Aidan Cramer: CEO of AIApply on seed-strapping to 1 million users and millions of revenue

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0:32Thank you very much. Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. I'm here with Aidan. Aidan is from AI Apply. Hello, how are you doing?

0:40Aidan Cramer:very well thank you big fan of the content uh it's awesome to speak to you thank you it's interesting i was speaking to um joan i saw him at a talk once giving you know he's like a master of content he's actually inspired a lot of my content strategy especially as i've moved from linkedin onto tiktok and instagram um but i love what you guys are doing i've been following you since that talk which is probably five or six months ago but why don't you just give a quick introduction to kind of who you are and what you've built cool yeah joan is the the go which i must say uh is boy star but i'm aiden kramer i'm co-founder and ceo of coming called ai apply ai apply is a consumer sas company so we have ai tools for job seekers um so we help them go from needing a job to getting hired faster um by democratizing access to career services that were once reserved for people that could afford a career coach um but will that break down into we have a suite of tools going from something that will build and tailor a resume for you to make sure it's attracted to tire managers, to something that will find and apply to the best matching jobs across the internet for you so that you're the first person to apply, the jobs that you might not have found, to something that will help you during and after job interviews to make sure you are polished and getting feedback and improving.

1:58Aidan Cramer:So yeah, it's a suite of tools to give job seekers an edge in this very challenging rocket. and you've seen a lot of success can you can you touch on some of like traction stats whether that's revenue or users or just what you've seen to date so yeah we're a couple years old we stopped showing revenue um after we started a bit of building public on on x and we were getting like two or three copycats show up um a month you know some literally copy pasting our landing page so we pull back from that which is a real shame so i loved it and i'm all for kind of openness and transparency but uh not at the you know um the risk of damaging our reputation by people signing up to the wrong company but yeah we're two years old um we were growing insanely quickly uh so we just had a million users um we have uh seed strapped so we raised like a very small round of funding from um an scis fund in london called hatch which have been awesome and a handful of very, very high value on supportive angels.

3:00Aidan Cramer:And since then, kind of April last year, we've bootstrapped, we're now scaling profitably, grow or we grew like five or six X this year in terms of ARR. Wow. And yeah, we're just, there's no sign of slowing down just yet. And that's up the back of an incredibly small team. How small is a team? So there's seven people in total. and efficiency wise it's probably one of the most capital efficient revenue per employee companies that are certainly in the space i believe now it's amazing i think there's a lot to unpack there i want to get into the efficiency piece first i think that's so interesting you've stayed so lean you've grown to a million users you're staying i guess like bootstrapped since the initial small round why is that do you think you could go further go bigger with more money or do you think actually you just don't need it so why take it so it's a combination of two so one like we at the very beginning when we started this company it was about kind of optimizing for a high probability successful outcome for us as founders and for us as our team so we didn't want to really go down the traditional bc route um we weren't trying to build like a unicorn company and you know i have i built a company before and i've gone through that kind of stage of pitching these unicorns um and a lot of people that were in my vintage of starting a company at a similar time so about 10 years ago now uh went through that vc roller coaster um and then came out the other side with very little to show for it so this time around um it's been about kind of optimizing for freedom, optimizing for a successful outcome, and just building something that is of value to a lot of people.

4:48Aidan Cramer:And it generates like real meaningful cash flow and is profitable. So we took the initial capital just to kind of give ourselves that, yeah, first bit of runway, first bit of boost helps us run some big experiments sooner. And then by not raising again, it's kind of really helps us focus on um you know how we build a sustainable business here um the truth is there have been parts of that journey where it's been very very tempting to take additional capital um there it's not been a straight line up you know we've had months and months of kind of flat growth we've had a couple of down months and um it's kind of you know it gets to your head and you're thinking you know if we had a few extra million in the bank um maybe we could hire this person that would solve that problem um but we've been very disciplined about not doing that and now kind of we're seeing the reward of that so you know our team is very very good at getting to a point where things challenging really going deeper what the problem is and we've now built this kind of muscle of solving problems without kind of throwing resources at it um and the company is much much better and healthier for it than it would have been otherwise if we'd have raised a few million dollars to start this year, we would have almost certainly grown a lot quicker at the beginning, but we wouldn't have kind of found the unlocks and the second level of product market fit that we've now found that is helping us kind of get this new level of growth that is profitable, that is efficient.

6:22Aidan Cramer:And yeah, we're building a better business for it, which is something I didn't really anticipate or expect in the level that we've seen. yeah i guess that capital restrictions gives you the mindset of just like we we either solve it or we die right there's no like pot of cash to help you there um when you raise that that that initial kind of seed round that early round were you able to be transparent with investors and say look this is going to be the only rate round that we're going to raise we're not aiming for a billion dollar outcome we think we're going to have a great outcome here but it's not going to be a typical 50x 100x yeah um so it really helps i'm some aligned angels so we raised the total about 450k um and we had yeah good fun on board and we were we were just transparent that like we don't know exactly where this is going to go we think there's a very high probability that you're going to see a 10x outcome from this um and there's a small probability that you're going to see you know a hundred thousand x outcome we're not we're not saying we won't build like a massive business if the opportunity presents itself, but we're optimizing for, you know, high probability at this time.

