Amelia Miller, Cofounder of Ivee

0:00Welcome to the first episode of the Scaling Europe show. It's great to have you. It's good to be here. Yeah, why don't you just give us a brief intro, who you are, what you're building.

0:09Amelia Miller:I'm Amelia Miller, co-founder and CEO of Ivy. We are building an AI agent within the recruitment space that connects companies to essentially every candidate that's not on LinkedIn. You know, we call ourselves the job platform for everyone else. The return to work market, so candidates that are out of conventional work and trying to get back in, whether that's for redundancy, caregiving, transitioning from being a retired professional athlete into corporate and everything in between. Typically, these candidates don't exist on LinkedIn. If they have a profile, they're not opening it. And we are that ecosystem for them.

0:47And how are you finding these people, connecting with these people? As you say, they're like offline. How are you getting them onto your platform?

0:53Amelia Miller:great question yeah they are very much hidden talent about about 55 percent of candidates that are out of the workforce in the uk haven't opened linkedin in the last 12 months and it's all about meeting them where they are and so for us that's been a few key pillars we're very we're a startup we proceed we don't spend a penny on marketing so everything we've done so far has been pretty frugal but what's been working has been word of mouth referrals That's about 60 % of our acquisition at the moment. Candidates coming to us, finding value in the platform, telling their friends about it. Organic social media.

1:32Amelia Miller:And for us, typically, that's TikTok, which is a huge white space within recruitment. A lot of people are going to TikTok as their primary search engine to search, you know, help with my CV or who's hiring in my industry at the moment. Strategic partnerships is crucial. So meeting these people where they are. So, for example, if you're a parent and you're out of out of work, it's partnerships with organizations like NCT or the British Army for retiring army veterans or Chelsea Women's Football Club for athletes. um and then seo and geo is is massive geo a lot more than seo now um which you can maybe come on to in in this call but ranking organically either on google or in llm so when people are talking to chat gpt about how to find employment they're recommending ivy as as a provider amazing yeah i think there's a lot to unpack but before we get into a lot of that i'm definitely keen to talk about geo that's like such a hot topic at the moment can you like talk a bit about your background you did psychology but then you're at Goldman Sachs like how did this come out of your background yeah I've you know I've been been here there and everywhere to be honest I so I'm a published psychologist I guess by trade I'm currently a fellow as well at the University of Cambridge and my research was all around candidate choice in recruitment so you know why is it that one candidate is far more likely to press apply than another if they have the exact same CV for example then I did a massive 180 went into banking I was at Goldman Sachs here in London in foreign exchange sales and trading half loved it half hated it I loved loved the markets loved the competitive side of things but it just just didn't scratch the entrepreneurial itch you're such a small cog in a big wheel um and it didn't yeah it didn't sit well with me so then left spent some time at a health startup leading their business development team before moving full-time onto Ivy last year my co-founder is my sister Lydia and the reason you know the reason it was Ivy that made us jump was we watched our mum experience the problem we're solving for a lot of candidates whereby she left the conventional workforce took a career break and just completely disappeared as a candidate from incumbent talent networks you know she wasn't opening LinkedIn if she went on the job board she wouldn't press apply because her confidence had been massively knocked she was out of work she felt so out of the loop and we realized that no ecosystem and no tech platform exists that's addressing this market and so that was the impetus really of building Lydia my my sister and co-founder her background's in VC so she was at Deloitte Ventures CBC and her vertical focus there was the future of work so very much looking at the space seeing where there was white space seeing where there was budget crucially in terms of companies like what solutions are they actually willing to pay for because if no one's willing to pay for what you're building there's no point even starting yeah so it's interesting like coincidentally you and your sister are alike even if you weren't sisters you'd have like a great founding team match up right like she's been investing and looking into this space you come without your psychology background but also your I guess your startup experience as well were you like how much were you building this while still working at your other jobs was this like a bit of a side hustle or was it like i've got this idea i'm just gonna go all in we were built i'll be honest with my answer we're building it quite a lot um yeah you know any hour of the day when you're not working your day job essentially where you know we're all in on ivy we did a really great like very early um product builder program which was free which we've got a place on and that was actually super helpful for like getting you from zero to 0.1 um and that and that was in evening so we were able to do that alongside our jobs but you know say we'd gone say we'd gone full in without working on this problem at all and like you know raised a massive round who knows if you have product market fit who knows if people are willing to use your solution who knows if you're even solving a pain point and so for us it was we actually have to figure out those answers out before we jump full time into this because it might not be the right product at the right time yeah 100 i had a similar thing where i was doing all my media stuff on the side while working at deal like in their product team and it was like trying to find the right time the right balance to to make the jump was there a moment or like a time when you were like okay i think we're on to something now i'm gonna quit and go go all in yeah there definitely was we did a big a big campaign It was a cold email, actually.

