SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 488: Hireology $26M Raised, $1.2M MRR, Helping 4000 Customers Hire More Effectively with Hireology CEO Adam Robinson
24 Nov 2016
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 is Hireology and how does it help businesses hire effectively?
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 top. 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. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner is Charlie Daggs. Okay, he was a middle manager at a manufacturing company. He wants to break free and he won the $100 I give out every Monday.
Chapter 3: What was the journey behind founding Hireology?
For your chance to win, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it. Many of you call me and tell me you love my email marketing. I have a very secret tool that I use to do it. And it was so coincidental when Clay acquired the tool, it was called Drip. And I use Drip.
I'm going to tell you how I use it later on in the episode. But if you want to use it right now and get the first 60 days free, go to NathanMutka.com forward slash Drip. I'll tell you my favorite feature and why I use it later on in the episode. Nathan Latke here. This is episode 488. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Mike Doyle.
Mike got a $200,000 deal on Shark Tank with Mark Cuban and Chris Saka, and 30,000 people have booked using his software, and they've booked $12 million worth of sports weekend housing. Nathan Latka here. Good morning, folks.
Our guest today is Adam Robinson, and Adam is the co-founder and CEO of Pyrology, where he's on a mission to help business owners make better hiring decisions using data and processes. He's a noted recruiting industry expert, speaker, and author with over 20 years of experience in the field of hiring and selection management. Adam, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready.
All right, let's do this. So tell us what Hierology does and specifically how you guys generate revenue.
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Chapter 4: How has Hireology evolved in terms of customer base and revenue?
Hierology is a talent technology platform built specifically for owner operators in business networks like franchise systems or dealerships. We help that owner with technology that gives them everything they need to be good at the people side of their business.
From employment branding, to connection to candidate sources, to interview guides, to testing, assessments, drug and background screening, onboarding, and connectivity to payroll. And we provide that to them on an unlimited use basis for one monthly subscription price. So it is a 100% software as a service model.
And I just want to be clear so people aren't confused. This is not a toptow.com or an upwork.com where there's actually talent you're placing. This is technology to help people manage hires. Is that right?
That's right.
Chapter 5: What is the average revenue per user for Hireology?
Most business owners are terrible at this stuff. We give them the tools to be great at it. That's great.
Okay, so take us back. So you said pricing was obviously SaaS, but I want to start back at the beginning first. What year did you found the business in?
Business was founded in the middle of 2010, and we launched the product in January of 2012.
Okay. And tell us a little bit of the background there. Did you leave corporate?
Chapter 6: What strategies does Hireology use to increase revenue per user?
Why'd you get into it?
I had a business before Hireology that was outsourced recruiting. So recruitment outsourcing, RPO. We provided recruiting services for mid-market technology and professional services firms. And what I learned in that business was our customers were make money in that business. So I had created an interviewing system we gave to our customers.
They started asking me if they could buy it because they really liked it. And I said, no, no, no for years. And I had an opportunity to sell that business, which I did.
Chapter 7: How does Hireology handle customer churn and retention?
And the idea was always in my head. I want to productize, you know, something similar to what we did with our customers where we gave them the interviewing guides. So that's exactly what I did. And that's where Hireology came from.
And what was, this is usually an embarrassing answer, but what was your first year revenue in 2010? Do you remember?
First year revenue in 2010 was just under $200,000. Okay, that's great.
And some of your first customers, are they still your customers today? The automobile companies, folks like that?
Chapter 8: What are the key metrics for evaluating Hireology's business model?
Well, they are. Our first customers were entrepreneurs from my personal and professional network who had asked me to help them out and were willing to be beta testers of the product. And for 18 months, I ran with a group of entrepreneurs, about 40 of them that I had known over the years. And they were generous enough to help me build the product by being an early customer.
That's great. So you have early customers in 2010. That's obviously a starting point. Fast forward us to where you are today. October 2016, how many customers are you serving?
We're working with just under 4,000 individually owned businesses in the United States, ranging across about 150 brands from Kia and Ford and Mercedes-Benz US to Anytime Fitness, Brightstar Home Healthcare and Sylvan Learning Centers.
If 100 Anytime Fitness centers sign up with you, do you count that as one customer or 100?
That's 100 customers.
Perfect. So is corporate paying or is the franchise owner paying typically?
They're not. And the nuance of this business and why we largely have this market to ourselves is because the traditional HR tech vendor sells to what they expect to be a centralized role-specific HR team at corporate. But in these decentralized networks, that doesn't exist. And in fact, labor law keeps them from being able to help at all with the people side of the business. And so
Corporate or the OEM is basically a marketing or distribution partnership and then they push us out to the network and we contract individually with them.
Are they taking a cut in order to promote you to their people or no?
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