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Building The Tinder For Hiring | Raj Das @ Hirect
190 Plays3 years ago
Recruiting talent has always been a tough nut to crack. And the pandemic proved to be one such trigger that has spiked unemployment rates globally.
In this edition of Founder Thesis, Akshay Datt speaks with Raj Das, Co-founder and CEO,
Hirect India, the country’s first chat-based hiring app. He is an alumnus of IIT Bombay and has worked as a product manager before starting his entrepreneurial journey.
As the pandemic has started to phase off, the hiring has peaked, especially in the high-growth start-up. In an attempt to create a Tinder-like platform for job search and recruitment, Raj started Hirect in March 2020, which enables candidates to directly connect with founders and HR managers. And within two years, Hirect has over 60k verified recruiters and 5 million app downloads and has expanded its operations to U.S. and Singapore.
Tune in to this episode to hear Raj speak about how Hirect is working towards simplifying both search and hiring processes through its AI-based platform.
What you must not miss!
- Hirect: A COVID success story!
- Why focus more on value proposition?
- Hirect’s revenue model.
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Transcript
Introduction to Zencaster
00:00:00
Speaker
Before we start today's episode, I want to give a quick shout out to Zencaster, which is a podcaster's best friend. Trust me when I tell you this, Zencaster is like a Shopify for podcasters. It's all you need to get up and running as a podcaster. And the best thing about Zencaster is that you get so much stuff for free. If you are planning to check out the platform, then please show your support for the founder thesis podcast by using this link, zen.ai slash founder thesis.
00:00:27
Speaker
That's zen.ai slash founder thesis.
Challenges in Startup Hiring
00:00:33
Speaker
I'm Raj, I'm the co-founder and the CEO of Hyrect.
00:00:49
Speaker
In 2022, if you ask any startup founder what is their biggest challenge, they will no longer tell you that it is fundraising or attracting investors. Rather, the current number one challenge founders are struggling with is hiring. And on the other hand,
00:01:04
Speaker
There are millions of young college graduates struggling to find meaningful jobs. Spotting this gap, Raj Das, the founder of Hirette, decided to create a hiring app inspired by the user experience of Tinder, something that would enable quick matching of candidates with employers and shorten the long and tedious process of hiring.
00:01:22
Speaker
Raj's own journey is nothing short of inspirational. He comes from an extremely humble farming family and it was sheer grit and talent through which he first ended up getting into Jawahar Navodya Vidyaale and then into the Dakshana Foundation that helped him to get into IIT Bombay. Here's Raj telling Akshay about his journey into entrepreneurship.
Creation of Hyrect During the Pandemic
00:01:45
Speaker
But after two years, my learning was monotonous.
00:01:51
Speaker
because I am working in the same market with the same, like same user persona. And I wanted to do something which adds more value to the societies. So, and pandemic hit us, millions of users lost their job. So that was the right time to enter into the job market. And we introduced direct.
00:02:17
Speaker
Did you like have that idea of higher ed before pandemic or the trigger was pandemic? I had the idea of higher ed in mind, but I was just like, when I will be able to do. And I will also be doing it.
00:02:44
Speaker
like the trigger for starting Hi-Rack is, so as I said, when I was working as a product manager inside Vue, I was also building some product side-by-side. So I... Yeah, as a hobby. Yes.
00:03:01
Speaker
So and I was building those side by side startup product along with my friends and sometimes we try to hire a freelancer or a developer to work with us on those products. At that time when we were actually hiring
00:03:21
Speaker
we realized how big how big the problem is for hiring for a smaller company see so hiring is not at all a problem for the bigger companies they have they have capital they have that brand recognition they have millions of followers are on LinkedIn so many people like it's not at all a big problem for
00:03:46
Speaker
big companies. But if you look at the hiring for a smaller companies, that's a user study company, you don't have followers on social media. Nobody knows you how people will trust you. So hiring is a very big problem for those small companies. And as a solution, they go for referral, right?
