SaaS Product-Market Fit: Stop Selling and Start Building

Omer (00:10.000)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I talk to George Carollo, the co founder of Dover, an end to end recruiting automation platform that helps companies to find and hire top talent.
Dover uses advanced matching software to identify the perfect candidates across all recruiting channels and drives the hiring process for companies and candidates.
In 2019, three friends teamed up to launch a new SaaS startup that all felt the pain of recruiting in previous companies and decided to to solve that problem.
They got their first 10 customers without even having a product or website.
In fact, at that point, they didn't even have a company or product name for the first nine months.
They solved the problem manually for customers.
The team would review resumes, create a short list of candidates, and then connect the right candidate with the right companies.
And by taking this approach, the founders were able to better understand customers and identify exactly the right problem that they should solve with software.
But growing beyond their initial customers was tough.
They sent about a thousand cold emails to recruiters, which turned out to be a waste of time.
They hired writers to create content, but they couldn't find anyone who understood the problem, market and data well enough to create meaningful or useful content.
Nothing seemed to be working.
And then Covid hit and suddenly things looked even worse.
Not only were they unable to acquire customers, they were now struggling to keep the ones they had.
The founders then made an important but risky decision.
They decided to stop selling and instead focus all their time on building a better product.
In this interview we explore why they made that decision, how they turned things around to get the business to $4 million in annual recurring revenue.
It's an interesting story, but what I really love about it is the super simple approach the founders have taken to build this business and how they got their customers without a product or website.
So I hope you enjoy it.
George, welcome to the show.

George Carollo (02:27.030)
Thanks so much for having me.

Omer (02:28.110)
So what gets you out of bed every day?
What inspires and motivates you to work on your business?

George Carollo (02:32.310)
Maybe I'm a bit basic, but for me it's really just around like I want to leave the world a better place than what I found it in.
So like when I die, this maybe sounds a little dark, but when I die, basically I hope someone goes up and says George did X, which was really cool and hard to do and it made a bunch of people's lives better.
So I'm hoping to kind of have that impact, I guess.

Omer (02:50.660)
Yeah, a bit dark, but good way to get inspired.
So tell us about Dover.
What does the product do?
Who is it for, and what's the main problem that you're helping to solve?

George Carollo (03:02.020)
Yeah, so we are an end to end recruiting orchestration platform, which sounds very jargony.
So let me kind of break down what that is.
We basically, our goal is to make hiring effortless for hiring managers.
So what Dover does is we basically help discover candidates for companies and then also move those candidates through the recruiting process for our users.

Omer (03:25.950)
Got it.
Okay, so you guys founded the company in 2019 and your co founders are Anvisha and Max, who was actually a guest on my show about two years ago.

George Carollo (03:44.790)
Yes.
With his other company.

Omer (03:45.830)
Yeah, with his other company, which I think is.
Let me just look that up.
Episode 208 is where we talked to Max before.
So tell me about like, how did you guys, how did you guys get together?
How did you come up with the idea for this business?

George Carollo (03:59.350)
Yeah, so the get together story goes way back.
So Max and Avisha both know each other from like freshman year of mit.
And then I met Max and Anvisha socially probably around six years ago or something like that.
Max and I had done a little bit investing work together and Anvisha is now married to my best buddy from Stanford.
So we've all kind of known each other socially for a very long time.

Omer (04:20.610)
And then how did you come up with the idea?

George Carollo (04:22.770)
Yeah, so all three of us have been founders before and worked in startups.
And one of the things that kind of came out of it was like we realized when we were trying to figure out problem spaces and stuff to work on, and Max and I actually did this even a little bit before I joined was we were like, hiring's a problem for every company.
All of our friends complain about it all the time.
When I go and have beers, I complain about it to my friends about how we can't find anyone who's good.
And we're like, this seems like an interesting problem to tackle.
So that's basically how we started the business.

Omer (04:51.380)
And you had a little bit more experience than your co founders because your previous company was sort of in a similar space, right?

George Carollo (04:58.580)
Yeah, at my previous company we sold tools to recruiters.
So Max and Vicho basically were like, we're going to do recruiting.
And I was like, okay, cool.
And I had just left my previous business and I was like, I didn't even really know If I want to do recruiting again, to be quite honest, I was like, oh, I kind of maybe had my kicks with this guys and what, we basically hung out with them for a couple months.
And, like, it's pretty rare you get a chance to work with two good friends on a project.
And one of the things I've learned throughout my career is that betting on the people is more important for me, at least especially early stages, than like, the exact idea, because the idea is going to change, you know, as you learn more and more about the problem you're solving.
Or sometimes there's massive pivots as well.
So I was like, well, I'll just take the jump and like, I'll work with two of my good friends and like, let's see what we can.
Let's see what we can pull up now.

Omer (05:40.350)
You know, often we hear that, you know, whatever space you're going into, having a deep understanding of that market is really important to be able to understand, you know, the nuances and, and really figure out what people in that market need, what their problems are and so on.
Now, you had some experience, but your co founders didn't.
What was it about this space that you guys felt like, yeah, it's interesting, but we also believe that we're the right people to go and solve this problem.

