Landing pages? Wait, did I hear you correctly? A platform for landing pages?
That's correct and, in this Deja, vu moment Rick Maré and the team over at SHAZAMME are betting on a platform that helps hiring companies build better landing pages quicker. No question, this is definitely a case of "what is old is new again", but has the idea run full circle? Has it lost its luster or is it just in time? Will Rick receive big applause, a golf clap, or the FIRING SQUAD?
You gotta listen to find out.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Intro: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids. The Chad and Cheese podcast is taking it to a whole other level.
Joel: Alright. Alright. Alright. What's up everybody? It's another Firing Squad. If you don't know, just ask your sister. This is your favorite guilty pleasure, The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman joined as always the chewy to my Han, Chad Sowash is in the house and we are here to welcome Rick Maré the CEO and Co-Founder at Shazamme. Did I say that correctly, Rick?
Chad: Shazamme.
Joel: They're in Australia and I don't speak Australian.
Rick: Shazamme, yeah.
Joel: Shazamme?
Rick: That's correct.
Joel: Shazamme. Welcome. It's 6:00 AM in Melbourne so it's your coffee time and our happy hour.
Chad: Thanks for joining us.
Joel: This will be fun.
Chad: Yes. Thanks for joining us.
Rick: Pleasure to be here.
Joel: Well, we always start with a little Twitter bio before we get down to business. So why don't you tell us more about Rick.
Rick: Thank you. Look, Rick is a very complicated person. Always been very interested in finding challenges and new ways of doing things. So I was born in South Africa, left when I was three months old back to Holland where I grew up until I was 15 then came to beautiful Australia and learned to swim with the crocodiles, swim with the sharks and have snakes around. So it is what it is in Australia but great fun and I wouldn't leave here for a million dollars or anything else.
Joel: Is it really true that 90% of the world's venomous animals live in Australia?
Rick: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Joel: Wow. Wow. Wow.
[laughter]
Chad: Joel's got a boner right now. Okay, so Rick, welcome. [laughter]
[music]
Chad: Welcome to Firing Squad. This is how it's gonna play out. At the sound of the bell, you will have two minutes to pitch Shazamme. At the end of two minutes we're gonna hit you with about 20 minutes of Q&A. Be sure to be concise or Joel's gonna hit you with the crickets 'cause he loves the fucking crickets. That just means get your shit tighter and move it along. After Q&A you're either gonna receive from both of us, big applause.
[applause]
Chad: What is old becomes new again. Get ready for the second coming of website-building, golf clap. Okay. Okay. Okay. Maybe you've got something here. And last but not least, the Firing Squad. That's right, Rick. I'm sorry Rick but the '80s called and they want its Commodore 64-like technology back. That is the Firing Squad. Are you ready?
Rick: Ready as I'll be.
Joel: Alright Rick. Pitch Shazamme in three two...
Rick: Shazamme is what the recruitment industry needs to build a brand online. So what we've done is we've looked at technologies around the world and saw Shopify, ecommerce sites, Canva and all types of technologies making it easy for people to do what they want to do. Now, that was not available in the recruitment and staffing industry. So what we did is we scoured the world and looked at what technologies we could use to make it really easy for people to do what they essentially needed to do to build a brand online. So build landing pages, track the referral sources and really do it very easily without coding. So Shazamme was born out of pulling together no-code platforms that really dealt with all the issues that we learned over the previous 14 years. So making sure that people could build landing pages, brand them, drop a job board on, drop 10 job boards on, filter it any way you want all without writing a single line of code.
Rick: So our four key promises to the market have been simple drag-and-drop technology. No developers required. 24/7 chat support so that if you do need help when you're building landing page new sections on the site, you have someone to talk to supported by extensive help system and an academy to teach you how to do certain things. Pricing. So pricing was meant to be very much competitive and not excessive compared to what was in the market at the time. And then integrations, making sure that we have every possible integration with every ATS CRM and multi-posted to make it easy for you to connect to your backend systems. So making it really easy and what that has allowed us to do is win clients from the smallest to the largest in the world. They all give us five-star reviews solely because once they see it they just go, "This is what the industry has needed for many many years because finally we can do what we want to do without having to go through support."
