Omer (00:11.840)
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.
Okay, today's interview is with Matt Mickiewicz.
Matt is the co founder and CEO of Hired, a two sided marketplace that matches high quality talent with the right job opportunities.
Previously, Matt Co founded 99designs, the number one marketplace for crowdsourced graphic designs.
He also co founded Flippa.com, an online marketplace for buying and selling websites, domains and apps.
And if that wasn't enough, Matt also co founded sitepoint.com as a teenager and grew it into a profitable multimillion dollar media company without any venture capital or outside funding.
And in 2011, Forbes nominated Matt to the 30 under 30 list.
Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt (01:18.110)
Thank you very much for having me.
Omer (01:20.270)
So I've told our audience just a little bit about you.
Tell us in your own words a little bit more about you personally and then give us an overview of your current product and business.
Matt (01:29.040)
Yes, on a personal level.
I've been founding companies since I was 14 or 15 years old.
I've never actually held a full time job anywhere working for anybody.
Not delivering newspapers, not flipping burgers at McDonald's, absolutely nothing.
I've always been self employed my entire life running Internet companies.
Omer (01:46.320)
Now, before we dive into more details, we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite success quotes?
Matt (01:58.010)
I'm going to cheat and give you two quotes.
One is from Winston Churchill.
He says success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
I think that quote aptly sums up the life of an entrepreneur where you're failing day in and day out.
Failing to sell customers, failing to recruit people, getting rejected by investors.
And you always have to maintain a sense of enthusiasm and belief going forward that you'll be successful in the end.
The second success quote I picked out for this is a quote from Mark Twain.
He says, to succeed in life you need two ignorance and confidence.
I think a lot of disruptive innovation happens from people and individuals who are ignorant about an existing industry and who haven't been educated in past failures.
So they have this strong belief that they'll be able to come in and make an impact.
Obviously confidence is absolutely necessary when either your number one job as a co founder or CEO is selling your vision to everybody around you, to prospective customers, prospective hires, prospective investors, the media, so on and so forth.
Omer (03:02.000)
Now, I'd love to talk about all of your businesses today, but we just don't have enough time, unfortunately.
So I'd like to spend a little time hearing your story from the early days of Site Point through to what you're currently doing with Hired.
But I think the main theme of this conversation is really how you've managed to build so many successful marketplaces and what our audience can learn from that.
Before we get into that, let's talk a little bit about you.
Where did you grow up?
Matt (03:28.700)
I grew up in Vancouver, Canada, though I was originally born in Krakow, Poland.
Me, my brother, my mom and my dad.
We immigrated over to Canada in 1991 when I was only seven or eight years old and we settled down in the city did you always know that
Omer (03:44.180)
you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
Matt (03:46.010)
Yeah, I think I was probably the only kid in elementary school who had a subscription to Fortune magazine and posters of Bill Gates hung up on his wall.
So I was an avid entrepreneur.
I knew I wanted to either start my own company or go into Wall street and banking in one way or another.
Omer (04:02.570)
So how old were you when you launched the first iteration of what became
Matt (04:05.850)
sitepoint.com I think I was probably 15 years old.
I launched the first iteration on April 1, 1998.
I remember that date very specifically.
That's the date that the price of a two year domain name registration dropped from $100 for two years to $70 for two years.
And given that I was paying for it out of my allowance, that $30 difference made all the difference in the world to me.
So I waited to register my first.com domain name till the price dropped.
Obviously I have a lot of regrets now.
I could have bought so many other many, many better domain names back then, but I didn't have the foresight to build a domain name portfolio, unfortunately.
Omer (04:43.650)
What was the domain name that you bought?
Matt (04:45.250)
The first domain name I bought was webmaster-resources.com not only was it a two word domain name, but also a hyphen in the middle of it.
Omer (04:54.770)
Where did the idea for this business come from?
Matt (04:57.650)
The idea was very, very organic.
Basically in 9697 I got onto the Internet for the very first time.