George Carollo (06:09.180)
So I think we'd all had, like, on the user side, we'd all hired people before and been through that, and we all have our own stories going through this.
Like, Max's previous company, I think, was 30 people or something like that.
And he was just like, it was always a dog for him to find good people and bring them on.
When I was working at a startup in San Francisco, this is probably, I don't know, five, six years, six, seven years ago now I remember I was hiring the first person on my team.
And so I throw up my job ad on LinkedIn and all the standard places.
Indeed, whatever.
And I just get like a million applications.
Just a million.
And when I say a million, probably like 200 or something like that, but like some very large number.
And I just sat down.
I remember one day just like flipping through on my desk and I was just like, trying to get through these resumes.
And my boss comes like, what are you doing, George?
I'm like, I'm trying to go through all these resumes, take like five minutes each.
This is terrible.
And he's like, man, you should print them all out.
And I was like, why should I print them out?
And he's like, well, you should Print them out, cut em in half, take the top half and throw out the bottom half.
I'm like, what do you mean throw the bottom half?
He's like, you don't wanna work with someone who's unlucky.
And I was like, oh my God, this is like crazy.
Like, and he was making a joke, obviously, he's a very funny guy.
But like there was some truth to like the, this process is very broken.
So it's been kind of a thing we've all known for like many, many years.

Omer (07:16.430)
Okay, so, so you've got the idea.
You think there's an opportunity there.
How did you guys get started?

George Carollo (07:21.170)
Yeah, so at the very beginning, basically it was friends.
It was like primarily Max and Avish's friends who were like founders of other businesses who we just went to and like, hey, you guys trust us.
We like to think we're smart people.
We'll give it hell for you guys.
And they trusted us and we owe them a lot for that.
And we just started doing real basic services, recruiting stuff.
There was no technology at all at the beginning.
And we were just like, let's just see if we can solve these problems with these hiring managers.

Omer (07:46.630)
Okay, great.
So let's talk about that because that's, you know, a lot of founders are like, well, I've got to build a product and to build a product I need the money and so on.
And you were like, no, we're going to, we're going to test this a very different way.
So tell me a little bit about like how that actually works.
Like, so if you've got somebody who agrees to work with you guys, what was happening?
Was there even some sort of, you know, website or sort of concierge mvp or was it just them emailing or phoning you and saying, hey, do this for us?

George Carollo (08:18.320)
Yeah, it was very much the latter of those things.
Um, I don't even think we had the name Dover until we were probably at like 15 customers.
Like we didn't have a name.
There was nothing.
There was like no landing page.
There was basically nothing.
And the way it worked to kind of.
So there's like three of us on the team.
This probably the way it worked for the first 10 customers was like essentially like on Visha was doing like the, like basically doing like sending out emails to candidates and like doing the first round interviews for our customers and just kind of like doing all that hands on work.
My job was largely to, to do like just doing resume review.
So the exact problem I was kind of making fun of My old boss for telling me to throw half of them out.
Like that was basically my job for the first couple months was like, learn how to read all these resumes and try to parse through them really quickly.
And then Max was doing a lot of our sales work.
And it's kind of funny I look back because both Max and Alvisha are engineers by trade.
That's like what they studied in school and what they've done before.
And our disposition was like, let's just understand our users problems.
We weren't really sure what we wanted to build yet.
It was like not super clear to us.
So we just tried to like solve it as it's been solved for forever, which is like just do the work yourself manually.
And then our whole idea is like, well if we figure out how to optimize our processes, then we can start building technology around that.

Omer (09:23.630)
Love it.
And so were you charging for your service, your product?

George Carollo (09:28.910)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, most definitely.
I think that's one thing that we knew early on we had to charge because in some ways it's kind of like getting customer validation.
Like if you just do it for free, it's like it's unclear if you're creating any value for them.
Right.
Or they just feel like they're doing you a favor sort of thing.
Where if you're charging leasers like this exchange of like, well you.
It's expected that we create value and it probably also makes us work harder at the end of the day.
Cause like they've trusted us so we gotta like, you know, do it right for them.

Omer (09:54.600)
Did you say you got about like 15 customers that you were working with that way?

George Carollo (09:58.920)
Yeah, that was.
Yeah, it was like incredibly manual for like the first 15 customers which you know, I look back to Pro, the first like, I don't know, nine months of the company's life, there was like very, very, very little technology.

Omer (10:10.180)
So how long did you do that?
Like how long did it take to actually build a product?

George Carollo (10:16.020)
Well, I still like to think it's.
Our product's not even done yet.
Like our RE0, my mind still hasn't even completed and we're tears.

Omer (10:20.859)
And you're not still pretty out those resumes, are you?

George Carollo (10:23.460)
Yeah, like that's so like we, we, we got that part working that took us three months to get the resume review part working and getting that done in an automated fashion.
But, but like we've been kind of like incrementally biting off different parts of the product.
So the product we have is as I kind of Laid out like, there's a huge surf product service area with us.
It's like, how do you find candidates and then like move them through this recruiting process?
There's just like a million steps in that.
And so what we've tried to do is basically like, try to automate and build nice product and like nice user features around the things that are like most repetitive and most straightforward.
And we're continuing to kind of like burn down that funnel, if you will, of like, things that have become more and more niche.
And so we're still, I think, six months off, if we're lucky, from actually having the whole thing working end to end.

Omer (11:06.380)
So is there still some aspects in the backend that are still happening manually?

George Carollo (11:11.100)
Yeah, there are.
And parts of those things I think will stay probably forever manually.
Like, for example, like we perform interviews for our users, so we'll serve as a candidate.
Our user says, oh yeah, that looks like an interesting person to talk with.
I'm really busy, can you like do the first interview for me?
And we say, sure.
So that's the thing that Dover does that like, that will probably never be automated.
I don't know how you're going to automate a phone call.
So we'll forever have a team that does that.

Omer (11:33.270)
Okay, great, that's interesting.
So walk me through a little bit.
I mean, obviously we don't need to go through like every single feature, but just if we can sort of think about sort of a high level, the roadmap.
So you started off no website, no product.
It's basically we're going to be bodies and provide a service for these customers.
And then you did that for, I think you said, nine months or so.