00:04:10
Speaker
referral can get
How Hyrect Works with AI
00:04:12
Speaker
to 1, 2, 3 candidates. It can't get to 10, 20 candidates because you have limited selection through referral. Then you go for consultancy, right? But the consultancy will charge you around 5 lakh rupees for 10 candidates. When you are building your company or your team, you are the one who should be building, who should be hiring for your team.
00:04:39
Speaker
Someone else shouldn't be hiring for your foundation team.
00:04:45
Speaker
Right? So consultancy, the consultancy solution is not very efficient for a startup founders. That's why, that's why we introduced Hirec. So it's a direct hiring app for the founders, business owners, or HS. We don't allow any middlemen. So what we do on one side, this job seeker will add
00:05:12
Speaker
the information, what type of jobs they are looking for. On the other side, recruiters will give information, what type of talents they are looking for. And then we use artificial intelligence to match them and recommend a feed of candidates and a feed of jobs. And after that, they can start chatting with each other. She will interviews and
00:05:39
Speaker
finish hiring within a day. So our vision is to help those smaller companies to hire talents within a day at the cost of maybe one pizza or one meal less than one meal. And so far we have thousands of examples where the recruiters
00:06:03
Speaker
head will able to hire at least one talent within one day. So it's so fast. So talk to me about the actual getting it off, like the actual launch journey. So pandemic hit, you were in a job where you had job security, financial security. What made you decide that in this extremely risky time, I want to quit my job and start this?
00:06:32
Speaker
Okay. So I think my company, because it was a Chinese funded company, we already suffered a lot of losses because China was hit first. Some of our partners lost their business. So we lost their revenue and the company was in a stable position and the company wasn't very sure that
00:07:01
Speaker
The leadership was very sure that they will be running the company for the next 10 years. And again, I said, I wanted to do something better or I want to do something which adds more value to the society. So you decided to quit and start working on it. It was just a trigger. Maybe this is the best time I should switch.
00:07:28
Speaker
The combination of factors helped. So when you decided that you want to build something, what was your...
00:07:38
Speaker
Thought was it that people are losing jobs? Let me build something to help them find jobs or was it that I have tried hiring Personally, it is very painful. Let me build a product to help founders so that they can hire and kyuki Austin pay hiring toe Free the within a sorry companies. They're hiring Roki with me because there was so much uncertainty and
00:07:59
Speaker
Yeah, so I would say it will be a combination of thoughts. It's not only that one thought behind start building it. So the opportunity was
00:08:11
Speaker
The next three to six months is the recruitment industry, because millions of people will lose their jobs. After six months, when the economy recovers, we can see a hiring peak after the pandemic. So that was our target.
00:08:36
Speaker
Okay, that we should be in place by the time the hiring picks up. Millions of people lost their jobs and once the economy recovers, they will get back to jobs. At that time, we should be acquiring them.
00:08:53
Speaker
If you like to hear stories of founders then we have tons of great stories from entrepreneurs who have built billion dollar businesses. Just search for the founder thesis podcast on any audio streaming app like Spotify, Ghana, Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the show.
00:09:15
Speaker
And when did you launch the product then? I think you quit your job in March, right? When the lockdown was announced. How many months did you take? Tell me the product journey. What was the first product that you launched? You must have launched a more basic product. I want to understand that whole product journey. We launched our first version in September.
00:09:43
Speaker
So it, and what was that version one? Like, what did it look like? So it just looked like you are a job seeker or a recruiter. You can, you can, you can post a job preference. Was it like say, I am jobs or cut short or one of these more, uh, one of the newer hiring platform was it similar looking? It was not similar looking. The idea was very unique.
00:10:11
Speaker
The user experience is very unique. However, we didn't compromise on the idea. We only compromised on building list number of features just to save those programming time. The idea was still very unique. We just had limited features. Let's say we just connect a matching candidate with a recruiter.
00:10:41
Speaker
But the idea is unique. LinkedIn promised that you come create your profile and LinkedIn will show you jobs which are relevant for you. And similarly for an employer, you list a job and LinkedIn will show those jobs to people and they will apply for your jobs and then you can start talking to them. So what is unique about your idea? I want to understand that. So let's say you are a recruiter on LinkedIn.
