In this episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast, The Boys welcome Noelle London, founder and CEO of Illoominus, a people analytics platform so cutting-edge even Workday took notes (literally). What starts as a casual chat about ghost tours and crazy Thanksgiving uncles quickly escalates into a snark-filled showdown on the merits of AI-powered HR tech.
Highlights include:
Debating the correct number of vowels in “Illoominus” (seriously, buy those domain misspellings).
A deep dive into cleaning up HR’s “garbage data” with AI (because spreadsheets are apparently the devil).
Chad’s poetic ode to “dirty data” and Joel’s plea for Delta Airlines perks.
Noelle pitches Illoominus like a seasoned pro, blending tech jargon and trying her hardest to dodge the dreaded "firing squad". Does it work? Listen to find out.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Joel (00:21.97)
that's right, kids. You are listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast and this is Firing Squad. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman. Joined as always, Chad Sowash is in the house as we welcome Noel London, founder and CEO at Illoominus.com. Noel, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast.
Chad (00:32.258)
Hello.
Noelle (00:43.374)
Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Joel (00:46.214)
Glad you're here. So before we get into the nitty gritty of the business stuff, introduce our listeners to who is Noel London.
Noelle (00:55.534)
Well, hi everybody. My name's Noelle London. I'm the founder and CEO of Illoominus. I'm sitting here in Savannah. I'm being convinced by these two to try and go on a ghost tour later on. I'm on my way to Thanksgiving in Charleston. I guess that could be also referred to as the firing squad Thanksgiving as well. So enjoying the weather and hopefully it's not gonna rain on me too much over here.
Chad (01:08.728)
Mm-hmm.
Chad (01:17.496)
Thank
Chad (01:25.39)
Do you have a crazy uncle? Because everybody has a crazy uncle they go to Thanksgiving with. you have a crazy, or do you have multiple crazy uncles? That's first question.
Noelle (01:32.186)
We've all got crazy uncles, right? We've all got crazy uncles, but no, this will just be the small family that's getting together. So it'll be fun.
Chad (01:35.232)
Okay, good, Good answer. Good answer.
Joel (01:44.946)
And speaking of crazy, crazy uncles and family members, you forgot an interesting note about you. You are a Longhorn at some point in your educational journey. Do you have a favorite Matthew McConaughey quote or movie or something you'd like to share as a personal antidote?
Noelle (01:55.188)
Indeed, hook Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chad (01:55.574)
Noelle (02:03.962)
not, I'm really bad at celebrity knowledge, but I will say watching, was it the Lincoln commercial that was like the Super Bowl commercial where he was tapping the steering wheel and it was just really awkward. That's probably one of my favorites.
Chad (02:15.842)
Mm-hmm.
Joel (02:22.094)
Okay, you gotta work on that Matthew McConaughey story. That's not, all right, let's get to this. Let's do this thing, Chad. Tell Noel what she's won today.
Chad (02:22.146)
He's very, he's, he's a very awkward kind of guy. Yeah. I'm more of a Wolf of Wall Street guy.
Noelle (02:27.874)
Yeah.
Chad (02:33.582)
Well, Noel, welcome to the firing squad. This is how it's going to play out at the sound of the bell. You are going to have two minutes to pitch Illoominus at the end of two minutes. We're going to hit you up with about 20 minutes of Q and a be sure to be concise. Are you going to hear the crickets, which means tighten up your game at the end of Q and a you're going to receive either one of these three from Joel and myself. Big applause. Better than a Debbie Boone sick single.
You didn't just light up my life. You lit up this podcast. Big things are gonna come in your way. Golf clap. Man for man said the best. She was blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce, another runner in the light. Now I have no clue what that means, although we're not actually sure what's gonna happen with the luminous either. Last but not least, the firing squad.
Noelle (03:21.272)
You
Chad (03:25.452)
Willie Nelson sang it best. Turn out the lights, the party's over, shut it down, try something new. This is not the thing.