6:07Amelia Miller:I mean, I'm kind of against cold emails right now in B2B sales just because it's evolved so much. But we did a cold email campaign to budget holders at large enterprises, so anything above 10 ,000 employees. And I'm very much a fan of the saying, if you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money. So it was really an advice call, and it was genuine. And it was a genuine email. We've got this idea. We're workshopping it. would love to have a chat with you to see what you think of it the reply rate was insane and we were getting on calls with you know global heads of talent acquisition at the likes of kpmg ey and having really candid conversations and something that i'd encourage any founders if they're listening in those conversations like really try and set the tone for them to be honest because people will just lie to your face and say that they'll pay for this when they won't yeah but from those conversations we were like there's this budget here that that people will that people will pay for this if there's because what we figured out from those calls is company's number one priority is to cast their net as wide as possible they want the best candidate for the job to see their job if there's a huge pool of talent that is not seeing their role that is a huge problem for them and if their competitors are accessing that talent that's an even bigger problem for them um and so those calls we we boshed out in like a two three week period and they were all so positive that we were like right there's there's real legs here um this is it this is it yeah yeah and that must have been like an amazing moment and can you tell me about a bit more about the journey since then so that was like over a year ago like what have you been up to building the platform you obviously went through ballerton launched you've teased some big things coming up in september can you give like a bit of a brief overview what's happened what's the success that you've seen over the last year yeah so we when we you know when we first jumped we didn't start shipping any code building any product at all it was you know a huge amount of customer interviews on both sides we're a marketplace you have candidates on one side b2b companies on the other figuring out what features do people want and what pain points can we solve how can we solve that quickly and how can we then then build an mvp very very quickly longball didn't exist when we first built if i was building ivy today it's obviously the first place i'd go but again i would wait until i knew what is actually the infrastructure that people want before before building something so we you know we did all of that transcribed all of those interviews pulled out the key points um on both sides and then and then hashed together our mvp which we launched in July of last year and over that time we've just yeah we've really spent a huge amount of time iterating figuring out what features aren't getting used what are getting used um what people are paying for what features we can add what can we upsell in terms of you know what we've built on both sides our talent ecosystem has has has gone from zero to now 70 ,000 and then on the b2b side we went from well cold start problem of a marketplace if anyone's building a marketplace they'll know you can't onboard both sides at the same time so for us the talent very much had to come first that is the product and so we waited till we were at 10 000 users before we even started touching b2b clients and that came towards the end of last year so we hit 10 000 at kind of the end of december and so from january we've really been going hard on b2b getting companies on the platform paying for us integrating with their ats so we've now got around 40 paying um b2b clients on the platform and arr wise we're yeah gone from we were zero in january and we're on about 400 450k now amazing and so the model is are they paying a subscription fee to just appear on the platform and then do they get is there a payment for like finding or hiring talent as well so we do not do a success fee or a placement fee um it is purely subscription-based companies will pay us a fee we integrate with their applicant tracking system and so all of their roles ping out to ivy very similar to how they work with with linkedin for example um and so they can post unlimited roles make unlimited hires and then they can also proactively browse our talent hub and our database and 97 % of our candidate profiles have their CV attached so they can look through the CV and any keywords in the CV will flag and that candidate will come up in any skills-based search or Boolean search they do.