Joel: Thank you, Rick. Thank you. You did get that five-star commentary in there which I'm sure you wanted to get in there.
Rick: Absolutely.
Joel: Let's start with the name, Shazam I think of a music discovery app or I think of a superhero that they may or may not have in Australia. It's spelled S-H-A-Z-A-M-M-E. So Shazamme but the spelling is off. How did you come to it? You're marketing people why not go with a word that people recognize. A common spelling? What's up with the name?
Rick: Very good question. Look, we wanted something that was Shazam boom bang here. And we threw around lots of names and the first version was Shazam my brand. So it's about building a brand for recruiters. That was too long, too complicated then we started throwing ideas around and Nicole my co-founder came up with Shazamme and we looked around and there was not a single mention of it. It was absolutely unique and yeah, we took it. We've got every URL possible and that's when the journey started. We registered a trademark and lo and behold, our good friends Apple and DC Comics sent us lovely letters resisting.
SFX: Shazam.
Joel: Now, that makes more sense to me. You should capitalize the M at the end, the second M so it's ShazamMe. Anyway, that's my own little thought.
Rick: Well, if you saw the first iteration of the logo, the first part Shazam was one color and Me was the second color. And so in order to get around the trademark dispute, we swapped it around so the Shazam was not highlighted. Yeah.
Joel: Okay. Okay.
Rick: That was very interesting having to deal with two absolute giants of the industry but they were very good.
Joel: Okay, so you have a nice history. You were at an agency before this. 20 years ago you were making biscuits and chocolate at a company called Snack Time, [chuckle] how...
Chad: I'm hungry.
Joel: Talk about the JXT, your past experience and how that all helps support Shazamme.
Rick: Yeah, very good question. So, you are right. I have been in a few industries. I was part of a housing company before that that owned the biscuit or snack company. So I built houses, 12,000 a year so that's many a week and then went into biscuits and chocolates. Very different again, but all to do with volume, outputs and how to best manufacture, how to get more out of a factory.
Joel: You can just jump to JXT.
Rick: Yeah. [laughter]
Joel: Get off the biscuits. You're making me hungry.
Chad: Please get hungry.
Rick: And then back in 2006 after trying to find staff for another business, I just realized it was very hard to use job boards that were prevalent back then and very costly. So I raised some funds and started Job X back then which was the next best job board. The technology by then was definitely far ahead of the major competitors in the market. There were three of them back then. And the GFC in 2008 hit and as you all know, the recruitment industry stopped spending on anything that was not core to their business. So rather than spending on four job boards, they moved their money to one job board and our technology or our platform essentially became obsolete. So we used that technology we developed to essentially spin out the first white label type SaaS technology for recruiters. And we went on a journey with Google back then to educate the market as to why recruiters should have their own brand and how they can build it well online. And we won large companies in the first sort of five years. We got Adecco, Manpower, Kelly and a lot of Australian big companies to jump on board and use our technology. And so that was the journey into the recruitment technology space. Since then we've had many iterations with under... You know Job X became JXT and then, yeah, Shazamme just before COVID hit and that was probably the best thing I've ever done.
Joel: Okay. Landing pages. That sounds like job descriptions to me. How is that... How is it different? I mean, you can embed a video, you can put in some graphics in a job description. What are you doing that's different?
Rick: So what we class as landing pages is, for example, you are a medical recruiter and you want to build landing pages for a specific hospital opening or an anaesthetist in Wollongong, you can literally in five minutes build a landing page, filter it down to that category, throw whatever you want on there, video consultant, anything you want, FAQs and have that running and then promotion on say Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, whatever you want and then track everything that comes back all the way through. So one of the things that obviously ecommerce does really well, they track everything that comes in and everything that comes out. So you can go ROI on this Facebook campaign for $100 with 10 applications. So we've perfected that process so that even if they don't stay on the landing page but then they go to another job or look at something else and then apply, we still attribute that to that campaign. Not difficult technology but the way the recruitment space is set up as you know, people go and buy a landing page product that stands alone and isn't integrated into the rest of their brand or they'll go and get MailChimp and they export CSV files and that's not connected to their brand or website. So we're trying to make it the Shopify of recruitment.