Noelle (03:29.242)
You
Chad (03:33.464)
You
Joel (03:33.51)
Noelle, are you ready to pitch the firing squad? In three, two.
Noelle (03:36.384)
Let's do it. Let's do it.
Chad (03:38.605)
Yes!
Noelle (03:43.098)
Hi everyone, at Illoominus' we are an AI powered turnkey people intelligence platform that sits on top of, integrates and gives context to HR data within and across companies. As the role of HR continues to change within organizations, what we're doing is empowering leaders to unlock the full value of their HR tech stack and to help them finally make strategic and dynamic business decisions.
I've seen this problem firsthand while I was leading HR tech partnerships at Accenture. I saw that the HR tech landscape was full of point solutions. On average, those companies had over 16 different tools and they weren't designed to talk to each other. So many HR leaders weren't equipped to understand what was actually working and what was not. At Illoominus, we think that now is the time for strategic HR. And so we've built an easy to implement way to unlock the full value of your HR tech stack to show business impact.
Our platform equips people leaders to clearly understand their entire employee journey across sourcing, hiring, engagement, promotions, and retention. We integrate across your critical HR tech stack to provide cross-tool learnings and help you to answer questions like which sources of candidates are more likely to stay. Not only are we interpreting key insights across your data, we're actually helping you to understand your peer data and that strategic context for decision-making.
We're bringing people analytics to the middle market. We're targeting people leaders and people analytics teams at retail, tech, sports and entertainment and hospitality. And typically we work best with companies that have about 500 to 15,000 employees. We're working through annual subscriptions based on a company's total number of employees. After less than 10 days and for less than the cost of a full-time employee, we're seeing that our customers HR data is finally starting to work for them.
And thankfully you don't have to take our word for it. We're proud to work with some awesome companies like Monumental Sports, Shnucks Market, Techstars, Cox Communications, Greenlight Financial and others. Our roadmap at Illoominus.
Chad (05:51.412)
Ooh, she was rolling too.
Joel (05:51.474)
Thank you, Noel, for that pitch. It was pretty tight. Yeah, I'm sure you'll find a way to get that in. All right. The name.com gets you points. It's a lot of letters. A lot of letters in Illoominus. How'd you come up with it? I get the illumination in your data. So what were the names that didn't make the cut? What's the genesis of the brand?
Noelle (05:52.11)
We'll talk about that. We'll talk about that.
Noelle (05:57.698)
Yeah, for sure.
Noelle (06:03.586)
Lot of letters in Illoominus.
Noelle (06:13.656)
Yeah, well, you're right. With Illoominus, I think we're considering starting a spelling bee pretty soon so that we can make sure that people can actually get it right. And the domain was available, and it's all about illuminating data, illuminating us. We were finding that so many organizations didn't have access to visibility and actually understand what was happening across their data. So that's what we're born to do.
Chad (06:23.96)
Can I buy a vowel?
Noelle (06:42.478)
We recently were excited that Workday named their AI tool Illuminate. So we know we're on the right track.
Joel (06:51.716)
Okay, how many misspellings.com do you have of Aluminus? At least five, right? Tell me at least five.
Noelle (06:56.48)
man, we need to though. We have a lot of misspellings. We don't have them and we're gonna get on that.
Joel (07:06.258)
Okay, need those redirects because not everyone is smart as Texas grads, So, found in 2022, pre-seed of $500k. What have you done with the money? Are you looking for an official seed round? Talk to me about the money.
Noelle (07:11.662)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Noelle (07:25.598)
to you about the money. So we raised Precede Round a little bit over a year ago. We'd been listening to our customers. We went to market with a product and with paying customers early in 22. We'd been listening to those customers. They were beginning to tell us, hey, you touch all of our HR data. And the reality is we are still living in spreadsheets on the side.
We'd been listening to our customers. So within that funding, what we were able to do is bring in a tech team from Unicorn Company Sales Loft that took their tool from the lowest performing part of the product to the highest performing part of the product and to relaunch our platform to be the turnkey people analytics platform that we have live today. So.