I started teaching myself about web design, web development, search engine optimization, which in those days consistent of keywords, stuffing white text on a white background to rank number one on AltaVista or Excite.
But I was going through a process of learning web development and Internet marketing.
I basically started compiling a list of all the useful Resources and tools and websites I was finding along the way.
I shared it on a website, and that website became immensely popular.
And that sort of spawned the idea for SitePoint, which became a massive online magazine and online blog.
Before the word blog existed for developers and designers around the world, it was at one time One of the 250 most popular websites in the world.
Omer (05:43.780)
So you had this idea, you bought the domain with your allowance.
What did you do next?
How did you get this thing started?
Matt (05:51.220)
I just kept pushing out awesome content.
And because they were very, very low, there was very, very low competition.
Back in the day, it actually was quite easy to amass hundreds of thousands of unique visitors on a monthly basis to their website.
Then success just spiraled from there.
USA Today featured their website, LA Times featured their website in their newspaper, and so went from there.
It was very organic.
I worked 40 hours a week on top of my day job, which was attending high school.
Omer (06:19.180)
And you were doing this all by yourself?
Matt (06:21.260)
I was doing it all by myself, literally working till 10, 11pm at night, answering phone calls during my lunch hour at Starbucks, replying to emails in the computer lab during recess breaks at school.
Omer (06:35.070)
And how did you start making money with this business?
Matt (06:37.550)
Initially, I used advertising networks to just post banner ads where I would make 75 cents or dollar per click back when people were still clicking on banner ads.
Eventually companies started approaching me directly, offering to do ad deals.
So during the height of the dot com bubble in 1999, the business was immensely profitable, and I was doing $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 direct ad buys with some of the biggest publicly traded Internet corporations in the world.
Omer (07:05.640)
At what point did the business transform from webmaster-resources.com into sitepoint.com tell us a story about that.
Matt (07:15.720)
Yeah, so in the fall of 1999, the business was really getting out of hand in terms of success.
It was much more than I could handle by myself.
And I started exploring the possibility of either a sale of the business outright to another company, a web hosting company, or finding a business partner to help me take it to the next level.
And I chose the latter route and met a guy by the name of Mark Harbottle, who happened to be based in Melbourne, Australia, who is the marketing manager at a software company that made HTML editing software.
And basically me and him decided to start the business together, formally incorporated in Australia, file the legal documents and split the equity and build something substantial.
Omer (08:01.150)
And why did you guys change the business to sitepoint?
Matt (08:05.070)
Yeah, the Webmaster Resources name was really awkward.
Not only Was it really long, but had a hyphen in the middle of it.
So I still remember a particular day when a very big computer magazine printed a full page feature article about their website and they dropped the hyphen from the URL that they printed at that point, that it was a very good time to rebrand and find something better.
Omer (08:26.800)
Okay, so you had this idea.
You've been working hours on end while still at school building this business.
You're generating revenue, you have a partner on board, you're getting great publicity.
What made you want to launch another business?
And which Business came next?
99designs or flip up?
Matt (08:45.760)
99designs was the next business that we launched.
It didn't come until eight years later.
So we had survived the dot com crash, the NASDAQ bubble bursting, the implosion of virtually every VC funded company, or so it seemed at the time.
We pivoted into book publishing as our primary revenue model and just hunkered down for eight long years, just slogging it out day by day.
We grew the business a little bit, but certainly it wasn't a rocket ship as you see today with the Airbnbs and Ubers of the world.
But in 2008, we noticed a really interesting thing happening within the SitePoint community, which was this thing called Photoshop Tennis.
Essentially, designers would create made up fictional projects and compete against each other to see who could do the best job.
At the end of a defined time period, usually one or two weeks, they would declare a winner and somebody would be like the reigning champion for that week.
Eventually what happened is that some other website owners stumbled upon this game of Photoshop Tennis and they started offering real cash prizes for real graphic design projects.
That's really how the initial idea of 499designs was born.