George Carollo (11:54.540)
Yeah, probably around then.
Yeah.

Omer (11:55.700)
And then once you sort of introduced sort of the first version of the product, like what part did you sort of first automate?

George Carollo (12:04.620)
So I'll explain a little bit more how Devreau works and jump into that.
So we argue there's like three ways to get candidates, like three channels or sources.
There's basically, you can throw up job ads on various platforms.
Indeed, LinkedIn, whatever we call those inbound candidates, they apply.
There's outbound, which is reaching out to people proactively, call it through email or LinkedIn or something like that.
And then lastly there's referrals and all three of those things kind of funnel in.
We call it the Dover Brain.
But this is basically that resume parsing thing that we built.
And then from there we basically work on process automation for our users to make sure, hey, we Scheduled your first round, phone screen, how did it go?
Do we need to advance them forward to a second round and doing all that sort of work to actually push them through the stages of a recruiting process.
So that's what our product is at a very high level.
The, the first thing we tackled because we didn't know if it was possible frankly was like, could we get resume review to work?
So that was the first.
When we started really building product, that's what we were focused on because it was the largest unknown for us.
We knew we could build integrations with these other tools.
We knew we could build the process stuff.
We didn't know if it was possible to actually build the right algorithms to actually review resumes in a thoughtful way.

Omer (13:03.930)
And explain to me a little bit about how does that work?

George Carollo (13:07.770)
Yeah, so it's a combination of a lot of heuristics and a lot of different machine learning models to basically solve the problem.
So that's basically how we tackled it.
And when we first started off, it was more rules based.
And as we've gotten more and more sophisticated over time to be able to hone in the algorithm, it's constantly a work in progress.
We're making it better every day.
That's become kind of the, like the main thing that allows us to do all this stuff at scale is that,

Omer (13:29.670)
is that algorithm and how do you measure that?
How do you know how well it's working or not working?

George Carollo (13:37.070)
It's a great question.
So part of our flow is we always want the hiring manager's buy in for the candidate before we move them through in process.
Right.
Otherwise it's a waste of everybody's time.
So what we do is when a candidate raises their hand and says, hey, I'm interested, we basically show that candidate to a hiring manager in Slack.
So we have all these Slack integrations set up and basically the hiring manager says, oh yeah, that person looks interesting.
I definitely would be interested in talking to them and then if so then we'll move them through.
So.
So there's actually a really great quality metric for us to track because we see basically of the folks that the brain is presenting, essentially like what percentage of them are being approved by the hiring manager.
And that basically helps us understand whether we're calibrated or not.

Omer (14:17.180)
Interesting.
Okay, great.
Okay, so that was like the first part that you, you guys started to build.
Let's talk a little bit about how you found customers that like you didn't know.
So you said, you mentioned like the first 10 was sort of like you know, friends and stuff like that who had companies.
But how did you start finding strangers?

George Carollo (14:40.650)
That's a really great question.
I think that's like.
I think it's really hard to do.
For what it's worth, the business timing with COVID and stuff actually is quite kind of interesting here, I think.
So we're.
I don't know, probably call it like end of 20.
I guess it'd be 2019.
We're probably like, I don't know, 15, 20 customers.
Something in that ballpark is my guess.
And again, most of us, like you said, are friends and friends of friends, things like that.
And we didn't have much word of mouth or anything going.
So we started running a couple experiments there to see could we basically increase our customer base.
And we tried two different strategies, both of which didn't work.
So the first thing we tried was, Max was like, well, let's just reach out to some companies and see if they'd be interested.
We'll show them the product, tell them how cheap we are, and see if they'd be interested in trying it out.
Basically, we got a big zero in that.
And we probably ran the experiment for a couple of weeks or a month or something, and we're like, okay, this isn't very good.
And in hindsight, it should have been more obvious to us.
There's a ton of recruiting products out there.
They're constantly reaching out to companies, promising them the world about how they're going to help them hire Elon Musk to come run whatever for them.
So we're like, okay, so that was great learning there.
This is not going to be our way of doing this.
The second thing we tried was some content marketing.
We were a really small company.
There's like six of us at that point, I think, and not a.
We basically didn't have much time to, like, write all the content and do it in a thoughtful way.
So we're like, what if we come up with the idea and then we can, like, outsource it?
So we contracted with a firm that does this, and they were supposed to generate, like, good content for us based off of, like, you know, we send them like a paragraph thing or turn into, like a nice fleshed out, thoughtful article.
And that didn't work out very well either for us.
And I think a lot of us do with like, A lot of our content is very data driven, and they just didn't have the ability to, like, trudge through our database and, like, have these interesting insights, like, do that actual, like, heavy lifting to come up with the article and make it really thoughtful.
So that was kind of our other failed experiment at that stage.

Omer (16:28.860)
And so, like, is that something that, like, for example, are you guys still like writing the content yourselves?
I mean, obviously you have a bigger team now.

George Carollo (16:38.860)
Yeah, so that's.
Yeah, that's exactly what's happened.
So we went through Covid, had a bit of a lull.
Then after Covid, I think we basically we stopped trying to do sales, like three months and just really focused on building the product out.
And I think we got a lot stronger product market fit during that phase is what happened.
So I guess like the world kind of aligned to make us work on our product more instead of worrying so much about sales, which I think was 100% the right.
Like, I feel very lucky that that happened to us and that really pushed us.
And I think that's when we started to get kind of good word of mouth was after a product.
Just like we fine tuned it and worked on it and became better.
And I think that's when people started to talk about it.
And that's really how I think has driven most of our growth, basically.