Joel (07:48.604)
Mm-hmm.
Noelle (08:10.776)
What we've been able to do is, I was telling you about my Delta headphones early on, we're extremely capital efficient company. We've been able to get pretty far on a small amount. What we're looking to do is as the market opens up next year, go back out for our seed round.
Joel (08:30.002)
Tell me about Techstars, the importance, what is it, why should we care?
Noelle (08:35.736)
You should care, because Techstars is also a great customer of Illoominus'. But in addition to that, Techstars is a three-month accelerator program. Companies that want to gain credibility, get some initial investment, sign up for Techstars. What that allows you to have access to is a global network of mentors that you can get expertise. They've been on the journey. They've built companies.
You can go to them with things around pricing or product roadmap, that type of thing. They are an incredibly valuable partner to us and continue to be and helping us to build brand awareness and get access to great global mentors.
Chad (09:23.254)
Excellent, well tell me a little bit about your HR experience and then also leadership within Aluminus.
Noelle (09:30.722)
Yeah. So in terms of my background, most recently I was over at Accenture Ventures leading our Ventures team. So we were making investments into HR technology companies. While I was there, essentially was going into Fortune 2000 companies, bringing HR software to them. There were a couple of really big market signals that was one, when I would walk up with my pretty startup logo map to an HR leader.
Oftentimes I was noticing this thing is full of point solutions. They're not talking to each other. HR is being asked to play a more strategic role. They were asking us to help them play a more strategic role. And the reality is that all of the interesting data points were living in different systems. So one, that was a really big thing that we saw as a market signal is none of these tools are talking to each other. It's hard to actually understand, you know, what works, what doesn't.
But then the other thing is that most of those companies, unless they were the Coca-Cola's of the world and had 300,000 employees, they couldn't actually afford to have the top line tools on the market that were built for a Fortune 500 company. So, you know, it meant that, hey, I'm a middle market company, but I can't afford to build a team. I can't afford to have a Fortune 500 level tool. So it means that I'm just living in a spreadsheet and with some duct tape.
So those are the big things that we saw as we were talking to lot of HR leaders is, you know, what was within the market was working for, you know, the one person of companies, but not really for the rest of everybody else.
Chad (11:06.04)
Give me a quick and easy answer around the leadership of your organization. So what other founders, who else is actually there to provide support and experience back to you?
Noelle (11:18.168)
Yeah, for sure. We are so fortunate at Illoominus to have a great team of individuals who have worked at unicorn companies. They have built companies and exited them. Individuals like actually my former leadership coach Courtney Swafford is leading our community over at Illoominus.
I'd worked previously with our head of marketing at a previous startup that we'd worked at together, brought in some of again, sales lofts leadership on the reporting and analytics side around data and around technology. What I'm really proud of is in terms of those investors that you were talking about earlier, we've got some amazing people and leaders around us that have built companies. So.
That means it's James White, former CEO of Jamba Juice. He's on about seven different boards right now. The founding team of MailChimp, like Eric Munz, their CTO, their first engineer, Joe Yule, are around us as well. So not only has our team built incredible companies and impactful companies, but also the leadership around us has been...
their every step of the way because they've built companies and exited companies themselves.
Chad (12:35.064)
So it sounds like you're in favor of being the one analytics program or platform to rule them all. How deep are you currently into the talent cycle? Obviously, you've got talent acquisition, you've got talent management all the way through. There's a big loop or infinity loop, whatever you want to call it. How many touch points are you all the way through the talent cycle?
Noelle (12:59.416)
Yeah, there's always more that we can touch, right? And I think that where we are right now, as I mentioned earlier, I mean, there's over a dozen different tools at a lot of these companies. The reality is that if you think about an S curve of data and like, you know, how advanced is your data program at your organization? The reality is that there's really about four pieces of critical HR tech stack.
Chad (13:02.904)
Mm-hmm.