Omer (09:52.320)
And why did you launch it as another brand?
Why not launch it as part of your existing business?
Matt (09:58.080)
Yeah, so I think a brand can only stand for one thing.
And SitePoint stood for educating web developers and web designers.
It certainly did not stand for crowdsourced graphic design.
And as we saw a broader array of small business owners coming to SitePoint's version of this crowdsourced marketplace, dentists and spa owners and hair salons and brick and mortar stores.
We knew that in order for this to be really successful, we needed to have its own separate identity, its own separate brand.
It was actually really, really hard to find.
If you go on archive.org and look at some of the early versions of this site back in late 2007, early 2008, you'll see, it was just a tab buried among hundreds of other things on the site.
So if you're a dentist looking for logo design coming to sitepoint.com, the first thing you'd see on the homepage is an article about some JavaScript framework or a PHP tutorial.
So it's very unintuitive to say the least, but people were still finding it.
It was really, really amazing that it got so much traction in such a short period of time without us really putting up a strong working effort behind it.
Omer (11:06.380)
In most cases, entrepreneurs will come up with an idea, and then these days, with the lean startup movement, it's about going out and figuring out how to validate that idea.
But with 99designs, it sounds like the idea came from what you saw was already happening with your existing business.
And by understanding the behavior of your users, was that really the validation for you?
Matt (11:31.860)
Absolutely.
I wish I could say I dreamed up this idea myself, or that Mark dreamed up the idea himself, but it was really something that started naturally occurring in the sitepoint community and that we just facilitated by building some software and spinning out as its own separate company with its own team and its own brand name.
Omer (11:48.900)
How did you manage running both sitepoint and 99designs?
It's hard enough for most people to run one business, but by now you had two businesses on your hand.
Matt (12:00.630)
Yeah, so we basically split, split the company and dedicated specific people to specific areas of the business.
So it's very, very intentional how we did it.
We didn't have developers working across both businesses.
Everyone was assigned to a specific company and I really took the reins in terms of marketing and PR, 499designs, going on the public speaking circuit and doing upwards of 40, 50 interviews a year to cement this idea of crowdsource graphic design into America's psyche.
Omer (12:31.030)
Now, it's no secret that building a marketplace is really, really hard.
Although you seem to make it look easy with your multiple successes.
Tell me about how you went about building that marketplace for 99designs.
Matt (12:47.030)
Yeah.
So for 99designs, the biggest challenge was always customer acquisition.
The designers signed up en masse, organically, through word of mouth, simply by us showcasing the volume of projects and the volume of payouts that were occurring monthly.
So I think most marketplaces, you're either solving the supply side or the demand side of the problem.
Over the long term, obviously, initially you're trying to build liquidity on both sides, but over the very, very long term, you should be taking 80, 90% of your focus to one side of the marketplace.
If you're actively trying to push the boulder up the hill for both sides of the transaction.
It's really, really hard.
Can be very, very difficult.
Omer (13:27.450)
So how did you handle that in the early days with the chicken or egg problem?
How did you try to build that demand on both sides?
Matt (13:34.490)
Yeah.
So for us, SitePoint.com was visited at that point by millions of designers and developers every single month.
So we were able to easily transition enough designers over to 99designs to make the entire thing viable on the small business front, initially, it was all organic and word of mouth.
Over time, we put fuel in the fire by investing a great deal in PR and ultimately AdWords and small business conferences and different advertising channels targeting small business owners in general.
Omer (14:02.620)
Did you bootstrap the 99designs business or bring on investors?
Matt (14:07.020)
It was bootstrapped and initially funded out of our own pockets from capital we had earned through sitepoint.
Omer (14:12.940)
Okay, and how long did it take you to get to a point where you really felt like you had some traction with that business?
Matt (14:20.520)
Probably six months to a year, I think.
The business was already generating tens of thousands of dollars a month in revenue before we formally spun it out as 99designs.
So it was incubated in SitePoint for quite a while before we made the decision to dedicate resources to it, to incorporate a separate business entity for it.