00:11:08
Speaker
Okay. So now you post a job on LinkedIn. Okay. So now you have to wait for applications.
00:11:21
Speaker
So on Hyract, you post this up, you will see the list of matching candidates. So you don't have to wait. Second, LinkedIn is not only a hiring platform, LinkedIn is also a networking platform.
00:11:39
Speaker
So many, many, many users of LinkedIn are there on networking, not for job search. So let's say you reach out to 10 users, maybe eight of them are not looking for a job at that moment. However, higher ed is focused only on
00:11:58
Speaker
hiring and zopcers. Every user is on hiring, they are there because they are looking for a new opportunity. The efficiency of hiring and the efficiency of zopcers is very efficient in hiring.
00:12:15
Speaker
And this is just to recap my understanding, traditional platforms like LinkedIn or IAM jobs, the trigger is when the job seeker discovers your job and clicks on apply.
00:12:30
Speaker
That is something which you've eliminated in Hirect. Hirect, as soon as you create a job, the platform will start showing you candidates who recommended matches. And then you can just initiate, you can send them an automated message, please apply for this job or something like that. Is that how it happens for an employer? Yeah. So I think in this process, the game changer is our matching algorithm.
00:12:57
Speaker
Okay, so we are building a very smart matching algorithm. So it's it will recommend you only the relevant candidates. Okay, so you don't have to go through hundreds of profiles to find that find that one fit. Okay, the first thing is we recommend you a list of messaging matching candidates and then you start chatting with them.
00:13:25
Speaker
or you can request their phone number. And since we are mobile first, the response is very fast. So people don't sit in front of laptop all the time, but they do keep their phone with them all the time. So since we are mobile first, the response rate is very quick.
00:13:55
Speaker
Okay, and other other value proposition we have is so now let's say you have got the list of matching candidates. So it's not that you will get their phone number and you will start calling them at any time you want. So you will have to
00:14:14
Speaker
If you need the phone number of the candidates, you will have to request their phone number. They will accept your request. Then only you will be able to access their phone number. So we also protect the privacy of the users.
00:14:30
Speaker
Right, right. Got it. Okay. Okay. And for a job seeker, what is the experience for him? So once he like uploads his resume, he has to upload a resume and create a profile. We don't believe much on the resume, because those traditional resume, they are computer centric, right?
00:14:52
Speaker
So it's difficult to make a resume on your mobile phone. So we want to get rid of traditional resumes. So our process is so the best value proposition for the job seeker is we allow only the decision makers of the company to become a recruiter.
00:15:14
Speaker
Okay, so it's not that any consultancy or any third party or anybody from any company will will become a recruiter. We have strict policies regarding who can be a recruiter on higher. So we allow only the decision makers who have the ability to offer a job. So that is that is the main thing because when these obstacles are talking with the decision makers,
00:15:41
Speaker
who can make hiring decision, the entire process become very first. Right? So that is the first thing second thing. So us as job seeker, creator profile and let the app know what type of jobs you are looking for. Then, then we
00:16:03
Speaker
recommend you a list of matching jobs and you can start chatting with the recruiter instantly. So it's not that you apply for a job and now wait for the recruiter to respond. So it's just like a WhatsApp between recruiters and job seekers. Okay.
00:16:29
Speaker
So job seeker can also initiate a chat like they can. Okay. Okay. Okay. So like, I would say it's more like Tinder for his observed and hiring.
00:16:49
Speaker
So how do you protect the employer from getting too many messages? That is like a big problem in India. There are a lot of job seekers and jobs are less. So typically like on LinkedIn and Nokri, if you post a job, you get sometimes even 1000 responses for one job posting.
00:17:10
Speaker
And then that defeats the purpose of this so how do you protect the employer from getting too many responses to many that's the first solution is again the matching algorithm.
Design to Minimize Spam in Hyrect
00:17:23
Speaker
Okay so if we if we do if we can match it with a job preference.