Chad (13:14.36)
Mm-hmm.
Noelle (13:24.728)
That's going to be your HRAS system, talent acquisition, engagement, and performance and pay. So what we do is we start with that critical tech stack. We bring that data together and by us being able to touch those data points, we can go anywhere from sourcing, hiring, promotions, engagement, retention, slash attrition. What we are showing right now is that full employee journey in one place.
Chad (13:33.944)
Mm.
Noelle (13:48.846)
And then I think what starts to get really interesting is that because you see that employee journey and you're able to filter down to understand how that's changing across the organization, then we start bringing in things like L and D data, benefits data to start coming in as almost initiatives that are helping to improve your overall employee journey. So there's a lot of places we can go and we see just massive opportunities and continuing to build in data points.
Chad (13:58.062)
Mm-hmm.
Noelle (14:16.014)
But for now, the reality that we're finding is that the majority of companies that we're working with at our place in the market don't have those four pieces of information and critical information talking to each other. So that's really where we've started.
Chad (14:31.983)
So we recently talked to Rebecca Carr as the CEO over at Smart Recruiters. And she said one of the biggest issues that they have is that, I guess you could just call it dirty data. I mean, the data is not the same from system to system. It doesn't make sense. It's not contextualized. So when you're talking about this huge TAM that you're trying to figure out, because you're talking about salary, you're talking about promotions, talking about internal mobility, mean, all those things.
Noelle (14:36.9)
Okay.
Noelle (14:42.734)
Yes.
Chad (15:00.534)
And I'm sure with AI, there's a lot of prediction that's going to be happening. How in the hell do you pull all of this together with such a broad TAM with literally just a garbage pile full of data at this?
Noelle (15:13.37)
I love this question because this is the really big thing that we're tackling alongside our roadmap. Like we were all at HR Tech together a couple of months ago. Every single talk that you went into was buzzword over buzzword about AI and somebody's like slapping AI on top of a platform. But the reality is like underneath that's
Chad (15:20.044)
Mm-hmm.
Chad (15:32.13)
Mm-hmm.
Noelle (15:34.638)
that's a real challenge for HR leaders, because they're going to use the slapped on AI and the underlying data foundation that you just mentioned is total garbage. So it means that when they're coming out and saying, like, look, I'm leveraging AI, those results are not trustworthy and accurate. What we're doing, and I think the real opportunity is like we talked about this S curve and the reality is a lot of HR leaders may be saying that they're in a different
place than they actually are on maturity and readiness for AI. What we're doing in our roadmap is to improve the underlying data foundation for our customers. So making sure that the data that's, you you said in the garbage pile, like duplications of data, typos within the data, maybe people are using different codes on things like, you know, attrition reasons that we're
creating that strong data foundation of, these are the definitions for how we look at data, and hey, here are things that you can improve within your data. That means that as we're adding in more AI-driven insights, more of those proactive features, the data that's coming from Illoominus is trustworthy and accurate because we're actually improving the data quality on the backend.
Joel (16:54.864)
The first time, but not hopefully the last time, that dirty data gets mentioned on our show.
Noel, talk to me about the competition.
Noelle (17:06.872)
Yeah, the reality is where we see competition most often right now is typically with a company that thinks that they've got to build it on their own. So it means that, you know, the reality is most organizations are tracking the same things. Sure, there are some things that need to be updated and configured for your business or, you know, customized for your business.
But the reality is what we run into more than anything else is the idea of DIY, DIYing the data, of feeling like I want to have data-driven insights. So I think I need to build something within Tableau. I need to build something within Power BI, and I need to start from scratch. And the reality is, while that might sound like a nice initiative to get off the ground, the reality is you're ongoing having to maintain those data connections.
Joel (17:41.169)
Mm-hmm.
Noelle (18:01.156)
data definitions of like, can we agree on what quality of hire means for an organization? There's so much ongoing work that maintains those. Yeah.
Joel (18:09.618)
Let me ask it differently. How are you different than Vizier, for example?