Chad: So building landing page is nothing new for this industry.
Rick: No.
Chad: Right?
Rick: Absolutely not.
Chad: So what's the focus of the market that you're trying to hit? Who is your perfect client? Is it a practitioner? Is it staffing? Is it RPO? Who is it?
Rick: Yeah, good question. So to date we have solved lots of problems for anyone from a startup, so a single person organization that doesn't know what to do. Because as you know, they may have come from a big recruitment brand and they step into the world on their own and they don't know how to set up email. They don't know how to build a website. They don't know about SEO or technology or...
Chad: So is that SMB or enterprise? I mean what do you...
Rick: Enterprise as well, yeah.
Chad: I'm trying to cut to the chase here, man. We only have so much time let's get to it. Come on.
Rick: Yeah, no problem. And for enterprise we solve a bigger problem in that they want the best platform. So we have one of the top five in the world as our client and they were on a different platform they moved to ours and they're absolutely loving it because they now have free reign to do whatever they want. They don't need to lodge a ticket to get things done. So they're running away and we've seen that with lots of our clients. They were on a journey on their own and sometimes we go to their site and go, wow! This is totally different now. We left them two years ago or a year ago it looked like this and now they've totally changed it and they've built all these additional things on there.
Chad: So it's flexible landing pages. So trying to carry on, I need concise, Rick. I need concise. We've got SMB, we've got enterprise so you're trying to cover the whole gambit. And then talk to me about customer service 'cause that was one of the things that you touted which I think is awesome. So talk to me about customer service and size of the staff.
Rick: I will just add RPOs is another big part of our market that we're now getting people approach us that really love the RPO concept because we have a tech stack and they can just roll them out cookie cutter style for their clients so, very popular. We've got quite a few large brands. The customer support, so the help system, the academy and the 24/7 chat support is winning lots of lots of love because the clients that we have can jump on and they'll ask a simple question. And we say that 95% of all of the support questions are solved on the spot within five minutes.
Chad: Okay. And that's through chat so once again the question is, how big is your support team?
Rick: So we've got 27 staff around the world ranging from people in New York, Phoenix, Columbia, UK, Philippines, Indonesia, Australia etcetera. So we try to cover the full 24/7 support. Obviously sometimes there might be a gap or we're too busy but we always follow up because the chat sends us an email saying hey you missed this chat so we'll follow up within as quickly as we can.
Chad: Okay. So knowing that many of the platforms that are out there today relic ATSs, new platforms and so on and so forth, they generally have this baked in. So why would they buy something that is just an additional piece of cosmetics versus just using what came with the system?
Rick: Correct. So in the staffing space, we are not aware that any ATS has a fully baked marketing platform. So we're talking Bullhorn, JobAdder, Loxo, JobDiva etcetera. None of them have a baked in full platform. There are a couple that claim they do but when you then look at it, it's a very stock standard. Everyone looks the same and you can't change anything, you can't edit it. It's all within a very solid framework. You certainly can't go building 10 job boards on the site. You can't throw landing pages on. You don't have the connection between consultants and jobs and you don't have that ecosystem that as I mentioned before, ecommerce sites thrive on and that's what makes their success. Those platforms don't have that and as I said, we certainly don't know of any that do. Well, that's in the staffing space. In the corporate career space, yes you may have a few that do this but what we are seeing they're very clunky, old technology. And the clients that we talk to once they see ours, they just have a big smile on their face during the whole presentation because they can just see how it can help them grow their talent acquisition path in the digital space.
Chad: So you mentioned some platforms Bullhorn, Loxo etcetera etcetera. Do you actually partner with them to be able to sell within their systems or do you just go direct?
Rick: A bit of both depending on what their model is but certainly with Bullhorn we're in their marketplace.
