How This Creator Turned 400K Followers Into an AI Job Search Startup | Ford Coleman, Runway

0:0052 % of recent college graduates are underemployed. This creator is on a mission to fix it. Introducing Ford Coleman. Ford has been posting content about career advice and hiring for the last three years, building an audience of over 400 ,000 college students and young professionals. And during that time, he kept getting the same DM from hundreds of college students every day. How do I get a job? His answer? Runway. A platform that helps college students land their first internship or job. Runway connects to over 175 ,000 company career sites and services open roles the moment they are posted, hours or even days before they show up on LinkedIn or Indeed.

0:38And it works. Runway users are landing interviews at six and a half times the rates of traditional job search, all powered by his content without spending a single dollar on ads. And on today's episode of the Hot Start Podcast, Ford tells the full story. Ford, thank you so much for coming on. Absolutely, Scott. Thanks for having me, man. Excited to connect to you. So you've built an audience of over 400 ,000 people talking about career advice and hiring. And I want to go back to the initial days when you basically had zero followers. What actually made you decide the one thing to post about this specific niche?

1:10And yeah, what inspired that? Yeah, so I started posting content about three years ago. At the time, my business, I was running an agency business where I placed early career candidates into jobs and internships. and a lot of my clients came from me going to networking events or people knowing who I was and people referring, you know, someone to Ford because they knew who Ford was. And so I thought to myself, well, how do I get more people to know who Ford is? I was like, well, there's this great thing that's called social media where, you know, you put a post out there and a thousand people, 5 ,000 people, 10 ,000 people can see it.

1:43So I started posting on LinkedIn. Yeah. About, about three years ago with the goal of, you know, I figured if more people knew who I was, that would increase my surface area of luck, which would help bring more opportunities to myself and my business. And so that's when I started posting. And my first, I had no idea what the content game really was. I was just kind of putting myself out there. And so at the time, I was on a bit of a nomad lifestyle journey. And I was traveling around all these different countries and like really cool spots in like Norway, South Korea, Thailand. And I was like, what if I did like 60 second infomercials with like a super sick backdrop of like mountains behind me describing kind of like what runway is.

2:22And so I would post all these videos on LinkedIn of me and I don't know, obscure places and saying like value props on runway. Those posts did not really work well. It's funny to look back on because I've learned a lot more on how to create good content, but that was kind of got me the itch and I saw enough sort of gains in the beginning to keep diving into it. Yeah. I think it's super interesting because normally I talk to a celebrities and creators who have been creating content for five or 10 years, they've built an audience and now they start to figure out what they actually want to build on top of that audience.

2:53But you're actually the flip side, right? You're like, you had your own company and you were like, hey, how can I get more customers? Well, actually content creation. And yeah, now you have 400 ,000 followers. How would you say your platform and your content has evolved ever since those initial infomercials with this obscure backgrounds? Yeah, I'd say once I, again, just kind of put myself out there initially and like got consistent with posting and broadened my network and started meeting more interesting people. That's when I started, you know, just like when you're gaining any skill, right?

3:25There's levels to everything, right? And so I wanted to put more and more into it. So I joined, God, I think I did a couple of courses or something just to like help me teach me on like how to do this stuff. And so I changed a lot of my content to a lot more like educational, maybe rather than like storytelling or just kind of like marketing my business. And so it was a lot more educational on the things that I learned when helping the people in my community that I serve for my business. And so I started kind of changing my content to a lot more educational tips. Again, since I'm in the hiring and career space, a lot of the content is, you know, here's how to interview well.

4:00Here's how to interview well. If it's a remote interview, here's how to update your resume so that it can increase the odds of you getting interviews. And so posting that educational content is really where I started to explode actually on social media. And so God, I did most of that content for a good bit of two years to really grow an audience. And then recently, I'd say the past six months to a year, it's been a lot more nurturing kind of my existing audience and nurturing them through my business funnel to ultimately help my business be successful.

4:32Ford Coleman:Hey, quick one before we get back to the episode. If you love conversations like this one, you would love The Fame Game, our weekly newsletter in which we break down how celebrities and creators build billion dollar brands. Sign up for free via the link in the description. And now back to the episode. Yeah, you talked about it a little bit already, like the first version of Runway is not what it is today. The first version was more of like an agency that you actually scaled to half a million dollars in revenue per year. So what was that decision like having to leave that business behind that was doing really well that allowed you to travel the whole world to kind of focus on a bigger opportunity to what runway is today so what happened was as I was building the agency business up congruently at the same time right I was basically building my personal brand and growing on social media and so at the time of growing the agency and growing my social media I had built up my social accounts to I mean gosh at that time maybe 300 ,000 followers and what was happening was I started getting hundreds of DMs every single day on college students asking me like the exact same question and telling me like the exact same thing that they were doing.