Noelle (18:15.746)
Yeah, mean, Vizier is the type of solution that let's say you're a what's a what's a good organization. Let's say you're a Google and you're eight hundred thousand people. Something like a Vizier is going to be a really good solution for that because it almost is like having a PhD in data science or it's supporting your PhDs in data science. The reality is that the most organizations
actually don't have that type of expertise or busier developers in-house to make that type of solution work for them. It's a great solution if you've got a built-out team and if you need that level of insights. But for the majority of companies that don't have that, what we've built is a solution that's really meant to put data in HR's hands, not necessarily in a data scientist or IT's hands so that...
Joel (19:05.714)
Mm-hmm.
Noelle (19:10.83)
there's more data-driven insights living within HR and that there's an opportunity to leapfrog some of those organizations that don't have the resources for a tool like Vizier.
Joel (19:22.738)
So real quick, name names, who is a competitor that you, you're going to get an RFP, who are you competing against?
Noelle (19:28.494)
Sometimes what we see is something like a workday prism that's gonna be within, that somebody thinks is at that level. Again, that's going to be a much heavier solution that's going to be more expensive than something like an Illoominus. And the reality is most organizations, we have workday customers, most of those organizations may need an HR tech stack that...
is more disparate because they have use cases that workday is not necessarily the right fit for. And so what we're doing is saying, if you use workday, great. Use the tech stack that helps you to get the job done and the work done best. What we're doing is simply making sure that all of that is connected to each other and helping to tell the broader context across those various tools.
Joel (20:16.978)
Talk to me about sales and marketing. How are you pounding the pavement, calling customers? I marketing wise, do like that you are really, I don't want say you're ignoring social media, but we talked to so many startups that have like every single social media and they have like three posts that were four months ago. So what are you doing marketing wise? I mean, like in Google ads, I don't see you if I search people insights platform. How are you getting the word out? How are you driving sales?
Noelle (20:43.704)
Yeah, I mean, we're, I would say on Go To Market, what we've done is we've been going to HR leaders and building their relationships with HR leaders directly. What we launched about two years ago was a community of chief people officers that we bring together regularly to talk to each other and to support each other. So we're doing invite only round tables, bringing HR leaders together to have real conversations and talk about how to solve real problems.
And that what we're finding is about 30 % plus of our pipeline is coming exactly from that. People are saying, so-and-so just called me on the phone the other day and said they were dealing with a similar challenge. I want them to be at the next round table. I think that they'll really benefit from it. So we've been building trust, building relationships with HR leaders, and that's been our primary driver to date. Virtually $0 on sales and marketing at this point.
Chad (21:36.748)
So how are you taking all that?
Chad (21:42.318)
That's what we're looking for. Okay. So how are you translating HR data into business case data?
Noelle (21:48.954)
Yeah, what we've been able to do is because we're able to connect different sources of data together, what that allows us to do is answer business questions. So for example, I mentioned to you earlier, retail is a big industry for us. Retail, some of our customers were experiencing what they call quit quitting when we first started working with them at exponential levels. So losing about 70 % of employees every single 90 days.
Chad (21:56.078)
Mm-hmm.
Noelle (22:17.21)
When we first started working with those kinds of customers, this is like a small mid-sized retailer, they were losing 70 % of their employees every 90 days. That was costing them about $100 million every single year. We walked into that situation and what we were able to do is help them to understand certain metrics like quality of hire. So if you think about, if I lose 100 people a week and my strategy is to hire 150 people,
because we're able to pull that ATS data together with the performance data and the attrition data, we can start to say which sources of candidates are bringing you quality hires. What that means is that your most expensive part of your employee journey is training, hiring, and onboarding somebody. And so by us saying what's working and what's not, it means that you can start to shift your focus into things that are actually working. The other thing is what we've been able to do alongside them is help them to understand
Chad (22:46.286)
Mm-hmm.