Chad: Tell me the ones that you actually have partnerships with that you are selling together with and then the rest of them we know. So that's the important part.
Rick: Yeah. So Bullhorn, we're in their marketplace, JobAdder and then we're marketplace. We just signed a marketplace agreement with Aviante, were with Idibu, with Broadbean, we're also finalizing Loxo and then there's lots of the other ones where we have an agreement with them because they don't have a marketplace. So in total we've 35 integrations so far ready to go and as new ones come along so we just did one the other day takes us two or three days because of the no-code technology platform that we use and so it's very quick to get an integration up and running.
Chad: How much revenue is actually represented by your partnerships, percentage wise?
Rick: I would say at least 80%. So most of our referrals at the moment are inbound. So we've done very little marketing to date. It is mostly inbound. As I said, some clients refer lots of their colleagues to us. They'll just say, "Hey, we work with Shazamme. It's just amazing. We love it. It solves a lot of our problems and... "
Chad: We know everybody loves it, Rick. Answer the question and let's move on. Come on.
Rick: Yeah. Okay.
Joel: Yeah let's talk about money real quick. According to CrunchBase at least, you guys have bootstrapped this whole thing. Is that true? Do you plan on raising some money? Is this thing gonna continue just to be self-funded? Talk about the investment.
Rick: Great. So to date we have had some investment from clients in the industry. So we've got about five, six investors all from the industry that saw the tech and invested. Very small amount. We tried to... Nicole and I tried to keep as much of the equity as possible. We are now embarking on a raise to expand our team globally mostly in sales and marketing because as I mentioned, we haven't really marketed anywhere before. So that is really where we're up to now. We're looking to raise up to 2 million USD.
Joel: Do you guys do URL mapping?
Rick: Yes we do.
Joel: Okay. Is that usually a big hurdle to get a company to map a URL to your platform?
Rick: No. Very easy.
Joel: Not very easy?
Rick: No. Very, very easy.
Chad: It is easy.
Joel: Very easy okay. More political than technical I know but sometimes companies worry about that kind of shit. So recruiters aren't traditionally marketers. I know Canva and some of the ones... And I've used Leadpages and Unbounce before from a marketing perspective. Even for marketers, that takes a little bit of training. What's the bridge like to train recruiters to use the platform? Do they have to go through a internal approval process? How do you make it easy? Do you have webinars about how to use the service? Is it onboarding a pain in the ass? Talk about that.
Rick: That was one of our absolute must, must-haves before we launched the product. So Nicole and I, whilst we've been in this space for a long time, we actually can't code. We can't write a single line of CSS or HTML. The test that we both said for this product to succeed, we must be able to build a recruitment website without writing a single line of code or without help. And that was the absolute hurdle we needed to cross. So Nicole is sales. I'm very much about product and ideas. We both, and just like you, Joel and Chad, you could build a website for the recruiting space fully integrated with probably 10 minutes of training or looking at a couple of videos. That is how simple it is.
Joel: What's the typical use case from the jobseeker side of it? Is the goal typically, click to view the job description? Is it, click to give us your email address and then we'll contact you? Is it a... What is the typical... In most marketing it's like, "Hey, give us your email and then we'll send you a white paper or you're signed up." What's the use case on Shazamme?
Rick: So the most common one, we obviously have many different options depending on what ATS they use or how they want to funnel people into their process. But typically it's a job listing. Could be from one job to 1500, 2000 jobs. People can search and refine just like on ecommerce sites. They'll go, "I want an engineering job in Melbourne or engineering job in New York." They'll have the list up, they can then filter through them, they can read more to look at the full job detail page and then they can apply. And typically the most common way to apply is what we recommend is just first name, last name, email address and a CV. And sometimes in the fast-moving space, people don't even ask for CVs anymore. So we make it as easy as possible. We don't want to have the barriers that a lot of ATSs natively have, where you have to register and you have to fill out three pages of stuff that is never used during the application, and then you finally get to put your CV. So we're about quick conversion, in and out.