Omer (17:15.770)
Yeah.
Let's go back to the outbound for a little bit.
So Max wanted to do this.
What did you do?
Did you send cold emails?
Were you kind of cold calling people?
What kind of outbound were you doing?

George Carollo (17:27.610)
Yeah, it was cold emails.
It was like standard crunch base, like figure out companies that are out there that are trying to grow quickly, just raised a big round of money, yada, yada, yada.
Like Very like, I think standard, like sales things and you know, put them in, dump them into some like, mail merge tool, like send a bunch of emails and like, see if people respond, see if people respond back.
And we just, we just got very little, very little lift from that.

Omer (17:50.580)
How many emails roughly do you think you sent out or to how many people?

George Carollo (17:54.260)
I guess that's a great question.
I'd probably guess in the order of like, I don't know, five hundred, a thousand, something like that.

Omer (17:59.580)
Okay, so it was a decent sample to.
To go and test with.
It wasn't like, you know, you, you reached out to like 20 people?

George Carollo (18:06.580)
No, no, no.
Because we wanted real data.
Right on.
Like, is this a thing or not?
And like we even did.
We even tried to do like smart things.
Like, you know, we're a y.
Companies are like, okay, what if we have the other YC companies?
What if they're interested or something like that?
Because maybe we have this common bond or something.
And I think the problem is that recruiting is so noisy.
Even today, as a recruiting business, I think this is kind of funny.
I probably get one or two emails a day offering development help from some recruiting business.
And I'm like, we're a recruiting business.
Why are you reaching out to us?
We use our own product.
And I think that that's.
I think kind of this shows how, like, noisy this market is, essentially.
So I think it's kind of like a.
It's a tough strategy, I think, for.
For businesses in this space.

Omer (18:45.770)
Yeah.
The thing with Outbound is that if you're sending emails out and you're not getting a response, it's like, is it because you're.
You're talking to the wrong customers?
Right.
Maybe your list, you just don't have the right list of people that you should be going after.
Or is it that you're talking about the wrong problem that they don't care about?
Or is it just the message that the way you're delivering the message and articulating it doesn't sort of come through?
But the challenge there always is like, okay, if somebody goes through this process, like, maybe somebody's doing it right now and they're sending out hundreds of these emails and they're not getting any response, it's not that hard to kind of get to the point where you just say, well, maybe this just is not a great idea.

George Carollo (19:30.310)
Yeah, I think it.
I think it varies a lot on the product as well.
Like, if you're a product that's actually, like, something that's like, brand new, no one's ever thought about doing it this way before or like, no one's ever seen things like this.
I think this is a compelling strategy for us.
A lot of our product is around optimization and throughput and educating our users with metrics about, like, what to expect in the recruiting process.
And I think that's a much more nuanced type of thing to try to sell and that people are going to talk about it and trust each other and trust their friend about this, and they're going to be like, oh, I got some, like, email telling me that they're like, my recruiting pipeline is messed up and I need help.
Because everyone thinks that they're doing it the right way.
And that's kind of a contrarian thing to post out there.
So I don't think that that's.
It's just something I think is likely to resonate with a lot of users.
And that's why, basically why we pull.
We just, like, stopped doing it pretty early on in our life we ran the experiment and just got bad results from it.
Like, let's try the next thing.

Omer (20:23.830)
Yeah.
And I think cold email is especially challenging if you're targeting people who already had a lot of cold emails and almost have kind of numbed out to them.

George Carollo (20:34.440)
Most definitely.
I'd say of our user base, I'd say there's probably of the 100 different companies we're working with today, probably 80 of them are between 30 people and 80 person companies that we work with.
And those folks we work with, the founders who work with the head of pick a team, sales, engineering, customer success, whatever, these people are just inundated with this sort of stuff.
Like they're not gonna like be like, oh yeah, hey George reached out to me, you know, cold and yeah, that sounds like a great product.
They're gonna be like, I don't care.
There's like 17 people ping me every day about random products.
So I think it's a very hard group to chase after like our user base.

Omer (21:09.110)
So I know before we started recording you mentioned that just sort of pre Covid ballpark you were probably, you'd got to about a million in ARR.

George Carollo (21:19.910)
Yep.

Omer (21:21.030)
But how did you fill that gap between the friends and friends, friends customers and getting to that number?
Where did the other customers come from if it wasn't outbound?

George Carollo (21:32.020)
There probably mostly was friends and friends of friends at that point still.
And some early referral stuff that someone had a good experience with Dover and they told their friend about it.
And that's how we got to that first 25 customers or whatever that number was.
I think it was all basically driven off of that.
Our content stuff didn't really work and our stuff didn't really work.
Those are just feeble things.
And that was kind of like pre Covid basically.
I think it's kind of where we ended up.

Omer (21:57.250)
So there's no, you know, we were talking about this earlier as well that there's no pricing page on your website.
Can you tell me a little bit about like how are you pricing the product and also why you chose not to put a pricing page up.

George Carollo (22:12.290)
Yeah, it's a great question.
So I think it's basically like our understandings of the world is like if you have a product that's more than call it, you know, probably 250 bucks a month, like a pricing page may not be the right solution because it's, it's pretty rare that someone's gonna like just whip out their credit card and pay for your product without having to talk somebody and like, kind of building some trust essentially and learning more about the product because it's a higher price point.
So that's why we've always opted away from doing a pricing page.
Our pricing is also.
As we've gotten better at delivering our product, we've been able to do it for cheaper.
Like, we're heavily.
Like, when we started, we were pure services, right?
As we were describing, it was like Max on V should be just running around with chickens with their heads cut off, like, trying to make it work for our users.
And as we've gotten better and better and better, we've basically been able to do a ton more work for work or Dover can do a lot more that run their processes for them in an automated way.
We've been able to give them a lot, lot more.
And I think that's ultimately our vision for Dover is to be like, just have the most awesome user experience.
It's exceptionally easy to use product and gets you exactly what you want.
And it's also really, really inex.
Like, my hope is that, like, when I think of like, really great products, they like, they kind of nail both of those things.
And you know, if you.
Whenever you're talking about a great product and your friend isn't using it, you say, why aren't using this thing?
This is like, obviously the best choice.
Like, doesn't cost anything and it's like going to deliver you a ton of value.
So that's where we want to pushed over is in that direction again.