00:17:30
Speaker
then this job seeker will see only limited number of matching jobs and this job seeker doesn't need to apply to 100 jobs he can apply to 5 or 10 jobs and he can get hired so that is the first thing second thing so on other traditional platforms on home feed you can see a CTA
00:17:58
Speaker
of apply. So we don't have we don't have so the job seekers will apply hundreds of application without even reading this ad. In the design, we have solved that problem. First, you click on the job, you read, you read, you read this ad, then you then you start chatting. And as as per the design, who cannot
00:18:25
Speaker
start communicating with hundreds of recruiters in less time. The design has solved that problem. Right, right, right. You've added a little bit of friction so that that doesn't happen. Got it. Okay. So for your algorithm to work, you need two things. You need
00:18:49
Speaker
like a job seeker bio, like a CV or a resume or some information about a job seeker. And then you need information about the job vacancy so that your algorithm can match. So what information do you seek from a job seeker? What all does he input? So from this job, so algorithm is very complicated. So what you asked is the simple thing that we do and everyone can do. So from the job seeker side,
00:19:20
Speaker
we take like qualification, then the skills, functional area, job titles, and inexperience. So it's more like those set of keywords. Experience like he has to enter all his experiences or just like the current job. So experience means let's say you have two years of experience as a Java developer.
00:19:50
Speaker
And on the other side, the recruiter is also looking for a two year of experience as our developer. So we will match. So that is, that is simple. We, we, we take list of keywords from Zobseger and recruiter and we class for them.
00:20:11
Speaker
Second point is we track the behaviors of job seekers and recruiters. So we can track who is a good recruiter, who is a good job seeker. Okay. Okay. Let's say you are a recruiter.
00:20:27
Speaker
So now, whether you reply to these obstacles, how you reply, how you behave to these obstacles, based on that, we can, based on that, we can predict whether like to what candidate your response probability is high. And we will recommend accordingly.
00:20:56
Speaker
Let's say you have replied to three candidates who is electrical engineer from IIT Bombay. So that means if we recommend you fourth candidate who is also an electrical guy from IIT Bombay, you are more likely to reply him. So we use a lot of logics in the algorithm just to improve that response rate.
00:21:22
Speaker
okay okay okay got it okay okay and so you would also be seeing so and what do you seek from an employer what kind of information same thing only like the key skills years of experience education like these so on the employer side the main problem we solve is the
00:21:43
Speaker
trust worthiness of that recruiter and company. The first thing first thing is you need to create a recruiter card like your name you as a recruiter your name your designation at the company. Okay, and also some details about your company like your company which is mentioned on a legal document. Okay, so first you first to create
00:22:10
Speaker
What does that mean? Mentioned on a legal document. So I will explain that. Yeah. So first to create your recruiter card where you mention your name, your designation. Second, you need to mention your company name and some other details like which financing round you are in. Let's say you are an angel investing, invested company or series A, series B like that. And then you post a job. Okay.
00:22:39
Speaker
But in the third step, you will have to verify your details. So now you are saying your name is Akshay from podium.
00:22:52
Speaker
right and you are a co-founder so first you will have to verify that this podium company is a legal company so you will have to submit some documents to verify your company let's say you like a tst registration license anything which has the company name printed over that second
00:23:16
Speaker
At the second step, now you have to verify that you are a decision maker at podium. On that document, we will see your designation and association with the company you mentioned.
00:23:33
Speaker
like a business card or whatnot. You can share your employee ID card, business card, if you have an offer letter or appointment letter, any document which proves that you are a decision maker at that company, then we will allow it. Hello.
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah, okay, you're back. Yeah, I heard till you can share your offer letter till there I heard. Yes. So now you have to prove that you are a decision maker at that company. So you can share any document like employee ID card, appointment letter, offer letter, where it will be mentioned like this is your designation at this company.
00:24:25
Speaker
And we do have a manual audit team who will verify all this information and then only allow you as a recruiter. So when we do that, the trustworthiness of the platform is become so high. Because there will be no prods, there will be noise scams, there will be noise spamming.