7:31Aidan Cramer:So the funds were great. You know, they were slightly de-risked with SEIS and the angels have just been awesome. And I think having spoken to some of these angels, they kind of saw our attitude as a sign that this is the kind of business that could end up doing really well. And we didn't raise until we were also, you know, generating you know a few hundred k in arl and we did that off absolutely zero resources and we were already profitable and we were already growing like 40 month over month with having with nothing so i think they knew that um we could get a lot further was not taking on a lot more yeah that makes sense um yeah i mean it's probably refreshing for investors as well right to see an opportunity where you're growing without a lot of cash you know and 90 percent of investing that's a great thing that the companies don't need the cash to grow that quickly where was the um the growth coming from in those early days so early days there's a lot of short form uh organic content so i was putting out a lot of content myself um so we were kind of testing product ideas um pushing stuff out on tiktok instagram reels um and yeah i would find a format that kind of worked to talked about what we were doing, had some good viral success, you know, tens of millions of organic use, chart went up a little bit, that gave us some more resources to scale that out.

8:59Aidan Cramer:So we would take that cash, we would hire a few influencers or pay them to repurpose those formats on their accounts, and I would expand the reach cheaper further. And then that was our kind of primary distribution channel initially that got us to our first 10-20k MRR. And then we started kind of using some of that content for ads um started reinvesting in or reinvesting in seo and then it was pretty soon after raising that we made our first like a growth hype um so when yon came on board uh we kind of showed him what we were doing uh we were super early stage at that point uh and yeah he's been kind of a rock star in that role uh again like is not used to working with super limited resources we gave him but um has that mindset to just kind of keep endlessly digging to find gold um and yeah it's been an insane asset to the team um and has helped us go from like what it was basically nothing to now kind of hyperscaling yeah i think it's so interesting the i certainly find it my own content that the the volume of impressions that you need to generate to then translate to something more meaningful or tangible it's just absolutely massive you know you have to be able to generate millions and millions and millions of impressions on a regular basis to try and convert those eyeballs into paying users um and so you mentioned that he was kind of your first growth hire you've got seven people at the moment what does a team makeup look like um so we just have uh year on and growth uh we wrote a few atcs for kind of our content production um which kind of feeds into our ad libraries uh we have uh juana on support um he was just manning our ai assisted uh support chat bar um she's incredible um and then we have two guys working on our auto apply product uh roman and martin um and we have a kind of product engineer guy called ole who's working on kind of all of our core web and making sure we push stuff forward and then we have peter up my cto uh so it's like predominantly engineering and then kind of great concern yeah so interesting i mean that's such a small team and you know you mentioned you one person support over a million users you've now hit that seems crazy you know are you able to touch on like that person's support role how they're leveraging ai because that seems like yeah it is crazy um and that has been a role that's been really really hard not to hire for um because the house has been on fire multiple times and and we've you know we've all jumped in um i jumped in i've been kind of answering support chat we built kind of a custom um ai support chatbot um so plugged in kind of all our docs uh we plugged it into crisp and that kind of assisted her for a bit uh and that was really good we built kind of a very decent prompting library to answer most requests uh we then kind of upgraded we're now using intercom that have thin ai support which is great that takes away a lot of requests but um when we kind of have had like inflection points and new things have broken uh we kind of go through a period of like new product iteration new growth experiment iteration and then like when we hit something we kind of default back a little bit to support engineering and just thinking you know how can we automate some of these requests um an example you know um we have we offer some refund policies if people kind of meet certain conditions if they're like particularly upset or something's gone wrong um and we realized i was taking up you know uh 20 of our fondest time so we prioritize building something that would like automatically refund if certain conditions are net um and so just you know going back into our backlog and making sure that we can automate a lot of support like before we actually just throw more for these the problem i think is part of that like muscle that we built and it's definitely compounded and enabled us to have such a lean thing.

13:17And when you look at what's coming down the road, what your next hires will be, do you have a view? Is it going to be more operational growth, product and engineering?

13:26Aidan Cramer:I think it's all going to be engineering, all products and engineering. Interesting. So you think you're going to be fine, one person with AI on support, one person on growth, and it's just going to be building and shipping? I hope so. Yeah, it's amazing. It's such an interesting... That would be the dream outcome, I think. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's so interesting. You know, you're sort of hearing all this stuff about the explosion of AI and how it's enabling people to build, lead, and grow faster. And yet, simultaneously, we're seeing more and more companies raise bigger and bigger amounts. And the two don't really seem to add up, right?

14:03You kind of expect, okay, well, companies should be able to stay, lead, and grow faster. And it feels like you're one of the few use cases where you really have nailed that. of staying lean, growing interestingly quickly while using AI to get you there?

14:16Aidan Cramer:I'd like to think so. I definitely believe in this kind of notion that a 10x engineer becomes a 100x engineer if they can utilize these tools effectively. And I think it's the same with cross functions, right? A 10x support person becomes a 100 ,000x support person if they know how to update the prompts, update our support, write tickets to support engineering, Like the same with growth, like 10x growth person becomes 100x growth person if they're using absolutely every tool available for kind of creative testing, for reviews, for kind of ad library management. So, yeah, it's a very unique and exciting time to be building.