Omer (23:35.800)
And I just want to kind of get this clear that we sort of talked about sort of the initial customers.
You got to about a million arrows pre Covid.
And I know there was also a time that you sort of mentioned to me before that there were about like, you.
You got to about 20 companies and then sort of just was stuck there for a while.

George Carollo (23:57.280)
Yeah.

Omer (23:58.080)
Is that when you were trying all of this outbound and content marketing?

George Carollo (24:02.480)
Yeah, that was very early 2020 call, like January, let's say, for sake of argument.
So we probably were at 20 there.
And we're like, okay, so we tried these two experiments and then Covid hits in March, right.
And at that point we're like, oh, man.
Okay.
This is like, you know, probably, I don't know, 20, 25% of our customers are like, oh, we don't know if we're hiring anymore.
The world might be ending.
Like, the economy might totally collapse.
Stock market's down 40%.
No one knows what's going on there's.
Like a ton of layoffs and stuff.
So we had a conversation around like, well, what do we want to spend our energy at?
Like, we're fortunate.
We're like a six person company.
We're going to be here for a while.
We don't have to like, you know, we're not going to like burn ourselves to death.
Like, we're not going run out of money anytime soon.
So we're in a fine place.
And basically our thought was, well, let's just double down on building our product.
Like if people aren't hiring, we can't sell it and that's fine.
So let's just acknowledge that's what the world looks like and let's just like really focus on trying to build a better experience and like make our algorithm better and like build more integrations for other, other tools and all that sort of stuff.
So that's really what we focused on.
And so circa maybe like July or August, we really started to have an uptick in business.
And it wasn't from a concerted sales effort or anything.
I think it's actually just got our product market fit stronger and people started talking about us.
And also coincidentally, people then also acknowledged that the world wasn't going to end because of COVID And that's kind of when we basically had this big tale of growth.

Omer (25:25.490)
So when you felt the COVID hit, did you lose any of your existing customers?

George Carollo (25:35.420)
So yeah, great question.
So what we did with them is we basically said, hey, we know it's uncertain times, it's totally fine.
We'll just pause your use of the product and we'll just delay it for a couple months.
So basically we didn't charge them.
We just let it sit.
I think we pushed out to like May or June.
I can't remember the exact date.
But basically we put.
All of our users said, here's, here's an option if you guys want to like freeze and like not pay for bakes.
You're not sure what your hiring plan is, totally fine.
So we just kind of delayed it for, for all those folks.
Basically we tried to keep the relationship and try to do the right thing for them.

Omer (26:03.900)
And one of the reasons you were able to do that is because you'd raised about $3 million right from.

George Carollo (26:10.060)
Yeah, exactly.
So yeah, we were in a fortunate position that, you know, it's a six person company, so we're spending very little money.
We have like reasonable revenue coming in and we're like, okay, well we can just like our bank account was pretty full so like let's just sit here and do nothing.
We're not going to like do a bunch of hiring in our team because that seems like we're running into a brick wall.
So let's just focus on our product and like really double down on that.
So it's kind of a nice pure state.
And I feel very fortunate this happened to us during this time.
Like, I almost wonder like if I were to build a company again, would I actually just say let's get the first 20, 30, I don't know, whatever magic number of users and actually just pause for six months and like try to build like the craziest cool experience for those folks and then start trying to work on the sales motion and the marketing motion and like, like basically getting new customers again after that.

Omer (26:50.710)
How did you figure out what, what to improve in the product?
Like was this based on talking to customers or did you just guys have your own kind of list of crazy ideas that you wanted to kind of go and implement?
Like what was the process you went through to decide where you were going to invest your time?

George Carollo (27:10.310)
A bit of both, to be frank.
We talk to our customers every other week.
We do like a check in call with them and learn about the recruiting pipelines if they want to adjust their search and figure that out for them so we can change the algorithm on our end.
We try to be their thought partner and this is how we also coach them with data about what the market is saying about their position and how they have it posted.
So we got a ton of user basically feedback during this time.
So we're getting it out all the time anyways.
But we were really able to focus on it then, which was cool.
And then the other thing is, yeah, our product was so early stages that there was so much to build.
We also had a lot of first principle things that we knew we had to build to make it better for our users as well.

Omer (27:48.330)
So give me some examples of.
There was obviously work that you did on the product during that time that helped you to get to a place where the product things just started to click.
So can you give me one or two examples of what kind of improvements you made to the product that you believe helped?