00:24:51
Speaker
So this is what I, so now coming back to my discussion, what I did, what I learned from my first company. So this is what I learned. So now we have a strict verification and we lose a lot of records because they don't want to go through a strict verification.
00:25:10
Speaker
So we lose records in order to build a trustworthy, scam free platform. So this is what I learned from my first company that focus more on the value propositions, not on the number of customers and applying the same learning here. Okay, got it.
00:25:36
Speaker
So now I think one secret sauce of your business is the algorithm, the matching algorithm. So how does that work? Like obviously it will be too complex to explain verbally, but
00:25:52
Speaker
Just some broad idea. Of course, one thing I understand is there would be some key skill mapping and then you would read recruiter behavior that what are the kind of candidates he's selecting and then show him more of those.
00:26:07
Speaker
Similar for job seeker also, I guess like you would read job seeker behavior Like what kind of jobs is he interested in and then show him more of those? So so like it keeps learning from their behavior basically, so it's like a machine learning application There are a lot of like lot of other things we also Consider so let's say if if you are not active recently, so we will not recommend your job or your Profile
00:26:35
Speaker
There are a lot of things we do in the algorithm. The goal of the algorithm is to make it more efficient so that response rate should be very quicker. If you just become a recruiter, I can say that you will receive response and you will be able to schedule interviews within 10-15 minutes.
00:27:06
Speaker
So, okay. How does scheduling happen? Is it again through chat only or is there a, like, tell me about the other feature set. Now, one feature set is creating profile both sides, like job seeker profile creation, employer profile creation, then listing a job and then matching algorithm, and then initiating chat. Tell me about steps after that.
00:27:27
Speaker
So since Hire Act is still in the early stage of development, so we haven't completed the whole hiring funnel for the recruiter. So still we don't have any in-app interview scheduling feature.
00:27:43
Speaker
But OK, so if they can do it outside the app, we don't mind. But we do. Or they chat and they decide that, OK, let's talk at this time. Or they can share a link like a Google Meet link or share phone number or something. So one feature is they can exchange their phone number with permission and they can talk over phone. Second feature, we have in-app video interview.
00:28:11
Speaker
Okay, so we have in a built-in video interview feature, but we don't have that schedule feature which we are working and it will be live very soon. So some... That schedule feature will be like a Calendly, like how Calendly works. So in Calendly, so let's say now you have to schedule an interview with a candidate. So now if you go with the other platforms, your email ID will be shared to the candidate.
00:28:42
Speaker
or vice versa. So at Hirec, our focus is to protect your email ID or phone number. So we are working on that. So we want to make sure that you can communicate with the candidate or recruiter without sharing your phone number or email ID. So that is something we are still working on and let's see how far we can go.
00:29:14
Speaker
How did you get this off the ground in terms of investing in a team? You've been a product manager and not a developer, so you would have needed developers.
00:29:29
Speaker
build the product, to build the algorithm. So how did you get it off the ground? Was it your own savings that you used? Or did you raise funds? How did you do that? We raised funds. So we raised about $2 million in seed. So we raised in early 22. So we raised funds. Then we hired people and start building.
00:30:00
Speaker
No, but you started this in 2020, right? Like April onwards you were working on it. So you were working alone or like from April and September you lost. So like that time we do have other co-founders as well. So we are also operating in US and Singapore. Okay. I'd say your co-founders are from US and Singapore. Are they like college friends or like colleagues?
00:30:30
Speaker
or also mutual friends of my colleagues. Like you told your colleagues that I'm looking for co-founders. So it was not only me. So it was also they finding me, I finding them and they like mutual, I would say mutual victory over the idea.
00:31:02
Speaker
Like basically March onwards you started the search for co-founders, getting some people together and building an MVP. We knew each other before them. So it was that time we decided to do. Okay. You decided this is the right time. Let's do it now. Okay. So your initial development of product was done by the founding team only. You didn't need employees. We hired.