Omer (14:40.200)
Looking back at Those days with 99designs, what do you think was one of the biggest mistakes that you made?
Matt (14:48.550)
One of the things that we did earlier on is we tried to engage a lot of the skeptics for 99designs.
One of the things that often goes unsaid is that we had a huge volume of hate mail and hate blog posts about us because we were asking designers to work on spec.
Essentially, the Designers participating on 99designs were submitting graphic designs without the guarantee of payment.
And that was very, very controversial among the American instit of graphic artists and several other individuals and associations.
And we spend a large amount of time and energy trying to bring these people over to our side.
Unsuccessfully, of course, because they viewed us as an existential threat to their job, their profession, and their career.
Omer (15:33.490)
And so looking back, what would you have done differently maybe, to handle that situation?
Matt (15:38.850)
I think we wouldn't have spent as much time trying to use logic and arguments to bring them over to our side.
They weren't going to be users of 99designs one way or another.
They weren't going to be advocates for a brand one way or another.
Another.
They're just staunch critics who, you know, acted in their own best self interest, which is, you know, charging $10,000, $25,000 for logo design.
Whereby we were really trying to democratize the process and allow designers to win projects and win clients based on their own merit, not whether they wore a fancy suit and worked in a downtown Manhattan office and where they had a degree from some fancy school.
Omer (16:15.150)
Okay, so you've got, you've now got two businesses.
Both of them have got some traction and they're.
And they're growing.
When did Flippa come along?
Matt (16:24.810)
Flippa came around 16, 17 months later, in the summer of 2009.
And once again, it was an entirely organic thing.
After spinning out SitePoint.
Sorry, after spinning out 99 designs from SitePoint, we saw the volume of revenue, of contests, of designers increase dramatically.
And we thought that the same principle, the same model would apply equally well to website sales, which was still being incubated within SitePoint.
Give it its own brand, give its own identity, give its own dedicated team, and watch organic growth take off.
So we decided to pull the trigger and follow the same playbook, essentially.
Omer (17:00.560)
It kind of sounds very similar to like, you know, the way Richard Branson has built out like the virgin empire by building these companies one at a time and then making them sort of standalone businesses and hiring the people to come in and run those businesses and then going on to the next thing.
Matt (17:15.529)
Exactly, exactly.
Omer (17:17.769)
So by now did you feel like you had a more well baked process for building out this next marketplace?
Matt (17:28.409)
Hired actually started off almost by accident.
I was in a pub with some friends after doing a panel, after doing a Marketplace panel in San Francisco.
And we were just debating our biggest problem, which was recruiting and hiring.
Both me and my co founders obviously had scaled businesses in the past, and at 99designs at one point we were working with like 30 different contingency recruiters and it was just a miserable experience.
So the idea came up to launch a marketplace for matching talent with companies in San Francisco, in New York, in Boston, within the US itself, for full time employees, basically like Elance or Odes, but for full time work.
Omer (18:07.900)
Okay, so that idea was for Hired, right?
Matt (18:10.860)
Exactly, exactly.
So Hired was really born out of this conversation in a pub back in April of 2012.
And we came up with the initial name, which was called Developer Auction.
And we ran our first auction in September of 2012 and we saw 88 developers get $30 million worth of offers.
I spent several painful, painful weeks trying to do everything I could humanly due to land a story on TechCrunch about developer auctions.
Early Traction, which I did.
And after that it just snowballed.
I mean, it was clearly an idea whose time has come.
We had thousands of companies and tens of thousands of engineers sign up over the following 72 hours after that TechCrunch post hit.
And we knew we were actually going to have to incorporate this business and build something real.
So in the following following year, in early 2013, we raised our seed round of venture Capital, we raised $2.7 million and started building a real business.
Omer (19:08.480)
Okay, so now we've gone from one business to four businesses.
Right, and you were still involved in all four at the time, right?
Matt (19:18.160)
No, no, I finished up at 99designs and I was only on the board of directors for SitePoint and Flippa.