George Carollo (28:09.370)
Yeah, great question.
So we observed that a lot of our, so our users, as I mentioned, they're founders, they're hiring managers, they're heads of various groups.
These are the main folks that we work with and they're always strapped for time.
And what we noticed was that when people get candidates further down their funnel.
So let's say you got an offer out the door or you got a couple people on the on site stage, you'll actually like stop interviewing newer people because you don't want to waste your time on it because you think you have a hire.
And statistically when you make an offer only it's you have a 50% hit rate on it.
So.
And we know that, but a lot of users think like, oh no, my company's in a great place, it's totally fine.
Like we get that one offer out, don't worry about it, George, we'll close them.
I'm like, okay, I know you got a 50, 50 shot, but you think it's like 100%.
So one thing we noticed through this was, okay, cool, like how can we make it for our users that they don't kill their pipeline?
They don't stop interviewing new people because then they're going to be really upset if they don't hire that person that they think they're going to hire.
Like, make sure there's a good backlog of folks for them to go through.
So what we built during the time is that's when like our Dover interviewer product came out.
So we said, okay, what if basically instead of the hiring manager doing those calls because they're too busy and they already think they got it closed, what if they just kick it to Dover and we do the first round phone screen for them and that way that they have a good backlog of candidates always.
So that is that product like came out during that time and that was kind of a thing like we observed, not that a customer asked for directly, but their actions showed that they weren't going to do it.
And we were just kind of reading in between the lines to figure it out what was the right thing for them.

Omer (29:36.810)
Love it.
How long did this go on?
Like this focus on saying, I mean basically during this time you were like, okay, we're not going to do any sales.
We're just going to focus on the product.
We're not even going to charge our customers for a while.
How long did that go on until you got to a point where you started to see new customers coming in?

George Carollo (29:59.040)
Yeah.
So I think we, so I think we did like, it was like a two or three month freeze on our users and said, hey, we'll just turn the product off for them is basically what we did and just kind of delayed it.
And then we picked back things up when they were ready.
I think it was, you know, Covid hits in March.
So it was probably Like, I think it was like July or August is when we started to turn things back on, really, and say, okay, cool, we're getting like a lot of referral people in.
Like, let's start like doing, like doing sales again.
So Max was, you know, out there like talking to folks and getting them in basically.
So that was kind of the, kind of the turning point for us.

Omer (30:31.120)
And these new customers were coming from word of mouth.

George Carollo (30:35.840)
Yeah, primarily.
Exactly.
So it was folks who were talking.
I think it's just because they saw the product improve a lot during those, during those months and they were, you know, as a user, like, oh, cool.
I can kind of like see the direction they're taking this business in.
This is a better user experience.
They're happier with it.
And yeah, it's basically just word of mouth, word of mouth driven.

Omer (30:52.690)
So were you doing anything within the product or your marketing to try and drive those referrals?
Was this some kind of, you know, virality built into the product?
Were you sending emails to customers asking for referrals or did this just happen organically?

George Carollo (31:12.690)
Primarily organically.
But you mentioned a really interesting thing there around asking customers for referrals.
So we started doing that around this time as well.
I think that's yielded, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15% of our user growth has been from actually just asking folks like, hey, you guys just made a hire.
Congrats.
Do you know of anyone else who would be helpful?
And Max actually wrote a pretty interesting blog around this around how to help.
What we do is we'd send them a list of like three or four of their founders they know or hiring managers that they know and say, hey, would any of these people be worthwhile introductions?
And that's yielded quite a bit for us.

Omer (31:45.580)
What was the blog post that Max wrote?

George Carollo (31:47.980)
I don't remember what it's called.
It's on our website under our blogs thing.
But basically it is like you can go to their, like you can go to their LinkedIn account and like filter on their second degree connections and you can see who they know that, you know, has the title you want.
So for us, our title we were targeting is like, you know, VP Sales Founder or like, you know, VP Engineering or something like that.
And we can just like generate a list of a couple people that they know that would be reasonable.
So after a user like had a lot of success with us, we would then go say, hey, here's for friends that you know, that we don't know.
Would these people be useful for us to connect With.
And normally people are pretty receptive to that, our users, and they send us one or two.

Omer (32:22.730)
And then you saw a huge growth in the last, what, six, seven months?

George Carollo (32:30.010)
Yeah, yeah.
I think we've 5X'd in the last, like, seven, eight months, something like that.

Omer (32:34.410)
So where's your MRR right now?

George Carollo (32:36.890)
Yeah, we just crossed 5 million annual a couple weeks ago.
Wow.

Omer (32:41.800)
It's been quite a busy year.
And the team's grown quite a bit since the six people that you had working on it.

George Carollo (32:48.040)
Yeah, exactly.
I think it's commensurate.
I think the team's out five exercises while we're around 30 people today.
So we've kind of been staying in line.

Omer (32:54.120)
You know what I really love about kind of what you guys have done is, I mean, obviously there was some benefits from the COVID bump or whatever we like to say, but the.
I don't think it's just about that.
I think there's this clearly something that you started to do around the product that has kind of helped to get happier customers.
And those customers seem to be more willing to tell other people about the product.
So that, on its own, I think, is a big part of this sort of the engine that you've built here.

George Carollo (33:33.430)
I think that's exactly right.
I. I always call these, like, shower thoughts, but you know, when you're in the shower and your mind is wandering, what are you thinking about?
And there's, I think, a lot of purity to having the whole team thinking about one thing, rather than like having Max really focused on sales and maybe me focused on marketing as our shower thoughts and on vicious thinking about product stuff.
But if we're all thinking about, like, how do we make this a better user experience?
Like, how do we make this product better?
And we basically just kind of, maybe we were forced into it, but also leaned into that state for a handful of months, and we really, really focused on that.
I think that's what helped us build the right things and build great empathy with our users and understand their problem deeper and try to come up with better solutions, just be more creative.
And I think that kind of committing to a problem in the most pure state of that, instead of trying to juggle 17 different things at the same time, is really, really helpful to building cool stuff.

