SaaStr 247: Hired CEO Mehul Patel on How to Move from Transactional to Recurring Revenue
Hear from Hired's CEO Mehul Patel on how to move from transactional to recurring revenue. Hired is a marketplace that matches tech talent with innovative companies. Hired combines job matching with unbiased career counseling to help people find a job they love. Through Hired, job candidates and companies have transparency into salary offers, competing opportunities and job details.
Missed the session? Here's what Mehul talks about:
How to leverage your company values to drive stability.
Hiring people, strategically.
Finding your pricing sweet spot.
If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin SaaStr Mehul Patel
Launching a Marketplace: The Playbook Behind 4 Wins
Matt Mickiewicz built his first online marketplace at 15 years old, paying for his domain registration out of his allowance. By 30, he had used the same playbook for launching a marketplace four separate times - SitePoint, 99designs, Flippa, and Hired - and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Matt reveals why every marketplace launch was born from watching user behavior inside an existing community, how he solved the chicken-and-egg problem when launching a marketplace each time, and why he pitched VCs for introductions instead of money. His two-sided marketplace Hired generated $30M in job offers during its first two-week auction.
🔑 Key Lessons
🎯 Watch your community for marketplace launch signals: Matt spotted 99designs and Flippa by observing organic buying, selling, and competing behavior inside SitePoint's community, not by brainstorming in a conference room.
🛠️ Validate before building when launching a marketplace: Hired started as a simple signup form with clear kill points at every stage. If developers would not sign up, the idea died. No wasted engineering.
🤝 Hack distribution through investors, not cold outreach: When companies ignored Hired, Matt pitched VCs to introduce their portfolio companies. This generated 24 employers and $30M in offers from the first batch.
🚀 Use PR to ignite marketplace launch liquidity: A single TechCrunch story drove thousands of company signups and tens of thousands of engineer signups for Hired in 72 hours.
📉 Do not waste time converting critics: Matt spent months debating designers who opposed spec work at 99designs. They were never going to become users.
💰 Spin each online marketplace launch into its own brand: A brand can only stand for one thing. Mixing a developer education site with a design marketplace confused both audiences.
Chapters
Introduction
Success quotes from Churchill and Twain
Growing up in Vancouver and early entrepreneurship
Launching a marketplace at age 15 with his allowance
Building traffic and monetizing with direct ad deals
Rebranding from Webmaster Resources to SitePoint
Discovering the 99designs marketplace inside SitePoint
Why each marketplace needed its own brand
Solving the chicken-and-egg problem at 99designs
Biggest mistake - trying to convert critics
Spinning out Flippa using the same playbook
How Hired started in a San Francisco pub
Validating Hired with a landing page and kill points
Pitching VCs for introductions, not money
Landing the TechCrunch story that ignited growth
Advice for aspiring marketplace founders
Hired's talent curation and salary transparency
Revenue model and growth metrics
Surviving the dot-com crash
Lightning round
Resources
Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/19
Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email
Product Hunt Radio: Episode 28, Hackathon Edition
Last weekend we hosted the first Product Hunt Hackathon at Y Combinator. While in Mountain View, we pulled a few awesome people into our makeshift studio (a garage in the back of YC) to chat about products and things they’re building. We're joined by Shrav Mehtaa (Developer Evangelist, Hired), Mark St Raymond (Unwind.me), Kyle Russell (Writer, TechCrunch), Erik Finman (Founder, Botangle and Intern for a Day) Dave Fontenot(The Hackathon Guy), and Aaron Landy (Engineer, Main Street Genome). Listen in. Check out the top hacks from the Product Hunt Hackathon: http://www.producthunt.com/e/product-hunt-hackathon-2014