO back then that like was good at like sending bulk emails.
So we were like, they an API and it played nice was API. So we’re able to like send things from these different trigger points and you have a check box in a air table and it shoots off the email and that sort of stuff. So it was like very. No code tools there might’ve been like a couple of things that we were at both my both foundation and max are like engineers, like computer science folks from MIT. So they’re, they’re pretty good. Um, but early days it was really just trying to like, figure out the right product for folks rather than like trying to design the right system. Um, or like from our belief side, at least.
Andrew: $5,000 a year, 5,000 a month. You are basically getting 60,000 a year from a client. You need 16, 17 clients to hit a million dollars.
George: Yeah. Yeah. That’s Right.
Andrew: And what you’re saying to them is you’re going to hire somebody to look at resumes all day and pay them 60,000. Give it to us. We’ll do the same work. We’ll probably do a better for you.
That’s that’s an interesting, uh, model. I didn’t realize that, that there were resume readers were getting paid 60,000.
George: Oh, let me make one more than at least in the, in the valley and in New York, they’re making way more than that.
Andrew: To just go through resumes and say, this is a, yes, this is a no,
George: Oh, yeah, for sure. Like coordinate those interviews and stuff is it’s difficult. Like there’s a lot of moving bits in this, um, in these systems making sure like, oh, the candidate has
Andrew: it’s not just reading it. It’s it’s the candidate asks a question. You need to respond. It’s scheduling them. God, it it’s this whole thing. And is that when you said we’ve got our business, if we could just be, what’s the name of that role in a bit?
George: It’s kind of nice. So it’s close to recruiting, but recruiters do a lot more than that as well. Then just, this is part of what they do to some people call them sources. Some people call them recruiting coordinators. We kind of pick up different bits of all these different roles, but it’s not like a exact one-to-one exchange on these things.
Andrew: Why didn’t you go to Y Combinator? You finally nailed this. You know, the problem you guys are developers. You can finally sit down and code. Why do you go to Y con.
George: So max had been through Y Combinator before actually zinc the company referenced previously, um, had a great experience on Vichy. I really wanted to go through the experience. Um, I was more neutral on it. Um, so we went through it and it was, it was really wonderful. It was definitely something that, like I looked back on the experience and like, it wasn’t, since we were all been founders before, we all kinda like, knew How to get like the first couple of customers and kind of like do a sale and like, you know, promise something to not over deliver on it, like this basic business fundamentals.
Um, but the thing that I found really useful out of it was the open conversations about people struggling and like trying to find their next break in building out the business. I found that really inspiring. The people were so open and like sharing their problems. I could learn from their problems. The other thing that they gave me was like, they gave me a great language to talk about our business problems.
Um, they found really helpful. Like,
Andrew: they do that?
George: it’s just, I think maybe it’s one of the things like being around people who are working on, You know, we’re all working on very different problems, but it’s the ecosystem of like, oh, we’re all like trying to make our businesses work. And there’s this massive struggle with that.
And like one thing that like really entered my lexicon out of this. I previously didn’t talk about product market fit enough. Um, and it was, I was always thinking about it, but I didn’t really use that language to describe why I thought it was more important than we solve the product problem rather than like the sales problem.
And that was like a big mistake. I made my first company that I had learned, um, by the time I had gotten to Dover, but it was
Andrew: and I had a conversation about this, which you’re saying is your thinking in the past was if sales aren’t high, we need to sell more and get better at sales. Y Combinator said to you, if sales aren’t high, Get back to fixing the product. If you’re talking to your existing customers is better than getting new customers to grow sales, because that’s going to help you improve the product.
Right.
George: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly Right.
And I think that’s a, there’s a lot of ego checking that. Um, like it’s easy thing to say. I think it’s another thing, like maybe my product isn’t right. Um, it’s not, it’s not doing the right thing after I’ve had this like, vision that I’ve been working on for whatever hundreds, millions of hours sort of thing to say, oh, maybe, maybe I need to rethink this.
Isn’t quite the right thing. It’s not solving a person’s problem. Clearly enough.
Andrew: So I don’t understand that. I thought that Y Combinator was about how do you grow, focus on growth? The reason you’re there is to focus on growth. You can get growth so much faster by selling more customers than by fixing the pro the product, which may or may not get customers in the next, what, your three months in the program.
Right.
George: Yeah. Yeah. I think that there’s, there’s definitely like. that there’s, I think some founders get stuck in the phase of I’m gonna work on this project. Um, and the people will come up just to keep my head down, working on this thing and they’ll go, go get customer feedback. Um, and I think that that’s bad.