10:48Amelia Miller:We also have our proprietary AI talent matching system as well, which is for an individual role that they're hiring for, it will pull up the top 50 candidates within the Ivy database that match that role. Amazing. And so, yeah, just to recap, you've got like 70 ,000 people kind of signed up to the platform 40 paying customers over 400k of ARR that's like an amazing first year right that's phenomenal yeah it's been it's been epic and yeah I also you asked me about Balderton launched which I didn't touch on but maybe we'll come on to that in a minute but yeah that's that's been great as well we've been doing that for the last six months yeah yeah and how are you finding like it doesn't look like you or your sister have particularly technical backgrounds how are you finding like building the platform building a proprietary ai tool yeah it's a it's such a good question because we're living in this world where like b2b sass companies are like like the new fast fashion brands and like i've seen some people make those comparisons where like anyone can now spin up a sass company overnight which is fantastic um i think and there's a new breed of founder emerging like lydia and i aren't technical and when we first had the idea for ivy we're like this is going to be a huge problem it's now the opposite where lydia's not technical in the sense that she's you know studied computer science and um you know sits down all day coding but she understands every single tool that needs to be used to get what done so you know all of our front-end designs she's on figma make all of our workflow ai agents she could build in a day using nan and it's just i think having that like top level product understanding of what tools can you leverage to build what in the business combined with an epic developer team so we've got wills who's our founding engineer and we've got Tom who's our front end engineer and and that combination I think is is perfect to be able to build something and build something quickly because you can do so much with so little right now which is insane yeah yeah the founders that we speak to who are deep in those tools and are like using them themselves day in day out are definitely the ones who seem like further ahead because there's so many of those like phenomenal tools same for like content creation uh like any of these ai tools are such a an easy way of building your own things um i want to get onto like content as well you you know content is king that's kind of like you know i've been building content for two years your content has done amazingly well like how are you using that and why are you using that as like a growth lever for ivy it's so important and again coming back to the point of anyone and their dog can now be a founder and be an entrepreneur create a business overnight on something like lovable it means it means you have to set yourself apart like if you take recruitment for example we're we're building an agent that connects talent that's not on LinkedIn there's about 50 agents that have been spun up over the last four months that are AI agents for recruitment but they're all scraping LinkedIn data and so they're all doing the same thing how do you set yourself apart as a business and I fundamentally believe it's it's all about brand building and I would say there's two pillars to that there's there's company brand building so how do people know about your organization and what you do from up from the brand perspective but then there's there's founder brand building you have to build in my opinion you have to build out loud I am like allergic to stealth mode I when I see people building in stealth mode I it's me out a little bit but the reason is because if you're not taking people with you on the journey of building your business no one's going to know what you're doing no one's going to know how you're doing it no one's going to feel part of the journey like very much playing into that ikea effect which is if someone feels as though they have physically built a piece of furniture themselves they place more monetary value on it and i think the same massively holds for businesses people feel like they're on the journey and they can help shape your journey you know maybe you're putting out the odd poll in your content that people actively are participating in they're going to hold more value and they're going to recommend your company to someone they're going to speak about it they're going to interact with your with your posts because they feel like they're on that journey with you so i and i am aware i'm probably massively one end of the spectrum but i just i just think content is is going to be a massive differentiator and then within that it's human content as well um you can you know some great ai tools for content generation but you If you take LinkedIn, for example, building a personal founder brand, if your captions are physically typed by yourself versus if you use a custom GPT for your personal brand, it's going to be night and day in terms of the content that's output, and people know that.

15:48Amelia Miller:And readers and consumers are so savvy as to what content is being made and written by AI these days that it has to feel genuine. And your content is not just about Ivy. you know you're like you're putting out strong opinions you're posting about uh day-to-day activities talking about like the euros you're talking about i don't know social issues as well is that like are there things you are willing to talk about versus not willing to talk about do you have an idea of like the the personal brand that you're building on top of the business brand yeah for personal brand you know we've got some great i've got some great advisors in in this space which I'd love to be able to name them but I'm under NDA but come October I'll be able to name them um and I can shout and scream about how helpful they've been but you know it really is with a personal brand you've got to have three pillars because if you talk about too much and people give you a follow they're going to be really confused as to why they follow why they follow you and you're not going to resonate with with what they want to consume and so you know for me for example I've spent some time identifying those three pillars I didn't just pluck them out of nowhere I made sure I was testing content seeing what was resonating but for me it's it's talking openly about AI and AI and recruitment specifically for me it's talking about the gender pay gap um and then for me it's it's it's being a tech founder in London those are kind of my my three key pillars and that's the type of content that I want to not stray too far away from controversial opinions or just opinions full stop go so much further than And you think they do because we're living in a world where you go on LinkedIn and everyone is writing their captions with chat to be tea and doing the most boring creatives.