Chad: On that line of thinking, are you using a partner for parsing, to be able to parse all that data so that you can get it into something that makes sense to the system?
Rick: So our great partners tend to have those in the ATS. So the parsing is done at the ATS level. So we send the CV in and we can get that data back.
Chad: So you, generally, you are a contact, really, high-level contact gathering of information and you're passing the CV along. Although, in many cases these applicant tracking systems still need more apply through their process? Are you then just pushing them... So you're becoming pretty much a lead form at that point and they're still having to apply through the applicant tracking system?
Rick: No, they apply through us and we send that information into the ATS. So first name, last night, email address, CV, then if they wanted... So we've job alerts. So again, the automatic notification of when there's jobs. We are heading down the path where we integrating into Shazamme CRM, so if anybody applies, registers or creates a job alert, we push them into the CRM with the information as to what they selected. So an engineer in New York, that then builds up a very effective marketing engine to then send SMSs, campaigns, whatever you want, to that audience.
Chad: So you said that you're looking to expand globally where?
Rick: USA and Europe is our main focus. North America and EMEA, so Europe, Middle East, etcetera, and then APAC. So they're our common markets, English-speaking markets. We are multilingual and we do have a client where we've rolled out 14 countries in Europe, with I think 20 odd languages, so our platform is fully multilingual. And again, it's very easy to change that, and we've made it so flexible anyone can change languages and make widgets different.
Chad: Okay. You're gonna tackle Europe and US, the US, all at once?
Rick: Correct.
Chad: Okay. So I reached out to a couple of friends of mine. Industry analysts and also people that are in RPO, one of them, RPO in the UK. And none of them had actually heard of Shazamme. First and foremost, does that surprise you? And secondly, how are you going to rectify that with only two million USD?
Rick: You're absolutely right. As I mentioned before, all of our clients have been acquired through inbound leads. The markets globally is 166,000 companies, according to LinkedIn, in the staffing space. We are attending all of the events that obviously are the most common ones, the VSIA, Bullhorn, the ones in the UK. So the way we are going to tackle is outbound outreach through LinkedIn, outreach through email marketing, through the partner network. That's really how we want to do it, through Broadbean, Idibu, etcetera. That is how we are going to tackle it. So we've modeled this out quite extensively, based on cost of acquisition, we know roughly what the industry average is. To date, as I've said, we've spent $0 on marketing. We know it can be a very clear path in the recruitment industry because you have such a finite and dedicated audience you need to target. So we've mapped out pretty well how that's gonna happen. It's gonna be... We're gonna be everywhere.
Joel: You've said a few things, your landing page development company, I guess, self-serve development company, but you've talked, you've said job alerts via email I assume, talked about SEO. What else do you guys do? Is there a social component to this? I assume all your web pages are mobile responsive. Talk about the other things that you do, other... I think it sounds really simple to say you build a web page, but it sounds like you guys do a lot more. Expand upon that.
Rick: You're right. And a lot of people do look at it just as a web page. We actually build very complex... We have a complex platform that's easy for people to use, and that includes SEO pages, consultant pages, sector pages. So we've over the years defined what we call the ideal site architecture for recruiters. 90% of recruiters that we talk to don't get that concept, and once we show them, they understand, ah, you've gotta have mining recruitment pages to attract employers and mining job pages to attract candidates, and that needs to have content on there, needs to have consultants on there, everything needs to be automated. So in our platform once you put a job on, or we receive a job from one of our partners, everything is automated from that point. It's put onto the job boards, put onto the sector pages, put onto the consultant pages. Job alerts are sent out immediately. If there are landing pages with that on, that is instantly populated. So we are very much about automating that whole process so once that website is set up, everything is very, very simple and automated and SEO-optimized. So we do send feeds to all of the aggregators out there, like Indeed, LinkedIn, etcetera. So your job really goes everywhere the minute the consultant presses the publish button in their ATS.