And I think that’s kind of what the, when we talked about, or when you mentioned growth and the part is like, you have to go out to market and like try to sell whatever it is you’re building to see if people like it enough to buy it. Because if people don’t like it enough to buy, that means your product might not be right.
So then there’s like a. You know, it’s not like, do you try to optimize the heck out of your sales process early days? I think that’s kind of the, and that’s what I try to do at my last business, which was wrong, um, was trying to do too much sales too earlier. And like, thinking about how to optimize the sales funnel when reality was like, let’s just make the product better.
Andrew: But I see that as a long-term solution to sales and growth doesn’t Y Combinator want short-term growth too. They want it within this. The, so how do you do that? How does fixing the product gets you there?
George: Yeah. So I think it’s a lot about like, it’s about learning the problem. And I think that that’s going to be something like, when we talk about like, Dover’s. Product. It was a bunch of, like, I’m saying as much as spreadsheets and air tables and things all tied together and stuff. It was very easy for us to change stuff quickly to try to meet the person’s problem.
So I don’t, if you want to call it like product work or just listening to our customers needs, maybe that sales work. And it’s kind of, I think it’s all kind of mushy in some ways, like we’re asking them what they want. Their tone is one thing. Right. Okay, great. That we should either decide to go build that thing or not build that thing for them, then, you know, try and deliver that solution that they need.
So I think it’s kind of. Translating that wherever the market is saying, it’s like something actionable, um, that we can go do as a business, like solve the pain.
Andrew: Did your sales grow while you were in Y Combinator? Or did you just spend time? They did. How,
George: Yeah. I bet you, they went up. I don’t know. They probably like doubled or something like that. Like are,
Andrew: No, I’m in, what did you do that? Get them to double them, but that’s impressed.
George: it was like, It was a lot of like, just putting ourselves out there more, which I think people shouldn’t be scared of. And just asking more people like, Hey, would this be useful for them?
And then also just like trying to build really quickly. Um, and we’ve built a lot of product breadth. Very fast. And I think this is because it was so little code. It was just like, okay. Yeah.
we’ll out his app. And we’ll do that thing now too. And we’ll talk to this other spreadsheet that does this other thing that you guys need to happen.
Um, so we were able to help tackle all people’s problems quickly. So we built like a horribly unsustainable system, early days. Um, but that was kind of on purpose to try to, to try to get the growth and to get like, learning about the market, to learn people’s problems more deeply.
Andrew: So first set of customers came from you going after your friends and your team’s friends. Right. Which is great. Did you also use, uh, the, the Y Combinator network since max was in it before to get customers? I’m imagining.
George: Very little, um, most of our, actually his friends from MIT, I think who were like, who were like founders of other businesses and stuff that were, you know, like I was saying 30, 40, 50% businesses that were like had growing pains that we were able to go help.
Andrew: Okay. And so then the next batch of customers came from what being in, why comedy,
George: It was mostly word of mouth from the first batch of customers. Um, I think that was the I think if you have good product market fit, most of your sales should come from other people talking about your product, that people are excited about it. They’re hanging out with a friend they’re having a beer or whatever there, you know, and like hanging out at the beach.
And they’re just going to bring this up, um, that this is like, oh yeah, we got this new thing. It’s really cool. It does XYZ. And we’ve been really enjoying it. And I think that’s the strongest kind of. That’s always the best time market is the best kind of sale. Like even to today, we don’t do any, like we’ve done like essentially very close to zero marketing.
We’ve done like zero outbound sales. It’s always been people who are interested in trying it.
out and want to learn about, they’ve heard about it from some way. Probably a friend is most likely.
Andrew: That sound was me. Actually look trying to look at your site on a, uh, on a private browser to see, to see what you’re doing for traffic. What? I don’t see anything. So I went to SEMrush my sponsor to see what are you doing to get traffic to your site? I don’t see a lot. I see that you’ve clearly been improving since let’s say December of last year, since January of 2021.
Right. But I don’t see a lot of content marketing there. Right.
George: No, it’s, it’s pretty basic. Um, we we’ve, like I said, it’s been mostly product driven. I think that something that we’ve cared a lot about is trying to build something that people will be really excited about, that they’re gonna talk. Um, and that’s really, like, I would say 90% of energy, which was actually making fun with max this morning.
We were looking at our website, um, And we were discussing like, well, you know, we, there’s not a very good call to action on it. It’s like, I think it’s like book a time to talk or something like that as I call to action, which is like very weak. Uh, and we were discussing like, we should probably
Andrew: It’s get in touch.