Noelle (23:15.32)
why people are leaving. So they're so focused on the hiring side, which is also super expensive for them. How do we actually shift the focus into understanding why are people leaving? Because we're bringing together that engagement data next to attrition data. What that helps us to start understanding and what we've been able to build through proactive attrition models is starting to show things like scheduling hours. How many?
Chad (23:22.083)
Mm-hmm.
Noelle (23:39.482)
hours is the ideal number of hours so that a frontline part-time worker is actually more likely to have longer 10 years. So because we're able to tell more of the whole picture by bringing the data together, instead of these data points living in different systems and not really being able to make sense of any of that, that's how we start to say, hey, HR is the most expensive part of the organization.
Chad (23:39.875)
Mm-hmm.
Chad (23:58.862)
Mm-hmm.
Noelle (24:03.566)
How are your dollars working for you and how are we making sure that where your investments are going are most impactful?
Chad (24:11.564)
So define quality of a hire, number one. Number two, since it means so many different things to so many different people and just take a look at how Sherm defines it. They have no fucking clue. So at the end of the day, are you creating standards or trying to create a standard in specific industries or how are you actually looking at this problem? Because it is a problem.
Noelle (24:17.39)
Yeah. Yep.
Noelle (24:33.23)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think standardization is a really big opportunity for us. It's also one that people are spending way too much time on the semantics of how do we define something as opposed to, OK, how is that helping us to do the work? On something like quality of hire, yeah, we're not necessarily going off of the shirm definitions. And we do.
create definitions when somebody is walking into the platform and they get that data definition, that library, if you will, of calculations. But on quality of hire, there's a lot of different industries and you would define it differently in different industries. What I can say is just going back to the example that we were just talking about is who is more likely to have a longer tenure?
Chad (25:07.662)
Mm-hmm.
Noelle (25:26.35)
And it's not necessarily there's pieces of it and we're not saying it's just the source of where that individual is coming from. But what we do want to begin to do is begin to learn about if somebody starts as a bagger, can we start to understand when people are moving from that role into another role within the organization? We have all these really interesting examples in retail of people that started as baggers and they end up in C-suite.
Chad (25:35.032)
Mm.
Noelle (25:54.522)
executives and that is a but anecdotal piece of information that we have right now. What we're doing is starting to say, can we look at that transition of a bagger into some other role within the organization and start to understand what is happening there and why is that happening?
Chad (26:13.12)
Okay, so go back to the the go to market real quick with regard to sales and partnership. How are you guys actually going after sales? Are you going direct? Are you actually going through white label types of partnerships? What? Where are you guys actually gaining ground to try to try to build your portfolio?
Noelle (26:30.362)
Yeah, it's going direct right now. So we go direct to chief people officers typically and at times now some COOs within those industries of retail sports and entertainment and hospitality. What we're finding is that referrals are our biggest source of new customers today and we're going direct. I think there's a huge opportunity. We are a SaaS platform. We're not doing consulting.
Chad (26:56.994)
Mm-hmm.
Noelle (26:58.638)
you we're not doing the change management and yeah, that's a huge opportunity within this work as well is how do we actually do the change management around a platform like Aluminus. But to date, we haven't been doing any of those types of channels. I think that's what I was doing at Accenture and that's a big opportunity for us ongoing outside of referrals outside of the chief people officer round tables that we're doing now in that community.
The other sources, we do have some partnerships with other HR tech companies like a Lattice and a Greenhouse of being a part of their marketplace, which allows us to add additional value to their customers that are also trying to make their systems work with some of these other systems.
Chad (27:45.698)
Gotcha. Marketplaces are to some extent somewhat easy to get into. The big question is very close partnerships so that you can actually start working with some of those bigger platform companies where they're town acquisition, they're HCM. When do you think that you're going to actually start moving in that direction with regard to go to market? Because obviously going direct to a company, that's one thing you get a lot of feedback, you get a lot of information, you also get a lot of recommendations.
But when it comes down to actually getting portfolio penetration, the way that you do it is through partnerships. When are you guys going to start moving?