Joel: You mentioned MailChimp earlier, and MailChimp launched this week, I think it's in beta, maybe it's more widespread, but they've essentially integrated ChatGPT technology to basically automate the creation of emails that are really custom to the user. Which is pretty exciting and slightly scary if you're in the business, from a threat perspective. I don't see you guys having the military buildup to take on something like a MailChimp or bigger companies that'll be able to automate these pages being created. My sense is that most recruiters don't like making landing pages or managing pages, and if they could automate it through something like ChatGPT or what MailChimp is doing, that you guys are toast. Tell me where I'm wrong.
Rick: No, it's a fair point. First and foremost, as you guys know, the recruitment industry is very niche. And the reason I used MailChimp before was because a lot of clients that we know just export a CSV file out of their ATS, throw it in MailChimp, nothing talks to each other, people unsubscribe, they don't know who has unsubscribed because next month they'll just download a new CSV file, throw it in MailChimp again. So that's sort of what we're trying to avoid and fix for the industry by having a fully integrated marketing system. In terms of ChatGPT, we launched already our own ChatGPT widget. So, imagine you're a recruiter, you want to type... You want to get a blog up and running, you just drag the ChatGPT widget onto the page.
Rick: You say, "Write me a hundred-word article on why nurses should be working in Sydney," and it'll type it for you. You can preview it, edit it, and publish it within a couple of minutes. So we already have that, and we also have a secondary version that is a bit more sophisticated and can do a lot more as well, and we are certainly going down the road. The good thing about ChatGPT, it's all open technology, as you know, so it's not that hard to build on it, and we are certainly... The people that we've shown just sit there smiling because they know that we can cut their work time in half or make it so easy for them to do. So yeah, absolutely agree, it is where recruiters want to go, because they are typically short of time, have better things to do, if they're in a small firm; obviously if they're in a big firm and marketing is their role, they'll love it even more because they can push out more content.
Chad: Let's talk about exit. So who is your perfect acquisition partner? Who would come in...
Joel: SEEK.
Chad: Acquire... Just because they're in Australia, come on.
Joel: Yeah, exactly. Share a Foster's and buy my company.
Chad: Who is that perfect partner that you are looking for? Or is that even the exit strategy at all?
Rick: Yeah. So there is definitely an exit strategy, whether that's a public offering or an acquisition. There are plenty of fish there in the sea that are big enough and are in this space that could expand their offering to the industry with a product like Shazamme. You don't need to think too far from LinkedIn, Indeed, that type of company, that has a global footprint and has recruiters as a prime audience. It's someone where I think we can add a lot of value and revenue to their top line. Because everybody, in reality, every recruiter, every corporate TA team needs to have a career site or a recruitment website to promote the job openings. We've only seen it get harder in the last two years to find and attract good staff. So that problem will remain.
Joel: Chad, global aspirations, ChatGPT integration, this sounds like a really fucking expensive product. Rick, talk about the price for us.
Chad: Better be.
[chuckle]
Intro: I've done this before a number of times, and one of the other items that I didn't want to have was a legacy monolithic platform. So as I mentioned to you, Nicole and I were the guinea pigs to say, "We have to be able to build recruitment websites," which we passed with flying colors. That was tick. The way we did that was through selecting appropriate parts of a platform. Think iPhone. Apple doesn't make the screen, Samsung does. Up to recently they didn't make the chip, Intel did. So we took a very similar approach in our design. We said it had to be a microservices based platform, not monolithic, so if we wanted to replace parts it's a very quick and easy, we'll replace this piece with another piece. So what that meant is we decided on no-code platforms.
Joel: Just looking for the pricing there, Rick.
[laughter]
Joel: Just looking for the pricing.
Chad: Cut to the chase, my friend.
Rick: Yeah. So no-code platform is what underpins what we do. So we've been able to do what we used to do with 20 developers now with a number of developers, and we're running so fast that we can't actually keep up with the speed of development.
Joel: Pricing's on the website, everybody. Feel free to go out there if you wanna know about it. All right, Rick, it is time to face the firing squad. Are you ready?
Rick: I'm ready as I'll ever be.
Joel: All right. Get him, Chad.