George: get in touch. Great. Thank you. Yeah.
Which is like not the strongest call to action. So we were just gonna say, maybe we should change it up, but I don’t know. It’s been our website for, I dunno, five, six months like that doesn’t have been much changes. so. it’s probably time for us to like go back And lean a little bit into this is a little bit bigger and like try to make, optimize the systems of it
Andrew: And you should, you know what, and you should go sign up for SEMrush. Go use my free account mixer.com/semrush. You know what I, it’s not, I don’t want to downplay it. What you do. One of the things that you do that is smart is you’ve got these tools, right? Like you have a, uh, what was it? You call them tools.
But there’s the rejection email list where I give you my email address. You give me a bunch of rejections that I can send out to candidates who I didn’t hire, which is incredible useful. And I imagine people are searching for it. You also, uh, created the one soft landing website, which is. Whenever there’s a company that does lay offs.
I remember coming into this when Dropbox had a bunch of people laid off and I think I saw it on hacker news where there was this post that said we are adding it to our site where you can hire people from Dropbox. Right.
George: Yep. Exactly.
Andrew: that’s smart. There’s somebody who’s doing some kind of search engine optimization, some thought about marketing, right?
George: Like search engine optimization might be a charitable way of talking to order. I think we think of this very basic, like, please create some value for some folks. Um, and like the, we call them, like you said, like those tools are just like free things that we think are cool. The, the one soft landing one started during COVID, um, cause there was a ton of companies that did massively offs very early in COVID and we was working with the companies.
I’d right?
We don’t work with candidates. So we’re sitting there. I think we’re like a six person company when COVID hits and we’re trying to figure out. Okay. Like we might enter, you know, the stock market halves. We might enter like a huge recession here for God knows how long, maybe recruiting. Isn’t really a thing we had done kind of like a, a moment with ourselves around, like, what are we going to build?
And one soft landing. It was one of those things that we were like, okay, cool. Maybe we can like help candidates find jobs. Um, how can we do that?
Andrew: Oh, that was you trying to rethink your whole business model. Oh, that’s why of all the tools. That’s the one that has its own domain. And the business model was going to be what,
George: We didn’t know, it was just like, we kept the existing business running and were, but we were like kind of hedging our bets of like, this might not like the market may not want our solution anymore. So we started doing that just as like a nice thing to do, um,
Andrew: market research. That’s a nice thing. Maybe market research, maybe all these people will tell you. God knows what it’s like. I don’t know how to find the right company. And then you create the company search tool. Got it. Wow. I had no idea. I do remember those times where. People were laying off and it seemed like wow, recruiting was just a terrible business to be in because companies are going to be scaling down for a long time.
And we might’ve been overbuilt with recruiter. Got it. All right. I want to find out what happened to you during that period, but first let me close out, uh, the, the mention of SEMrush. In fact, I might as well just turn it into an ad for SEMrush George, whenever your team is ready to do content marketing to say.
Tools are great, but let’s not sit around and Intuit what we think that the world needs. Let’s see what they’re searching for. What are our clients searching for? What are they searching for? And leading, it’s leading to our competitors. What are competitors doing? Crap, job doom, right? You can just go in search for one of your competitors.
See the keywords that are sending traffic to your competitors. See the pages that it’s going over to, and then say, you know what? We could do a better job than they did. They’re getting kind of lazy to have improved it in a while. And they’re getting all this traffic from it. We’ll copy that and improve it whenever you want to start thinking that way in a systematic way, I’m going to let you use well, I don’t, it’s not going to be around for long, so you better use it quickly.
It’s mixergy.com/semrush. They’re going to let you use it for free. And it’s available for a limited time. And I know it’s a limited time because that after each mention they turn it on and then they turn it off. And then I get a bunch of emails from people saying, Andrew, this doesn’t work anymore. And keep emailing me.
Cause what I do is I take them one at a time and I send them over to SEMrush and SEMrush will activate just those people. But if you don’t want that interaction, just go, jump in and use it right now for free. All right. mixergy.com/semrush. Okay. Uh, when it, when it hit, you’d already raised money, right? So you had some money in the bank.
So you were safe. How much did you raise?
George: 3 million.
Andrew: 3 million.
George: was in the August. Um,
Andrew: Oh, so months before and then months before. And then at what point did you say we’re going to rewrite everything that we did into our own software?
