First Customers·George Carollo, TopFunnel:

Dover: How to Get Customers without a Product or Website

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George Carollo is 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. They'd all felt the pain of recruiting in previous companies and decided to solve that problem.

They got their first 10 customers without a product or website. In fact, at that point, they didn't even have a company or product name.

For the first 9 months, they solved the problem manually for customers. The team would review resumes, create a shortlist of candidates and then connect the right candidates with the right companies.

By taking this approach, the founders were able to better understand customers and identify exactly the right problem to solve with software.

But growing beyond their initial customers was tough. They sent about 1,000 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, but they were also 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 and how they turned things around to get the business to $4M in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

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 initial customers without a product or website.

I hope you enjoy it!

This episode is part of our First Customers series.

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