Noelle (28:21.838)
Yeah, we're, mean, right now we're still going direct. I think we will do the partnerships when we find the right partners for us. It's something that we've explored in the past, but looking for those right partners. So that is something that in the next year or two, we'll be doubling down on even more.
Joel (28:41.426)
What's the greatest threat to the business? Something that comes to mind as we're talking, know, LLMs, companies just being able to dump their data into this thing, ask the chat bot like the questions and have them answered. But you live this every day. What are the main threats to the business that you see?
Noelle (28:59.544)
Yeah, it's a good question. I think the biggest threats that we see to the business are probably, I mean, right now it's awareness of, as I mentioned, you know, we're very cost effective, capital efficient. So right now I think that the biggest thing that we're seeing is, you know, we need more people to know about what we're doing at Aluminus. So
That's probably what I would say is the biggest thing. I'm not as, in terms of LLMs, chat, GPT, these other innovations that are coming out. As I mentioned, we were at HR Tech together and I think hearing about a lot of those innovations. But I think the way that we're approaching of bringing people along
the journey for AI and supporting them in readiness for these types of solutions is something that we're hearing from our customers and hearing from our community is very differentiated.
Joel (30:07.666)
your geographical footprint? it US only or do you have customers in other countries and what does that look like growth wise?
Noelle (30:13.378)
Yeah, we're now global, but the vast majority of our customers are going to be North America based, but they are going to have a global footprint. So they're going to want to be able to look at international data and, you know, geographically how the employee journey differs.
Joel (30:33.362)
Chad, this sounds really, really expensive to me. I'm a little scared of the price tag. Now, well, let us know and our listeners know, what am I going to pay for this service?
Noelle (30:43.438)
Yeah, so the good thing is, again, we're a SaaS solution. And so what we've been able to do is build this in a way where we're sharing those learnings and we're distributing the learnings across companies. We do a per employee per month price point for Luminous. We're typically working with companies one to two years at least at a time.
But we cost less than the cost of a full-time employee for an organization. So we're really able to leapfrog organizations to having both access to their own data, but then the learnings and the improvements across customers.
Joel (31:29.84)
It's an answer. There weren't any numbers in that answer, but it was an answer. All right, Noel, the Q &A is over. Are you ready to face the firing squad?
Chad (31:32.957)
Hahaha!
Noelle (31:40.174)
I am.
Joel (31:41.65)
All right, get her Chad.
Chad (31:43.64)
She's excited. All right. Right out of the gate, as I'd said earlier, this is a huge, huge, huge tam. There's so many issues. The data's dirty. You're looking at people data, which focusing on attrition, salary. There are whole platforms that are dedicated to one thing, pay equity.
Right. And you're doing salary, internal mobility, performance, quality of hire, quality of source. But I mean, this is a small list compared to what you guys I'm sure are focusing on. So trying to get one of those right is going to be tough. But but I got to say. First and foremost, Noel, one of the things as I advise or I'm actually brought on as an advisor. Number one thing is the founder.
I like you. I like your background. I like how you're talking about data, capital efficiency. As soon as you said that, I almost fell in love. AI is a commodity. Data is queen and you're digging into that dirty data and making sense of it. LLMs can't get into these walled gardens, data lakes, data oceans. They can't. Not enough focus is happening in this space. You can be a vizier pilot fish and make a killing.
Core platforms don't want to build this. Partnership, partnership, partnership. Noel, you light up my life. You give me hope. This is a big applause.
Joel (33:14.66)
Almost fell in love. Almost. Not quite. Not quite there. Yeah.
Chad (33:15.148)
Good job.
Noelle (33:17.29)
wait, that was the golf clap. That was a really good golf clap.
Chad (33:21.654)
No, that was a big applause. That was a big applause.