Omer (34:25.350)
Yeah.
I also really like how, I mean, obviously the three of you have done this before.
This is not your first rodeo.
And the way that you have sort of approached this, where I think many, many founders sort of almost create unnecessary hurdles for themselves.
I can't Go and talk to customers until I have some kind of prototype to show them.
I can't do this until I have this.
You know, I've got to figure out my pricing and get it perfect before I can start selling my product.
And you guys have obviously taken a very different approach and everything from selling it as a service before you had a product, you know, not having the pricing page and kind of giving you some flexibility in terms of how you test and optimize there.
But there are other things as well.
Like, you know, we often think like, well, I've got to build this great website which has kind of got to do, you know, all of these pieces and you know, the Dover website looks great.
I'm not, you know, I'm not taking anything away from that, but it's like, you know, when I clicked on, like get started, I'm expecting a signup form and I get like a embedded type form on the page.
Right.
And it's still like, still really scrappy and I.
And you know, you guys.
And I love that.

George Carollo (35:38.790)
Yes, I appreciate that.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I would definitely describe us as.
I think this is.
Max is really incredible at this.
This is really like his strongest trait is he's amazing at duct taping stuff together and building flows from essentially nothing very, very quickly and testing things very, very quickly.
And I think that that's very much part of our DNA, which is try it out, see if it works.
If it doesn't work, just move on quickly onto the next thing.
And it's more of that kind of game.
And I think that I've laughed because the Typeform is 100% a max thing and, and it's exactly right.
Cause it does what it needs to do.
Everyone knows what it is.
Hopefully it doesn't turn too many people off, but it's something we could have spent a bunch of time building into our app.
But was there really going to be much gain from it?
Probably not.
You know, it was, it was like the right ROI kind of kind of calculation, I think on that.

Omer (36:25.900)
Yeah, yeah.
No, I know my friends at Typeform would love to hear this, but.
Yeah, I mean, just the fact that, hey, you know, like you can, you can build a seven figure SaaS business and you can do it with a type form or at least, you know, in terms of, you know, building the sort of the top of the funnel and, you know, acquiring customers.
You don't have to kind of over engineer a solution here.
Yeah, I love that.

George Carollo (36:52.390)
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And maybe our problem Lends itself more to this than other people's, you know, business problems are taking on or businesses are trying to build.
But like our first, I don't know, it might have been we were using airtables, our primary database, for embarrassing long amount of time.

Omer (37:06.190)
Wow.

George Carollo (37:06.590)
That was like our primary database.
Like we were using API and reading and writing out of it and stuff, but we didn't even have like a postgres instance or anything stood up for like a very long time.
So like that's the sort of thing where we were very heavily tilted on.
We don't know exactly what we're building yet.
So let's not overly commit to the perfect solution because we're not sure what it, what it is yet.
So we try to keep like really wide, like wide open eyes on that.
And I think it was probably until probably 25 customers is when we started to really, you know, until we kind of hit that lull that I was mentioning that we really started to like really become more opinionated as a product.
And when I look back, I think we actually probably were late doing these sorts of things.
We might have been a little bit too far in the extreme of like non committing in some ways to various things.

Omer (37:48.940)
Oh, but that's, that's a great point because I think a lot of, you know that a lot of no code type tools these days are really attractive to non technical people who can see a path to building something without being dependent on a developer.
But you guys, you've got, you know, max, you've got engineers on the team and you're still using these no code tools to build this stuff.
And that's great because again, it's like, do you want to build a great product and show people that you wrote all the code or do you just want to get something good enough out there so you can basically figure out whether you're going down the right direction or not.

George Carollo (38:38.610)
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And I think that goes back to kind of just like that, trying to.
I think it's such an art.
I think it's so hard.
I call it the lost phase of like when you don't really know what you're working on yet.
And that's probably up through like the first 10 customers, you're not even really sure what it is that you're building or the exact direction you're headed.
And I think that the technical problems in some ways are actually easier because they're more dead on and you can spend a lot of time building them.
But in the really early days, a lot of the value creation is in the experimentation and talking to a lot of people and trying different things out and just see if you can create some value for them.

Omer (39:09.420)
Yeah, yeah.
I just noticed the site still even has the made in webflow badge at the bottom.

George Carollo (39:15.580)
We should get that off.
That's bad.
That's embarrassing.

Omer (39:19.180)
No, this is beautiful.
I love this.
This is the reality.
Right.

George Carollo (39:21.820)
It's just like, you know, it's easy

Omer (39:24.360)
to show somebody like you know, some, some hugely polished thing and, and, you know, but it's great to get the insight into really what's going on here.
And I think it tells me, and hopefully, you know, people listening to this a lot about the way you guys.
It's not about the badge, it's not about type form.
It's about the mentality that you have to building this business.
All right, So, I mean, things have gone like pretty well over the last six, seven months.
Business is kind of growing and you're at over what, like 100 customers now?

George Carollo (40:03.810)
Yes.

Omer (40:04.530)
And again, it's like they're just like, what, 80%, I think you said, like were coming through like word of mouth.

George Carollo (40:11.810)
Yep.

Omer (40:12.930)
That's awesome.
And so what else are you doing now beyond just relying on that?
Like, how else are you trying to.
Or what channels are you testing or trying having some success with other than word of mouth?

George Carollo (40:27.580)
Yeah.
So now that we've gotten a little bit larger and there's more people on the team who are thoughtful and understand the problem deeply, we've gone back to content marketing, which has been probably where the other 20% comes from of our user base.
And our content marketing is still fairly simple in lots of ways.
It's like try to write something insightful and thoughtful and try to educate somebody on something.
So we've been doing a decent amount of that.
And the other thing that we've done that's been very fascinating and I would never bet would have worked, was whenever we bring someone onto the team, we celebrate it because we're all really excited that someone else is joining us to work on this.
But we share it on social media and it's amazing how many people will be like, oh, yeah, I saw so and so join your team.
So, yeah, we have this hiring problem and they just start talking to us and it drives a lot of leads for us just talking about other people joining the business.