Omer (19:25.440)
Okay, okay, so pretty much full time you were able to focus your efforts on now building out this new business.
Matt (19:33.130)
Exactly, exactly.
Omer (19:34.810)
Okay, so tell me again a little bit about, okay, so you've got this idea, you're trying to get this early traction.
What did you do differently this time?
What were the lessons that you learned from building out 99 designs and Flippa that helped you to be more successful with building out Hired?
Matt (19:54.650)
Yes.
I think one of the biggest mistakes that people want is people make is overbuilding technology before they really know what the market needs and what the customers demand.
So the first thing that we built to launch Hired was a simple landing page and sign up flow to get developers to sign up.
We thought if we can't get developers to sign up and buy into this concept, into this idea of using a marketplace to job hunt, then it's all over and we'll kill this idea right then and there.
So we built the landing page, we trolled through our Networks and through LinkedIn, and we got engineers to sign up.
And we're like, perfect.
Now we have engineers who are interested in new jobs in San Francisco.
We initially limited it only to engineers from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zynga, and maybe one other company.
So it's like a very, very highly curated set of engineers.
And we said, perfect.
Now we'll go out and talk to companies and say, please interview these engineers.
If you hire any of them successfully, you'll owe us a success fee.
But if you don't, there's no risk and no upfront cost, no commitment, no contract, no SaaS subscription, et cetera.
And lo and behold, every company in Silicon Valley ignored us.
No one really wanted to engage with the marketplace.
They were inundated with pitches from recruiting agencies and we didn't stand out enough.
So rather than giving up.
We decided to hack the system and go to their investors.
So we went and talked to some of the biggest VC firms in Silicon Valley, and we had them reach out to their portfolio companies on our behalf to get them engaged with the marketplace.
And that allowed us to launch our first successful two week auction.
Omer (21:30.130)
What did you tell these guys?
What was the conversation like with these VCs?
Matt (21:33.730)
We said we were pretty frank with them.
We were like, look, the number one problem all your companies face is recruiting talent.
You may have internal talent teams that try and help your portfolio companies, but it's really hard to make an impact at scale.
We've built this beta product that we'd like to invite your portfolio companies into.
There's no upfront fee, no subscriptions, no cost whatsoever, unless they successfully hire someone.
Would you please mail us out to some companies or make some introductions to firms that you think would be interested?
A few companies turned us down, a few VC funds turned us down.
But enough took us up on the offer to make it viable.
And we had 24 different employers participating in the first batch.
Some of those ended up just being personal friends and companies on whose advisory boards I sat on or where I had personally invested.
So I pulled a lot of favors to try and get the first couple companies bidding.
Omer (22:23.160)
And then what happened?
Matt (22:24.360)
Yeah.
So the first batch of 88 engineers received $30 million in offers over the course of two weeks.
We were absolutely blown away by it, and we decided that we needed to publicize our success.
And the best place to publicize it would be TechCrunch.
I spent the following three or four weeks trying to get reporter to write write up a story about us until eventually one of my friends introduced me to Billy Gallagher, who wrote the first ever TechCrunch piece about the company.
And that led to a massive volume of signups from both employers and candidates.
Omer (22:56.650)
Now, people could look back at SitePoint and the success you had with that and say you were in the right place at the right time.
But then you go out and build a very successful business with 99designs.
Then you built Flippa.
Now you've built hired.
So clearly this is not just about being in the right place at the right time.
You seem to have really mastered how to build successful marketplaces.
What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who maybe have an idea for building some kind of marketplace, but are either being held back from moving forward because everyone keeps telling them how hard it is, or two, they've got started and are really struggling to get traction?
Matt (23:40.270)
Yeah, it's immensely Difficult.
Most businesses, it's hard enough to launch a one sided business where you're just trying to build a product and sell to customers.
With a marketplace, you have two points of failure because you have to build both the supply side and the demand side and have them in equilibrium week after week, month after month.