00:31:31
Speaker
we hired few Indian developers to build the MVP. So when you launched it in September,
00:31:38
Speaker
Was it, uh, like what was the pricing you launched with? Did you start making revenue from September onwards or like, what's the pricing? We are a business where if you don't get enough matching jobs and candidates, then you will not pay for it. So we lost the free version because when we launched, we didn't have any job seekers or jobs. So nobody will pay us. So we launched the free version. Yes. Yes. Yes. Right. Right. Right. Okay. Okay. Hmm.
00:32:08
Speaker
Tell me that journey of finding revenue. You launched in September free version. How did it grow? How many users were you signing up? How many jobs were getting posted? That evolution, how has that number been over the last year and a half? By now, in less than 1.5 year,
00:32:29
Speaker
We have acquired around 5 million downloads. We have around 50,000 verified recruiters and about 2 million verified candidates. The start of the journey was, I would say, it was not very easy. For a platform which doesn't have any candidates, convincing the recruiter to create a profile and
00:32:59
Speaker
posting a job was very challenging. Comparatively, getting Zobseker was still a little easier, but getting first 1000 recruiters or those initial recruiters was very challenging because they can't find any Zobsekers for them. In the initial stage,
00:33:25
Speaker
And we are a society where people are willing to help each other. So this strategy was gone full users instant you ask help from them. So instead of telling you, okay, download HiRack and start hiring, I will tell you we are in the early stage. We have no jobs, no job seeker. Can you please help us by posting a job?
00:33:56
Speaker
from your company. So that is what helped and people were ready to help. And that number, like we keep on increasing that number every month. And now every day we get around 10, 20,000 verified job seekers and 100s and thousands of verified recruiters every day.
00:34:21
Speaker
Wow. When you say verify job seeker, how do you verify job seeker? You told me how you verify recruiter, but how do you verify job seeker? First thing is the job seeker has to fill in the complete information. Okay. And then we have a, like we do have automation to see whether the information are correct.
00:34:45
Speaker
So if someone use irrelevant keywords, so maybe someone just using it for casual purpose, they will enter some words which doesn't exist. So we can find those profiles automatically and we will remove them.
00:35:05
Speaker
Yeah, so we also do some audit things on the profile set. It's not that we will recommend any candidates to these recruiters. Do you also do like that verification through SMS and all of that, like the OTP-based verification or something, or one-time link-based verification? You mean for creating a profile?
00:35:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
00:35:55
Speaker
Okay. Got it. And recruiters, so job seeker I understand will prefer to be on mobile only, but a lot of recruiters who are working in companies, maybe they prefer a desktop environment. So what is the environment like for a recruiter? Yes. So we do understand then that for the recruiter, there is a need of both mobile as well as web app. So because of limited resources,
00:36:24
Speaker
We built mobile first. Now we are also building the web app and the web app will be launched by the end of January.
Monetization Strategy of Hyrect
00:36:35
Speaker
Got it. Are you now monetizing it? Do you have some pricing plan in place today or is it still free? We have monetized Bangalore.
00:36:48
Speaker
So we have thousands of channels. Let's say Zaba developer in Bangalore is one channel. Product manager in Mumbai is one channel. So those channels which has good number of users on both
00:37:04
Speaker
recruiter side and job seeker side, we have monetized those channels. And there are a lot of channels. So by, by channel, you mean job profile. It's a combination of one job title plus city. Okay. So most of the time, let's say what you hire you, you hire like Zaba developer in Bangalore.
00:37:28
Speaker
So that is one channel. So two channels who doesn't have much traffic, we are yet to monetize them. So our first focus is to grow and provide 5x value propositions to end customers. And we know our customers very well that if they receive values from you, they will not hesitate paying you.
00:37:57
Speaker
And I myself, I myself have spoken to more than 500 or 1000 users. Okay. Like, like recruiters as well as work seekers. And I know their feelings. So it's the value propositions. If we succeed in providing value propositions, the revenue profits will definitely follow.
00:38:22
Speaker
Okay. And for this one channel, which like you are monetizing some channels, like say Java developer in Bangalore, what is the way like new charge recruiter job seeker? Like how do we are still testing our hypothesis? So as of now we have, we have monetized recruiter. So let's say, and let's say we let recruiters to post two, three jobs for free.