15:01Aidan Cramer:And we're taking one route and we'll find out whether it's the right one, but it doesn't come without its own set of risks. yeah and how are you finding it on a personal level you know compared to your previous experiences going down that venture-backed route where you know maybe you had a bigger team and you had more money you know what's your personal experience been like doing both um i i love it um i absolutely love it um i love the freedom that it gives us um i love the ability you know just to um really control kind of our destiny and our future on this and not feel kind of tied to this unknown feeling future outcome and feel like you know every every dollar in MRR that we add is actually something that will have a meaningful contribution to myself and my team and the fact that we can give away like you know meaningful amounts of equity to the people that we work with versus giving that away to a passive sidelined investor, that's also something that's very important to us.

16:04And is that part of the sell? Because, you know, a lot of people who work in tech, and I know you're on this, he's had amazing experience working with these hyper-growth, you know, huge organizations that have scaled to thousands of employees, raised hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. So I imagine trying to pitch, you know, a much smaller team, a much scrappier way of life is difficult, almost challenging to people who who like a lot of us got quite used to the the easy money world of 2020 2021 how are you able to convince these people to like to come into the team and to be like we're not going to give you you know the big budgets but it's a different experience

16:42Aidan Cramer:um you have to ask him because i i think truly like he must have done his own kind of um mental modeling of what this opportunity looks like for him and he you know he's worked for some of the biggest companies in existence like billion dollar ipos and i remember when he first joined we were talking about the kind of daily ad spend budgets that he's used to having and we were like one percent of that and i couldn't even imagine spending that much money and now we're you know we're not far off it which is also crazy so yeah he must have seen like the growth trajectory and he's seeing like what these successful companies actually look like and what the metrics look like um and that there might have been something there that he could kind of scale into uh but yeah i it's also you know um what we're doing is fun and it's new and we're like truly building something people want um users are raving about us we've got like an amazing engineering team and it's just yeah it's fun to be kind of on the um upwards growth trajectory uh much more enjoyable than you know stuck in a a larger company that's kind of plateauing or maybe an earlier stage that is pre-product market fit yeah absolutely i know i can definitely i can definitely imagine that you know i went through that similar experience of yeah almost like seeing you know the burn is such a it's such a worrying thing it's great to have huge ad spend but when you when you know that every month you are just bleeding cash it's tough um yes yeah and i think that's like also a big thing that kind of reflects across uh the team and day to day is like we are we're default alive um which is a very very different place to be in you know we're not thinking about our next raise to extend our runway um our runway is infinite and the additional cash we generate like um each month like that's we treat that as new bets we can make um and we're is constantly collecting chips, placing new bets.

18:42Aidan Cramer:The whole team is aligned with that. And that's a fun way to think about growth, trying to place profitable asymmetric bets versus your manager giving you an ad budget and saying, do the best you can with it. So I think that's also part of the difference and also makes it quite fun. And are you using all of the cash that you make the profit that you make just to reinvest into the business or you're getting to the stage where you can start kind of taking cash out so at the moment we're re-investing everything um it's all kind of yeah trying to hit some kind of revenue milestones and then we kind of call the lever back a little bit um and then give ourselves a bit more of a buffer um room to place like much bigger bets uh potentially acquisition level bets and and think about the different type of business we can be building yeah amazing super exciting i always want to talk about um content more generally right you're such a content-led business from you know the early days scrappy doing it yourself to hiring a growth person to getting agencies to help are you seeing or you leveraging ai and content generation are you seeing that as either a threat to good organic content or you're seeing it as a tool to help you in your own content um so we probably used every like ai tool ai ugc ai content creation um system uh we know them all we know them all intimately like we've never really had anywhere near the same level of success um through using like pure ai ugc or ai created that we have um based like compared to real humans real people actually like doing it the hard way uh for things like statics i know like we've put out a lot of variants using um ai tools but um yeah like real human content forms best for organic by a mile um and for us even like our paid content um the real human stuff performs better i i'm not sure we've had like a top 10 winning creative that has been like purely um ai generated and I think we've tried a lot.

20:55Interesting. So for you, human always wins.

20:58Aidan Cramer:Yes, strangely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I stay away from it for my own content. It's good some of the AI tools to help clip or to help, you know, that kind of stuff can be quite helpful. But the actual generation of, I even, even I don't, because I just feel like it's so much worse. But look, Aidan, like, thank you so much for joining me. Like, we're out of time, but I think what you're building is super exciting. I love speaking to founders who are taking this route and not the flashy raise those of millions, hit loads of super high valuations. So let's stay in touch. And if you ever do want to share news or like share milestones, let me know.

21:35Like I'd love to talk about it and post about it. But yeah, thank you for joining me.

21:39Aidan Cramer:Cool. It's been a real pleasure. And we should have a big milestone to share in the coming months. And we'll be shouting about it. Amazing. Well, look out for it. Cool. great to chat speak soon thanks Aiden bye bye bye