Otherwise you just start getting a whole bunch of negative feedback and creating a really poor customer experience.
So there's absolutely nothing more difficult than creating a marketplace.
And I wouldn't launch it.
I wouldn't launch into an endeavor trying to do this.
Unless you're willing to sacrifice the next seven to ten years of your life putting in 70 hour work weeks and no vacations.
You kind of have to go in with the mindset of you'll do whatever it takes, you're going to hustle, you're going to scrape the bottom of the barrel to make things happen and kind of gain liquidity and get some traction in the marketplace.
I think the other mistake that entrepreneurs make is sometimes they fall in love with an idea or fall in love with the idea of being a founder or CEO versus falling in love with the idea of actually solving a fundamental problem.
I think most businesses should start from the core idea that you see a huge pain point, a huge fundamental problem that needs to be addressed.
An experience that is fundamentally broken or overpriced or has too much friction and you want to do something about it.
That's really the core of every business is solving a huge pain point, hopefully for yourself or for those around you, versus, you know, doing that in the reverse where you want to become a founder or CEO and you sit around the whiteboard and start brainstorming ideas, then that can be very, very dangerous.
And it's very, very easy to come up with plausible sounding ideas that won't take you anywhere.
And the other interesting thing with hired is that we had multiple points where we could pull the plug on this and stop investing our time.
If we had failed to sign up candidates from our simple splash page and sign up form, we would have canned the idea right there.
If we hadn't managed to hack the system and sign up our first couple dozen of employers, we would have stopped right there.
If the first batch of candidates didn't get a whole bunch of interview offers, we would have stopped the idea right there.
If the TechCrunch story hadn't resulted in hundreds or thousands of signups would have stopped the idea right there.
So there were very logical proof points each step along the way that if we didn't see the level of traction or adoption or excitement from the community that we would have been able to just stop ourselves before over investing and building something that nobody wanted.
Omer (26:05.590)
But how do you know when the right time is to stop?
We talked about how it took 6 to 12 months to get traction with 99 designs.
If it had taken longer, would you have walked away from that business idea?
Matt (26:21.480)
Yeah, certainly.
I didn't need to start another company and I was in a pretty comfortable position in terms of my personal life.
So going in and starting another company from scratch and enduring all the pain and suffering that involves is not something that I was going to do for an idea that didn't have a huge amount of promise and that wouldn't have the potential to be the biggest thing I've ever been a part of.
So.
Absolutely.
Omer (26:46.190)
Okay, so talking about hired, what are the main reasons that companies should consider using Hired?
Matt (26:54.350)
Yes.
So the most important thing is that hired curates a pool of talent on a weekly basis based on quality and intent.
Quality meaning people who worked at top companies, went to top schools, who have great GitHub accounts, who've participated in hackathons and startup weekends, so on and so forth.
And intent is the other key piece.
Intent to switch a job, which means you no longer have to pay.
Play the game of guess and check that you would have to do with LinkedIn, where you're finding a lot of great looking people, but most of them are not interested in new jobs and most of them don't respond to you.
So the great thing with Hired is one of every two people you contact via our marketplace will actively engage in going interview process with your company and you'll have the opportunity to sell them on your your vision, your business and why they should come and work for you.
So it makes it possible to build a fantastic town of pipeline with a minimum amount of time and effort.
Omer (27:47.500)
Are you still finding that you're getting resistance from a lot of companies or has the idea of using this marketplace for technical resources become more accepted now?
Matt (28:03.830)
Yeah, in the first six to 12 months we got a lot of resistance, particularly around the idea of salary transparency.
Some of the really unique things about Hired is that we decided to be talent centric.
We put the talent front and center of our entire thought process, even if it costs us money in the short term.
So one of the ways that we do that is when a company requests an interview with an engineer that they see unhired, they have to disclose what they think the person's salary would be, what their equity will be, what their relocation package would be, what their signing bonus would be, what their perks will be, what the company's vacation policy will be, what benefits the company offers in terms of 401k matching health plans, dental plans, life and disability insurance, all these details.
