Steve Pokras

So this originally started as I was going to talk about one thing.

I was going to talk to you about how to scale talent.

And then Nathan got really excited that I should talk about how to start a marketplace and also what's a SaaS business model for marketplace businesses.

I'm going to focus on the middle part and just talk about how we scaled our talent and

I'm happy to talk about the rest of it later, but I don't think we'll be able to cover quite that much.

We scaled this team.

I took over about 10 people.

We are actively over 50 now.

I've interviewed and talked to every single one of the people who came on board.

We also recruited a very specific focus on our contractors and who we wanted to bring on as contractors.

All of our developers, our individual contractors are out of Latin America that are maybe a quarter, maybe to 20% of the cost, work with our team full-time and just give us incredible competitive advantage.

But getting them was really quite the chore.

And so I'm going to have you walk away with two things that I want you to think about that I think really differentiated us and set us apart with the competitive advantage.

And the first is...

that we think about sales and recruitment or recruitment as a sales and marketing process.

Every piece of it is a funnel that should be managed with marketing in mind.

And in the same way, there should be a sales.

You should target who you're selling to marketing.

You should have the right messaging.

You should have the right segment.