Chad: All right. Rick, I love that you and Nicole have great industry experience. We're not seeing enough experienced industry folk like yourselves. So that's pretty damned refreshing and it's awesome. I personally led a project that launched a build-out of 40,000 job site domains and worked with over a hundred Fortune 500 companies in building out their websites. Hold your breath. As in 2009, 2009 we were doing that. So I'm very familiar with the process and definitely familiar with being able to scale that tech. The thing that we didn't do, even though we did launch at that scale, we didn't go after Europe and everybody else. You know why? Because focus and discipline means something. And $2 million? We were over 20 coming to the bottom line at that point. So we had some major... We had pretty good revenue for a small organization. Two million is not enough to take on those two fronts, period.
Chad: I think that you guys need to be more focused, need to definitely get somebody in there from a marketing standpoint that will squeeze that message so that you have a nice concise articulation of what you're trying to provide. And at the end of the day, I think you've got a chance, I think you've got a little bit of a chance if, if you're focused and you have discipline and you don't go and try to invade America and Europe at the same time. So I'm gonna give you a golf clap.
Joel: All right, Rick, you're still alive, man. You're still breathing.
[laughter]
Rick: Great.
Joel: A little bloodied Mad Max style. A little bloodied Crocodile Dundee style.
Rick: That's what the Australians do well.
Joel: So Chad, you said 2009 when that little project launched, and I remember that period, that was glorious, and [laughter] that was 14 years ago. And on a marketing side, landing pages, I mentioned Leadpages, Unbounce, that was a thing about the same time. I always try to temper myself, Chad, because we try to talk about such innovative things, cutting edge stuff, but at the end of the day, man, HR, recruitment, these are people that are not ahead of the curve, by any means. So like...
Chad: No.
Joel: I really have to temper myself to say, when someone comes to us with, we do landing pages, and I just want to go, "What the fuck?" [laughter] Go, "Okay, hold on. Remember what industry I'm in. Remember where I am, okay?" Job postings. We do online classified help wanted ads, basically. So I'm gonna temper sort of my mentality going into this. I understand that people hate their ATS, they hate to have to go through a platform to create things quickly. They want to throw a page together, talk about nursing jobs in Melbourne or warehouse jobs in Toledo, Ohio, whatever. I get that people want to have that platform like yours to do that quickly. It sounds like there's not a lot of hurdles to get those done. Marketing doesn't have to look at these pages. You really saved your shit when you said, "We're putting in some ChatGPT automation."
[laughter]
Joel: Copywriting stuff. Like if you had not said that, it would have been bad for you, my friend. But you... That was great. You talked about the market, the potential market, I think it was 66,000 staffing companies, RPOs, people that want an efficient, cheap, fairly cheap, solution like yours. Damn it, this is not sexy. I think it's maybe something an agency, somebody will snap up.
Chad: Bullhorn.
Joel: Two million is not... Yeah, two million is not high expectations for that series A funding round, so it sounds to me like you're just gonna get over that hump, get something that is something that someone will be interested in buying. If that's your goal, for me, I gotta put my 10-year curve hat on and say, we're in HR and goddamn it, Rick, you and your Aussie mentality and gung ho spirit, man.
[applause]
Joel: I'm gonna give you an applause. And on top of that, I'm gonna give you a...
SFX: Shazam.
Joel: Yes, sir. All right. How do you feel?
Rick: Yep. Feel good. Thank you for the feedback. Absolutely, you've hit a few good points there. Just as a addition, the two million was a seed round only, not a series A or a series B. So we certainly have a plan to not just have two million to expand. So it'd be two million seed, grow rapidly, then go for your series A and then series B. So there is a longer term plan to grow rapidly. I do get the focus, Chad, and that's certainly something we'll have a chat about.
Joel: Well, when you do get money, promise me you'll update your website because it looks a little bit like Steve Irwin and Mad Max downed some Foster's and went to Photoshop and made a website. Chad, another one is in the books, and he just made it out alive. We out.
Chad: We out.
Outro: This has been The Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to The Chad and Cheese podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup who wants to face the firing squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today. That's www.chadcheese.com.
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