So for an engineer, they're able to make a really informed decision as to whether or not it's worth their time to engage with a particular company.
So we serve as a fantastic filter, a fantastic screen for them.
One of the really interesting things right now that's happening in the Silicon Valley ecosystem and in other cities like Seattle, LA, NY, Boston, London, etc.
So the average engineer just getting bombarded with recruitment spam.
It's not all unusual to receive 5, 10, 15, 20 different recruitment emails over the course of a single week in LinkedIn.
What happens as a result of that is that everything just gets tossed to the side.
The opportunity cost of even spending 30 minutes talking to every recruiter, every headhunter, every CTO, every VP of engineering, VP of engineering that contacts you is just too great.
So hired is a really low friction way for someone who's potentially interested in switching jobs to wave the white flag, get exposed on a marketplace for only seven days.
And in those seven days, they'll get five, 10, 15, maybe 20 different offers with salary information upfront, with equity information up front, with full details about the companies that are interested in them, and they can make an informed decision about whether or not they want to engage with any of those businesses.
Omer (29:53.800)
How do you generate revenue from hired?
Matt (29:56.520)
So we charge the employer when they successfully hire somebody via us, and we charge them in two different ways.
Number one is we offer them the ability to pay 1% of the person's annual salary on a monthly basis for up to 24 months or until the person gets fired or gets laid off.
Number two is we charge them a flat 15% of the first year base salary for someone starting a job.
So if someone accepts a job for $100,000, you will charge the company a $15,000 flat fee or $1,000 per month for up to 24 months.
Omer (30:29.750)
Which one of those is most popular with companies?
Matt (30:33.030)
I initially talk to companies, a lot of them are very excited about the 1% fee because it really aligns our interests with their interests.
If somebody doesn't work out after 120 days, after 150 days, they can stop.
They can lay them off and stop paying our fee.
But when push comes to shove, the vast majority of our employees prefer to pay up front and they go for the 15% fee, which is about 40% less than competing recruiting firms in the major cities that we operate in.
Omer (30:59.720)
Are you able to disclose revenue numbers?
Matt (31:02.440)
We don't just talk about specific revenue numbers, but we're on an eight figure run rate.
Omer (31:07.240)
Okay, and are you guys profitable?
Matt (31:10.050)
We're not, not yet.
We could be anytime we wanted to, but we're growing so fast and launching our new city and opening up a new office every six weeks.
We're growing our revenue 4, 500% year over year, quarter over quarter.
We grew 57% from Q2 to Q3.
Omer (31:25.170)
Wow.
What's the one thing in your business that you're most excited about right now?
Matt (31:30.370)
I'm really excited about just being able to offer hired platform to a greater portion of the tech worker population.
Right now we're just in five cities, so serving people in Seattle, San Francisco, Louisiana, New York, Boston and London starting in November.
But I see this as a platform in a marketplace that can serve people in over 100 different cities across the US and internationally as well.
And over time, we really envision this becoming a career marketplace for the world's knowledge workers.
So we're starting off with engineers and designers and data scientists and product managers.
Both already started expanding into additional verticals like sales.
And over time you can see it's expanding into roles in finance and marketing and healthcare, et cetera, et cetera.
Omer (32:14.800)
How long have you been.
When did you launch?
Hired.
Matt (32:18.560)
The initial batch of talent that we put forward to employers happened in September of 2012.
So we're just barely past our two year anniversary.
Got it.
Omer (32:29.360)
So two years, does that mean there's another business on the horizon for you or no?
Matt (32:35.790)
No.
Omer (32:36.070)
You think you're going to be in this for the long term now?
Matt (32:38.550)
Well, we're in this for the long term.
We raised $18 million in capital and we're planning to be in dozens of different cities around the US and around the world over the coming two, three years and then expanding into additional verticals as well.
So this is a multibillion dollar opportunity.