George: That was when, uh, John joined our first engineer on the team. And I think he saw what, uh, max had hacked together. He was like, oh Lord, this is not going to get you guys much further than where we currently were. Um, so, um, that’s when we really started rewriting. So I think it was like September after he joined, we did this, uh, Very goofy thing, early days where he was kind of like learning how Dover worked in like, cause we had this very large product space that was very much a mess.
Um, and so one of the things I think this is like his second week at work and we we’d just gotten an office as well. Um, and he said, he came in one day, we’re doing some product planning meeting and he’s like, Hey, what if we do like a, whatever, like a firefighter schedule? And we’re like, what, what does that mean?
Like it help me ramp up faster. I’m like, Okay.
Yeah. Well what’s a firefighter schedule. And we’re like, what if we. Live in the office for like four days straight. And then we take a three-day weekend and I can just like focus really deeply on that for that time we can, like, we can like rebuild a lot of stuff very quickly.
It will all be in the same room together. And it’s not like being distracted by customers and stuff. And we were like, Okay.
cool. So we did a one week firehouse where we all just bought air mattresses and like slept on the office floor for a week. Um, And did that. And then like he ramped up and we like rebuild a lot of our code base or like code base.
During that time, it actually turned into like, you know, got into like, uh, we like moved off of like air table and like Postgres and like started building like proper things. Um, so that was kind of during, during that phase early on the company’s life, we also learned for you to do a firehouse, you have to have a shower in the office.
It was not pretty, but by the end of it, that was a, that was learning for us.
Andrew: I do wish that all offices had showers. I mean, as someone who likes to run into work, I want a shower as right. You’ve sleep in at the office. You want to shower people cycle into the office, uh, shower. I don’t, I don’t need a foosball table. I don’t need any of those other benefits. Just give me a private shower.
I don’t want anyone else in there.
George: You don’t want your coworkers like.
Andrew: No, no coworkers. See my legs. I should just go in there, shower up and then go into work. It’s such a, it’s such a helpful tool. All right. And so you built it up and then revenue is now growing. You’re understanding how to talk to customers about your product and then the product when you built it.
The first version did what, when it was all software, not editing.
George: That’s actually a really, so I think there’s like dairies parts. There’s like the move off of air table, which I think is like a defined the company’s life. But there’s still like things that we do today that we know are manual that we need to automate, um, over time. And I think there’s like a large part of that in our DNA as a business around we’d rather ship a new feature, just do it manually for the first month and see how it works for a customer.
And then, oh, they’re loving it. Great. Okay. Now let’s like put it on the product roadmap and start building. Um, so I think that that’s still, so I don’t know if there’s ever like a moment where I was like, Dover was full. Autonomous. I do remember the time we got the resume reader to work, which was a big win for us.
Like that’s me going through like all these things. I think that was, I think it was February. It was like right before coronavirus happened. It was like, that was when we really got that thing working. Um, and like, everything was actually like, I like, they weren’t like reviewing candidates anymore and that was a huge, huge win for us.
Andrew: Okay, then coronavirus hits people start doing layoffs, by the way. What I love about that site that you created? What is it? One soft landing. It’s beautifully done, but it’s, it’s done using Webflow. So you’re just quick. And then I said, how are they putting all this data into some like structured system?
You’re not a lot of companies just happen to have spreadsheets with the people who volunteered on their company after they left the Republic. And so you’re just linking into that, which is phenomenal. Some of these companies have email addresses of the people who are like. Others just have LinkedIn contact information, some have gotten real detailed about the kind of work that they’re looking for when they’re available.
All you did was just link to that. I just love the, the speed at which you work. Yes.
George: Yeah, it was a, it was very base. I think we built that in like a week or something like that was really what it was. It was just like, get something out there. And then we were lucky, I guess like after Corona, like. We had a couple of months where I was like, Ooh, things got a little hairy. And I think By basically about this time last year is when things started to pick back up again. So I guess June, um,
Andrew: companies were shutting down April. There was a, there was an iffy anise, March. Things were shutting down. Uh, may you guys were in what the hell? Tartar territory. And then June comes around and you’re back. And the reason that you’re back as I understand, yeah. Companies interest let go of their, their team of people, members of their team.
They also let go of their recruiters and now they needed to build back up because they also were scared and didn’t think they were going to hire. It turns out that in certain spaces like tech, of course, it was just a huge growth and they needed someone to help them grow fast. And that’s where you guys came in.