Omer (41:16.350)
So how does the onboarding work today?
So I'm just looking at one of the blog posts.
There's no obvious workplace to sort of sign up for an account.
And even when I get to the bottom of the page, there's a little form where I can type in an email address and, and get updated and like, you know, get added to a newsletter.
So how is this leading people to that type form?
Maybe people are just, I guess drawn from the post and then wandering around the site.
Maybe it's just as obvious as that.
But once they've complete filled out the type form, what happens next?
Is it, is it still manual?
Like you're still having one on one conversations with customers and what's going on behind the scenes there?

George Carollo (41:57.860)
Yeah, it's.
Yeah.
So we basically at that point, once you kind of enter yourself not into the.
You're exactly right, Omer.
When you go through the, like read a blog or something, enter yourself in, you're just going to get the monthly content update, probably referencing about their blogs that are hopefully helpful to folks.
That's kind of all that flow is around, which is kind of more the marketing flow.
If you sign up for the product and go through that type form, then you're going to end up in sales land with us.
We still don't have any salespeople though.
Our chief of staff's kind of been our hero.
She spends about half of her time doing our sales work and having first calls with people.
So she's been absolutely amazing.
But yeah, basically you'll chat with her and she just kind of like shares about the product and wants to hear the problem to see if we're at all reasonable solution for folks and kind of help them think through it.
And a lot of times, you know, people are looking for something that we're not the right solution for and we try to be the first people to say, hey, here's the other folks that are the right solution for you given the lay of the land.
So you enter that and then if you want to move forward at that point, that's when we send you the onboarding, the onboarding process, like the application around like, hey, here's your job.
And we ask, you know, the app goes through and does calibration with you and all that sort of stuff around what you're actually looking for in your hiring.

Omer (43:04.990)
And then how do you, how do you get paid?
Do you send them a.
Just a standard boilerplate sort of contract or just an invoice?

George Carollo (43:12.910)
Yep.
Yeah, it's very basic.
Yep.
Just send them a, give them to sign a contract and send them an invoice.
It's very standard, like SaaS, like model there.

Omer (43:21.470)
Yeah.
Again, it's like you know, a lot of people will be like, well, I can't do that because I haven't, I haven't integrated with Stripe on my website yet.
So.

George Carollo (43:31.920)
No, we're very basic.
It's a hello sign goes out and if you like it, you sign it.
If you don't like it, then you let us know and that's fine.
Or we talk to you about it and then at that point, yeah, we just move you into the flow and try to onboard you as quickly as possible to get your job kicked off for you.

Omer (43:47.040)
I love it.
There's so much good stuff here and I think you guys have a great story.
I think you have really made some, some, some awesome progress in, in the last couple of years.
But I think there's just, I just love the, the approach that you've taken from day one to, to build this business out.
Maybe at some point we should get you and Max back and we should just dig into all the other stuff that he's been doing behind the scenes.

George Carollo (44:17.750)
Yeah, no, Max is, Max is very fun on these sorts of things, for sure.
That's awesome.

Omer (44:23.200)
All right, we should wrap up here.
So I'm going to go into the lightning round.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you.

George Carollo (44:29.040)
Sounds great.

Omer (44:29.520)
Just answer them as quickly as you can.
All right.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

George Carollo (44:34.400)
Probably from yc.
Just focus on product, market fit.
It's all that matters.

Omer (44:37.920)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why the goal?

George Carollo (44:41.440)
It's an operations like excellence book.
Essentially it's about throughput on machines.
It's very boring sounding, but it is an incredible reading.

Omer (44:48.830)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

George Carollo (44:52.750)
Move quickly, admit you're wrong very easily and move on.

Omer (44:56.510)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

George Carollo (44:59.870)
It's probably more of a habit for me.
When I create a document, I always put the date first.
Like date format, everything, so I can find stuff easily.

Omer (45:06.910)
What, in the file name or just at the top of the document?

George Carollo (45:09.550)
Yeah, the file name starts with the date.
Every time.

Omer (45:12.270)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

George Carollo (45:16.000)
Oh, this is what I'm really excited about.
So I've been talking with.
Someone should do this.
I really think someone should create a sandwich shop or like a burger place that really specializes in buns and breads and like the meat's kind of like whatever, but like they just like nail it on the carb.

Omer (45:30.560)
Love it.
I'd go there.

George Carollo (45:32.960)
Yeah, that's.
I want a burger with a great bun.
Like, that's what I want.

Omer (45:38.880)
What's an interesting little fun fact about you that most people don't know?

George Carollo (45:43.010)
I had a couple pygmy growths when I was growing up.

Omer (45:45.810)
Wow.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

George Carollo (45:50.930)
Work is nearly all consuming, but I really enjoy cars.
I like to try to work on them.
I'm terrible at it, so I mostly do drive in, but, yeah,

Omer (46:00.770)
love it.
So, George, thank you so much for joining me.
As I said, it's been a fun conversation and it's.
Congratulations on.
On the success you guys have had to date and thank you for giving us a peek into, you know, how you guys are building out the business and, you know, trying stuff out and kind of the lessons you've learned along the way.
If people want to check out Dover, you can go to dover.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

George Carollo (46:32.370)
Just shoot me an email.
I'm Georgeover, and I'll get you there.

Omer (46:36.220)
Awesome.
Thanks, man.
Wish you all the best of success.
And say hi to Max for me.

George Carollo (46:42.380)
Will do.
Thank you so much for having me.

Omer (46:44.060)
Okay, cheers.