There's over $124 billion a year spent on recruiting services in the US alone.
It's an industry that hasn't changed much in the last 50 years.
That that doesn't have economies of scale, doesn't use technology to create efficiencies.
That's really where we're applying our stamp.
Omer (33:10.060)
What I really like about all these businesses that you've created is that you've looked closely at what you're already doing and identified new opportunities from that you've developed these organic opportunities.
It sounds like you've been very systematic in the way you've tested and validated these ideas on whether you're going to move forward or not.
And looking back at it now, it seems very natural at how all these businesses have evolved.
But looking back, I'm assuming it wasn't all smooth sailing and you had your fair share of challenges along the way.
Can you think of one big challenge that you face that really stands out in your mind?
Matt (33:46.100)
Yeah, the biggest challenge was absolutely the bursting of the dot com bubble and the crash of the NASDAQ stock market back in the spring of 2000.
Sidepoint was still a bootstrapped company.
We had offices, we had employees, and a couple hundred thousand dollars in the bank.
But all of a sudden, the vast majority of our customers, which were advertisers, went bankrupt or slashed their advertising budgets drastically, and we had to pivot into a new business model or be out of business in a matter of months.
That was definitely the scariest time of my life.
And something that a lot of entrepreneurs today going through techstars and Y Combinator, et cetera, haven't experienced because they were still not preschool or elementary school back then.
Omer (34:24.980)
Yeah, yeah.
It must be funny now that you were the 15 year old starting these businesses and now you're looking back and seeing younger people kind of going out and starting new businesses.
All right, Matt, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions, and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Matt (34:45.530)
Sure.
Omer (34:46.570)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Matt (34:51.450)
Assume the best intention from other people.
So if you receive an email that could be interpreted in two different ways, I assume they meant it in the best way and reply accordingly.
Omer (35:01.270)
That's a great one.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Matt (35:07.270)
I like the Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Rees and Laura Rees.
Branding and marketing is something that probably isn't studied or understood well enough by enough entrepreneurs and can be very, very important.
Omer (35:19.110)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Matt (35:24.310)
Persistence.
Absolute persistence.
Omer (35:27.900)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Matt (35:32.700)
I'm a huge fan of the Mailbox app on my iPhone 6 for dealing with email.
Omer (35:39.580)
If you had to start over tomorrow, how would you go about finding that next business opportunity?
Matt (35:45.420)
I would keep my eyes and ears to the ground and hear and listen to complaints or problems that other people are facing and try to solve them.
In a meaningful, disruptive way that's 10x better than the status quo.
I think the biggest mistake that people make is that they think they can just build something that's 10x or 20, that they think they can build something that's 10% or 20% better or cheaper than what currently exists.
But I don't think that's enough.
I think in order to build a truly big company, you have to build something that's 10x or 100x better than what's currently out there because the friction costs involved in switching are so high.
Omer (36:18.040)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Matt (36:22.610)
I'm a huge wine enthusiast.
I've been to everywhere from Margaret river to Central Otago to Priorat in Spain to Napa Valley to Walla Walla.
It's been a huge passion of mine.
Omer (36:35.650)
Wow.
Okay.
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work, apart from the wine?
Matt (36:43.730)
I like travel.
I like travel a lot.
And eating really well.
I was fortunate enough to go to Spain last summer and eat at some of the best restaurants in the world.
Two star, three star Michelin restaurants.
It was really, really good.
Omer (36:57.260)
Very nice.
Great answers.
Okay, Matt, I want to thank you for joining me today and talking about your business.
I really appreciate you sharing your experiences and insights with our audience and thank you for letting us get to know you a little better personally as well.
Now I'll make sure that the show notes have links to all the businesses from SitePoint, 99designs, Flippa and Hired.
If folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Matt (37:21.490)
They can probably guess my email address.
Omer (37:25.650)
Okay, awesome.
Thanks again Matt, and I wish you continued success.
Matt (37:29.250)
Thank you.
Omer (37:29.970)
Take care.