George: Yep, exactly. If there was a huge, it was a huge boom. Like people, there’s a bunch of demand. All of a sudden, I think that people are really, I think a lot of businesses really over-corrected I’d actually be, I don’t, I’m sure. Some, someone smart we’ll do some sort of survey at some point that’s like of the businesses you have these large layoffs, like, you know, was that, was it the not, was it the right move at that time?
But if you had it over again, would you have done it? Because I think in that.
Andrew: question.
George: And I think that, like, I hope someone who goes and does that analysis and says, I know there was like a huge, I remember like toast laid off, like half the employees or something. It was like 1200 people or something crazy. And so people like really went to that extreme.
And I think a lot of businesses really over corrected. Um, and then they were kind of sitting there
Andrew: some business that over-corrected, but also a new, tell me, anecdotally, I’m hearing that there’s some businesses that overcorrected, but actually ended up liking, going slimmer and starting again stronger. It, it really hardened. The, the team made them smaller, you know, got rid of a lot of other expenses.
George: There’s, there’s definitely a thing around also like writing out a problem together as a team that makes a team really strong and really high-performance and trusting as well. So I think that there, there were like a lot of like silver linings on the cloud of it. Um, but I think that’s one of the reasons that like, we really kind of took off afterwards as well.
So it was kind of, I think it was a nice, we got tailwinds out of it after the initial molar And being very nervous, then it was kind of tailwinds for us.
Andrew: And it was a lot of word of mouth where people were coming back to you. And at that point, You were, what was it that attracted them? The we’ll just put out the resumes we started. Well, I guess the thing that you were offering was if they put their, their, uh, jobs up on job boards, you would then help facilitate the rest of the process up to.
Well, for including sometimes talking to the candidates, reviewing the resumes, et cetera, and then sending them a stream of people. They could talk to, not a big spreadsheet with all of them, but three a day. And then the next day, another three, and they just need to follow up with those candidates, but they know that George and his team at Dover, they vetted this, these group of people and they just have to focus on the top people.
George: Yeah. That’s exactly. That’s it? Yeah, it.
was. It’s Like in some ways it’s like very, very simple. I think the other thing is around like helping figure out where where’s the right place to post the job. You can go spend a bunch of money on different bunch, a bunch of different platforms. And what’s the optimal one.
If you’re trying to hire, you know, an it specialist is going to be a very different place. So you want to post your job is you’re trying to close like an account executive or you’re looking for like a,
Andrew: I, that seems like that might be intuitive at this point. What’s what’s the surprise place to
George: well, I think some people say like, so I would say if you’re trying to hire an it person, I’d put that on. And I would not put it.
on LinkedIn. I’d put most 80% of your spent. So you have to figure how much we’re going to spend on advertising all these different platforms. Right. I think like, indeed really, really great at those positions.
If you’re out like an account executive, like LinkedIn’s a great place to post those jobs and put a bunch of money behind those ads to drive, to drive those folks in. Because at the end of the day, like sales people spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. That’s a great place to advertise to them on. Um, so there’s a bunch of different, we call them personas internally, but like, Based on that persona, you’re trying to hire for, there’s an optimal strategy to get there.
It actually can save companies money at the end of the day as well.
Andrew: And you’re also helping them write that, um, that ad,
George: Yeah. You, The job description. which is an ad at the end of the day. Yeah, that’s right, exactly right.
Andrew: so essentially it’s, they place the ad with your guidance. You give them the best candidates for their needs.
George: We actually post the ad forum now as well. So they said, Hey, we’re looking for X, Y, and Z. We say, great, here’s the right recruiting strategy. Go get this person that we think is going to save you the most amount of money and gives you the best people in the door. And then we’ll March those people, those candidates through the recruiting process as well.
Andrew: I wonder if we even need to mention the end-to-end Gnomon like of the marketing team with you. I wonder if you need to mention the end-to-end recruiting process. I wonder if it just needs, uh, give us your, your, uh, job openings and we’ll give you the best candidates.
George: I think that’s a great way to describe it, but yeah.
Andrew: Uh, but yeah. Uh, and what are you charged for that?
George: So, yeah, so companies start with us at $3,000 a month, um, is how they start then is based on the number of jobs we’re supporting for them and their company size. So it kind of, there’s a spreadsheet that we calculated with, um, around how much to charge.
Andrew: Wow. How long did it take. This, this basically nailed it. Then now we’ve got a business that makes sense at a time when people are looking for it. Right. And you, now it seems to me, you know, what you need to do, which is just automate more for your customer, right?