17:29Amelia Miller:And there's em dashes coming out. There is. And then suddenly you see a post that has a genuine opinion. Maybe they throw a swear word into the hook and you're like, oh, thank you. Like a human opinion. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. AI means we don't see it as much as we used to. And I think that is really what resonates, especially if you speak something that perhaps has been on people's minds and other people have been too scared to address. But, you know, other people are thinking that as well. Those are the posts for me personally that tend to do the best. Yeah. And it's the same on X.

18:03X is just so I've only recently got into X and trying to like grow my audience. But it's just so full of absolute nonsense. And all you've got to do is post a genuine opinion and people will love it. I want to talk about like your running with Harry Stebbings that you were very vocal about some of the things that he said about 996 it's sort of like he tweeted it he put it out on LinkedIn and then Saranga at Balderton said something you said something and then all of a sudden it was like in the newspapers and then I saw your TikTok with him and you went for a walk can you like I guess did you and him come to some sort of resolution or middle ground and how did that

18:38Amelia Miller:meeting come about yeah yeah it weirdly blew up I mean and again it was like I'd been thinking that for a while I'd wanted to say something but I've been a bit scared and I was like you know what no I need to put my opinion out there and other people were thinking it too and I think that's why it got a lot of traction but yeah essentially I guess for anyone that doesn't know the the 996 model it's working nine till uh nine six days a week and that kind of being mandated and a lot of startups that you're seeing emerging in the bay area for example and you know the main point of difference is fundamentally harry and i are and will continue to be on the same page which is you'll be a good business if you work hard and get shit mentally i have a problem with like the mandating of it and the bums on seats at certain hours of the day and that like presentee isn't biased because i actually don't think it leads to productive work i've been at a bank where i had to do that and I work next to startups and have done for the past year where I see that happen and actually people having two-hour chit chats in the middle of the day they're in the office and so it's just like the way it's framed um but yeah I think Harry and I are quite similar in putting out those controversial opinions and yeah you know he does the same and I'm sure if you were to speak to him about it you know he he's controversial in his own way as well um but like chatting it through yeah we are we actually got on really well um and yeah as i said fundamentally the same opinion stands which is hard work equals results but yeah what i what i have a problem with the whole 996 You know, whoever's speaking about it is fundamentally what does that mean for founders that are listening to that rhetoric?

20:28Amelia Miller:And what does that mean for young people that work in VC? Because for me, there's a huge number of VC analysts that will look up to figures that speak about 996 and praise it. and then they will subconsciously internalize that rhetoric so that when they're doing their deal flow screening calls, certain founders aren't going to make it through because they're obviously the gatekeepers to the partners. If a founder is a parent, that deal flow analyst is going to be like, oh, they can't do 996 and you've got to do 996. Oh, let's blitz scale in Project Europe, hashtag Project Europe. and and and that i think is the problem um because it sets a tone of a certain type of founder which is a young usually male hacker house tech bro vibe and and i and that for me is is the scary part of it it's not the fact you're working hard everyone should work hard i'm often in the office to midnight i just don't post about it and i don't mandate it yeah yeah it's always the uh it's always the nuance but it's a lot of people i've spoken to about it have said the same thing which is there's the the content that does well when you post about it online and then there's the much more complex nuances which you're touching on which is like the the after effects and the implications and how it trickles down to the ecosystem uh i'm conscious we're already over time i've seen you post a lot talk a lot about september october being big months is there anything that you can like share ahead is there anything that like we should be looking out for what can you say i actually really can't say much which is so annoying but but keep your eyes peeled obviously we'll we'll be able to tease it a little bit before um you'll see it all over socials if you're following me or you're following ivy don't you worry we'll be on your we'll be on your news feed amazing all right well i look forward to it and look if it's um yeah if you want to come back when the time is right and talk about it or let me know and i can post about it on linkedin if it's relevant just let me know um but otherwise thank you so much Amelia it's been great chatting you too sir thanks for having me best of luck with it all thank you take care