SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
702: With $5k Left in Her Bank TheMuse Was Launched, 50m Visit Annually and 600 Companies Pay
26 Jun 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
Chapter 2: What inspired Kathryn Minshew to launch The Muse?
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. This is episode 702.
Chapter 3: How does The Muse differentiate itself from traditional job search platforms?
Coming up tomorrow morning, I talk to Paul, and he breaks down the accidental $10,000 per month side project. Well, heck, how can you stumble into your own accidental 10 grand per month? Be sure to tune in tomorrow morning. Good morning, everybody. My guest this morning is Catherine Minshew.
Chapter 4: What challenges did Kathryn face when starting The Muse?
She is the CEO and founder of themuse.com, a career platform used by over 50 million folks to find a job, learn professional skills, or advance in their careers, and by hundreds of companies looking to grow their employer brand. and to hire. Now, Catherine is a Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review contributor, and she's spoken at MIT and Harvard, along with the Today Show and CNN.
She's been named a Smart CEO's Future 50 and Inc.
Chapter 5: How did Kathryn secure initial funding for The Muse?
's 35 Under 35, a Duke alum. Catherine worked in Rwanda with the Clinton Health Access Initiative before founding the Muse and was previously at McKinsey and Company. Catherine, are you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 6: What unique strategies does The Muse use to attract both job seekers and employers?
I am really excited to be here.
Thank you for making the time. So tell us first, for those folks that are not familiar, what is The Muse? And specifically, what's your revenue model? How do you generate money?
Yeah, so the Muse was founded to be the most trusted and beloved place for people to navigate their career. What does that mean? It means we function essentially like a marketplace.
We have over 50 million people who use the site every year to find a job, get to that next step, talk to a career coach, get advice, learn a skill, anything that's related to taking charge of your career and sort of living the life that you want. And then on the other side, we have over 600 companies from Facebook, Dropbox, Slack to HBO, Goldman Sachs, Marriott, businesses large and small.
Chapter 7: How has The Muse evolved since its launch in 2011?
And we help them with hiring and employer branding. So the way I like to think about it is, you know, the sort of old way of doing things, because a company could just put up a job description and expect that some of the most talented people in the world are going to line right up. to come in. That's no longer the case.
If you want really great people, you've got to compete for them because everybody else wants them to. And so we help these companies figure out, first of all, what is the story? What is it that they have to offer great candidates? How do they survey their top people and understand what are the core elements of their employer brand, their value prop to employees?
Then how do you tell that story through photo and video, through a Muse profile? We have a lot of different ways companies can do that, especially
Chapter 8: What insights does Kathryn share about building a sustainable business model?
kind of once you've gotten these great stories from employees, sharing those to a broader audience. And then finally, how do you distribute that?
So how do you make sure that anywhere a company is trying to hire, they have the ability to reach those candidates and to get more context and assets in front of those people to help them decide whether working at Goldman Sachs or New York Life or Facebook is the right place for them.
Should we think of you more like a LinkedIn recruiter or like a media brand that makes revenue from impressions?
We are more of a SaaS company. So it's a, I don't know if you've heard the sort of word going around New York tech these days, but it's a SaaS enabled marketplace. That's I think probably the closest way. We do compete fairly directly at times with LinkedIn. with Indeed, with Glassdoor. But interestingly, we do also in some ways work well with them.
Like we found a lot of companies that will use their Muse assets and their Muse platform and embed it or link it to some of these other platforms. And it makes the entire kind of sum work better than the individual parts.
And so for those that are not familiar with a SaaS enabled marketplace, right? Help us understand and give examples in specific in your business, right? What part is the marketplace and what part is the SaaS component?
Yeah. So most companies sign up for an annual subscription to the Muse. And that can be anything from four to five figures for an SMB or a small mid-market company, all the way up to six figures for a major Fortune 1000. And that includes everything.
What's the average, Catherine?
Um... That's a good question. So right now, the average is between $20K and $30K. But the number of enterprise deals is rising quite a bit more quickly than our mid-market business. So I think you'll continue to see that go up. We're also, we look at sort of average by category. In that case, you obviously see very different things based on the employee count of a company.
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