George: It’s It’s it’s taken more of the problems that they’re having. And like, as we get deeper and deeper into it, like there’s this forever more problems. Like one of the things we haven’t been bitten off yet that we really want to do is like on-site scheduling, which is very complicated at a 40 person company, because you have your CEO and your head of whatever who wants to talk to me, your head of this other group, who wants to talk to me, I’ll make sure the schedules line up and stuff.
And that’s something that like, we’re going to be building product around. Um, kind of, we know we have to do, it’s just a matter of when basically.
Andrew: it’s how to unify everyone’s calendar into one set of availabilities of the CEO and the, uh, head of corporate social responsibility needs to be there with S with the recruiter, from the company, you need all their calendars to line up with the candidates calendar, or to present the candidate with all the availability
George: Exactly. And like, one of the tricky things with that for example, is like the CEO might be in backpacks all day. Um, but some of those meetings are movable and you have to kind of like figure out which ones are moveable. It’s like, oh, great. The kid can come through on this day then. Um, so it’s very, these are like tricky problems to sort out that we’ve just kinda been burned them down one by one.
Andrew: Wow. The, the rest of it seemed easy. How do you know when a meeting is moveable? They have
George: Yeah.
Andrew: it somehow.
George: Is there like this heuristics is how you start always on these things. Right. So it’s like, if I see it’s a one-on-one and they both have the same email address or like same domain then like probably moveable. Cause it’s a one-on-one check-in sort of thing. So you can move that stuff around. Um, there’s all sorts of things like that you can get into.
Andrew: One sec, George, Olivia DDB.
No, we’re going to fix it. All right. Can you give me five minutes? Yeah. All right. I’m keeping this in the recording. So Olivia is giving a big presentation to the company and I’m the it person in the house. So I’ve connected her into internet. And she’s saying that there’s some kind of lag in our system, which I don’t know why there would be, and I’m going to fix it.
You’re working from home, right? You think you’re going to do full remote?
George: No, we, we actually, um, just put, I think we’re going to be split. So right now we’re about 35 folks in total and there’s about 12 in San Francisco, 12 in New York and the remaining folks kind of scattered around and we’re in it, I think with both the New York and the San Francisco office, um, since folks want to come in.
Andrew: I think that I think we’re overestimating, people’s willingness to work from home, right? Like, look at this, there’s a lag in internet. We have two different Comcast business internet. Somebody’s got to solve it. Right. And make sure that it works. They’re not, it’s not Comcast. And then there are all these other random things that come up from working from home.
Um, and, and one of them is just. You want somebody to be there, to talk to and to work things out with, um,
George: I’ve been to the office once. Um, uh, she has a co-working space and when I met with her and one other person on the team and it was like such a rush of like, oh my gosh, I’m like out of the house, I’d like, put real pants on. This is like nuts. I got to like talk with people in the, like in the real life.
This is crazy. So I don’t know if that was just like my excitement about just being out of the house. And That was like novel. Or if it’s something here to stay, like, we’re pretty, at least our business, we were treated as like very open around, like, what do people want to do? And like, whatever works best for them, we don’t really cares.
Whatever you have most fun with. Um, but I’m curious to see, like, do people come in just a couple of days a week and that’s what it looks like. Or do people love coming in or people don’t like it and in a year from now we just don’t have offices. No one likes it.
Like I could see a total state change like that as well happening.
Andrew: All right. The website for anyone wants to go check you out is dover.com. I fricking love that domain. How much do you pay?
George: Um, I don’t remember. I
Andrew: Such a good domain name. Even someone like me who can spell, can spell it. D O V E r.com. I want to thank the two sponsors who made this interview happen. The first, if you’re doing any kind of content marketing, or if you’re doing even social media marketing, that’s content marketing, too.
You need to go see why so many people who I interview are using SEMrush and the best way to do it is to go get it for free. Right now I’m giving you a URL. Available right now for free. If you go to mixergy.com/semrush, SEMrush is S E M R U S H. And I want to thank my second sponsor. If you’re hiring a sales person, if you say to yourself, you know, maybe we should add a voice, a human being to help close sales, to help bring sales in.
Go to overpass.com/mixergy. They’ll take great care of you. They’ll give you a great price. If you use that URL and frankly, to see your option, you should know that you can hire people to be the voice of your company and to help close sales, overpass.com/mixergy. George, thank you. I’m going to rush out and go help Olivia with tech support, but I appreciate you coming out here and I’m hoping the two of us, you get to have a drink at some point.
George: Thank you for having me.
Andrew: Thanks man. Bye bye everyone.