00:38:50
Speaker
and for additional job post they will have to pay and again we will come up with better monetization strategy and we have our law and we know our we know our monetization strategy in the long term really well.
00:39:09
Speaker
What is the long-term strategy? So I can share some of them, not all of them. So some of them, like we know like job seekers do spam recruiters by blindly applying or blindly chatting. So we will limit that. So let's say you as a job seeker, you can chat with 20 recruiters in a day for free.
00:39:33
Speaker
if you want to yeah then you will have to pay so you get 20 you get 20 recruiters for free then you pay so you will not spam the recruiters and there are several other ideas we have in mind but those are not yet confirmed so we don't see monetization as a challenge to our business our challenge is are we able to provide the values
00:40:02
Speaker
or solutions they need. Right, right, right. Got it. Okay. Okay. Got it.
00:40:10
Speaker
and like what kind of monetization like pricing do you have like per job how much do you charge or like what kind of revenue are you making today as I said we are still testing our monetization so the pricing the price per unit is very less so let's say it's it's just rupees 199 for one additional job post we are just testing it we are just testing
00:40:40
Speaker
like what the recruiter persona pay us more, what recruiter persona pay us less, and definitely. So we don't see monetization as a challenge. So in the hiring industry, the companies are willing to pay you much more if you can save their time in hiring, and if you can give them the best fit. Okay, okay.
00:41:09
Speaker
Tell me about the fundraise that you did. When did you do it? How did you find the VCs? What was the process of pitching and how many did you pitch to? That whole fundraise journey. For the seed round, it was more like a prototype, pitch the prototype and pitch your ideas and the opportunities in the market.
Investor Focus in Seed Funding
00:41:32
Speaker
In the seed round, more than ideas, the investor believes in the founder.
00:41:37
Speaker
So ideas don't work. You have to make it work. And the founders make it work. So in the state round, the founding team is the most important thing. It's more important than the idea. And once we have a product, once we have business data, it's easy to respond. So now if I have to raise more funds, I will just give him a demo.
00:42:05
Speaker
or give him a demo of my live examples. Let's say I can post a job and I posted a job and she do interviews within 10 minutes. Like that. So once you have an ongoing business, raising funds is not difficult. But when did you raise funds? Like when did your first... So we recently raised our series A.
00:42:32
Speaker
very recently and as of now, as per the company policy, we don't disclose the investor name and the amount of funding because we don't want competitors to notice us. We don't want competitors to take us something big is happening and they should focus on.
00:42:58
Speaker
But if you want to know, I can tell you unofficially, but not officially. Yeah, just tell me unofficially, we'll edit that out just for you. I will take a call. Sure, sure, sure.
00:43:17
Speaker
pop pen, global investors, you can say, obtain global investors. And in series A, we raised around 20, $30 million. I can even tell you them. So, but why don't you want to
00:43:35
Speaker
Talk about it. It's a marketing tool. I mean, it then creates a lot of news about you on various places where founders go. So like if you get published on your story or these other platforms, and then a lot of founders will see that, and then they will want to try out the platform. So I mean, it's a net positive benefit. Why not?
00:44:03
Speaker
Yeah, we believe there's a right time for it. So once we still, once we believe that we are out of that still mode, now we are good enough to tackle any competition. And we will do and definitely we will be sharing our funding news in maybe two or three months.
00:44:24
Speaker
If you like the Found A Thesis podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like marketing, technology, career advice, books and drama. Visit the podium.in, that is, T-H-E-P-O-D-I-U-M.I-N for a complete list of all our shows.
00:44:47
Speaker
Before we end the episode, I want to share a bit about my journey as a podcaster. I started podcasting in 2020 and in the last two years, I've had the opportunity to interview more than 250 founders who are shaping India's future across sectors.
00:45:03
Speaker
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00:45:24
Speaker
If you are planning to check out the platform, then please show your support for the founder thesis podcast by using this link zen.ai founder thesis. That's zen.ai founder thesis.