Joel (33:21.874)
No, that was applause. That was a rousing applause. That was a rousing applause. And when he says background, he doesn't mean your actual background, which is very cool. Kind of a real Southern esque background. so one of the things in Chad mentioned, we talked a lot of startups and, and TA folks and a consistent challenge is making sense of what all these fucking SAS tools that I buy are doing for me.
Noelle (33:23.457)
that was a big pause. Great.
Chad (33:30.446)
Yeah
Chad (33:51.074)
Yes.
Joel (33:51.43)
They're telling me what they're doing, but I don't really know. I'll take them at their word. I'll believe them. You have a really good triangular strategy of saying, we're unbiased. Give us the data. We'll give it to you in an unbiased way, in an objective way. And then you can make your decisions on what kind of vendors you use and who you renew with. I think you're going to save companies a lot of money by not just blindly re-upping with a service that they don't really know what the hell they're getting.
for their money. So I think you're solving a very real problem with a lot of companies. If you can start talking about how much you saving companies based on not having to re up, services that they're using, I think that's, that's a, that's a huge win for you. You're growing out of a way that I like, you've taken very little money. your bootstrapped you underscore that you're using a free Delta headphones on this call.
Chad (34:47.296)
Ha ha!
Joel (34:49.106)
I think you're just showing off a little bit. headphones don't cost a lot. Yeah. There you go. Shout out to Delta. Shout out. She wants the diamond status. Everybody she wants the, if you're listening Delta, she's willing to trade an Illoominus. Illoominus license. Yeah. Illoominus license for a diamond diamond, status. so you're growing in a way that I like your team is small. It looks like about seven on the website.
Noelle (34:50.308)
Shout out to my hometown airline.
Chad (34:53.72)
Too, too far, too far, too far.
Chad (34:59.16)
Ben 10 bucks, Noel.
Noelle (35:02.18)
Chad, you were wondering earlier how you're gonna get diamond. I'm just saying. Sponsored over here.
Joel (35:17.69)
Now there is, there's a little fear of me. You you spent some time in Texas. There's a Texas phrase, all cat, all hat, no cattle. you gave me some answers that were non-answers. You kind of danced around some stuff, which makes me a little fearful that what are you hiding? What, what, why wouldn't you tell me pricing? You have a marketing person, but you're not doing marketing. like a little witty, leery about that, but I do think that the problem you're solving.
is so big. I can't name any competitors really, which is why I kind of pushed you on that. And then either you're bullshitting me or you really don't have many competitors. are an acquisition darling. Some big fish is going to eat you up. You have not taken hardly any money. So your investors are going to be very happy. You're going to be very happy when that day comes. So for me, yeah, aside from the straight shooter,
issue and what am I really, you know, what am I getting from you, Noel? I don't have any cute illuminating comments like Chad does. He's good at that, but I as well.
I'm gonna give you a rousing applause and on the doorstep of Thanksgiving, we'll probably air this in Christmas because of the Noel thing. I think that'd be cute, but give thanks to your double rainbow big applause for Illoominus. Now for our listeners who want to know more about you, maybe find out what your pricing actually is. Where would they go?
Chad (36:31.01)
Hello.
Noelle (36:38.116)
love that.
Chad (36:45.944)
Good job.
Noelle (36:53.112)
Go to our website and I'll spell it for you so that you don't have to be a really good speller. It's I-L-L-O-O-M-I-N-U-S.com. If you guys wouldn't mind putting in the show notes. Go to our website. We've got demos up there. Schedule some time with our team and we'd love to learn more about what you're focused on for this year and if we can help.
Chad (37:05.923)
Of course.
Joel (37:16.114)
Yep. And she's going to go out and buy like a dozen misspellings of Illoominus.com. So don't worry about how you spell it. That's right. Go daddy's going to be happy. Chad, that is another one in the can. We out.
Chad (37:17.079)
Love it.
Noelle (37:21.058)
That's what I'm going to go do for the rest of the day. Thank you.
Chad (37:21.134)
Do do it quick
Chad (37:30.518)
way out
Noelle (37:31.361)
Thank you.
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