5:35And their question was always like, how do I get a job? I've, you know, the job market sucks. I can't find anything. And then I would ask them, well, what are you doing about it? And they said, well, I'm mass applying to like thousands of jobs every day. And then I'm not hearing back. And every student had the exact same answer on the exact strategy that they were doing, which was not successful. And I had been And from my actual service work, placing early career candidates into jobs, I knew what the actual successful way to job search was if you wanted a favorable outcome. And so since I was getting literally hundreds of DMs every single day, it was so obvious where the demand was that it was quite frankly, a pretty easy pivot to then pivot into a consumer product for early career candidates, the consumer as they'd had the most acute pain.

6:21So let's dive into that a little bit deeper. So what is Runway exactly and what does it do? Super simple. We are a consumer product that helps college students and fresh grads get internships or their first job out of school. Yeah. Okay. And why does Runway exist? What is broken about the current market or the setup that doesn't allow them to get their ideal outcomes? Well, what most people say in the hiring space, in the job search space, if you're a job seeker, the majority of people tell you the job search is a numbers game. You know, just apply to as many things as possible. And if you apply to a thousand stuff or a thousand jobs, that's going to increase your chances of getting interviews because you're just, you're doing more.

7:00It's like sales, you know, if you do a thousand cold calls, you're more likely to maybe get a customer. However, the job search, it is not a numbers game. Actually, you'll apply to a thousand jobs. You'll get ghosted from every single one. And then you are back where you started. The job search in reality, specifically for the early career space, it's a timing game. And the time at which you apply to a job, that is what maximizes your chances of getting an interview. Because most of these candidates who are 18, 19, 20 years old, most of your resumes are relatively identical, right? Decent GPA, maybe an okay school, you joined a couple of clubs, and maybe you have one internship.

7:38Very hard for a company to look at that side by side and be like, oh yeah, here's our guy or here's our girl. But the candidate that applied early within the first 24 hours or so the job is posted, that is the candidate that is most likely to get an interview. Okay, very interesting. And how is Runway set up to actually allow these students to be the first one to apply to these internships or jobs? If you say the timing is the solution? Yeah, what we do is we integrate with company career sites. So as soon as a company posts a job on their workday or, you know, take Home Depot, for example, as soon as Home Depot posts a job or an internship on homedepotcareers.com, that's open source.

8:18So you can take from that. So we're connected to over, at this point now, about 200 ,000 different company career sites. And typically what companies do, like your Home Depots of the world, is they post on their job rec on their career site first. And then a couple of days later, their recruiting team, they boost the job on the advertising platforms like your LinkedIn's of the world, Indeed's, Handshakes. I mean, those job boards are effectively advertising platforms for employers. But that job is sitting on that company career site for a few days before it reaches the job boards and thousands of applicants are already flocking in.

8:51And so since we're connected directly to the original source of the job, we're able to service those jobs fastest. Yeah, and I know obviously it's a little bit boosted. and manipulate it. But what I really like about this is that as an employer, you also want people to actually come to the website, right? Because it means that they follow your brand. They're interested in what you're doing versus them finding a random LinkedIn vacancy and applying to it. It means like they're just on LinkedIn. It doesn't mean they love Home Depot or they love Walmart and actually on the website looking for specific jobs.

9:23So I think also mentally for the companies, it just makes a lot of sense to actually get people through this way versus having them apply through Indeed or LinkedIn or whatsoever. And companies are starting to, most of these job boards, the number of postings have gone down. I mean, employers are, they're getting a bit tired of it when they post a job on LinkedIn and then everyone just hits quick apply. And then in 24 hours, you have a thousand applicants, but you have no idea if the applicants are actually serious about your company, you want to work there, even if they're actually a good fit for that job.

9:56Because again, they probably just sat on their computer for an hour and hit quick apply to everything that was out there. Yeah. And do you also have any data on kind of how effective a runway is compared to like the traditional way how they applied? Like you mentioned that they used to apply for hundreds or thousands of applications or vacancies. And how does that compare to now doing a true runway? Yeah, the core KPI that we track for our users is interview rate. If we are getting our users interviews, ultimately that is the dream outcome that a job seeker wants when they're using a product to find employment.

10:29Total dream outcome is get the job, but they know that it's up to them to prepare for the interviews and ultimately get it. But just getting the interview, that's the dream outcome they want. So we track interview rate. On average, we have about 50 ,000 users that have used Runway. On average, they're getting about a 6.5 % interview rate. To give you some context, that would be if I applied to 100 jobs, I would get seven interviews. To give you context on some of the other platforms, it's about a 1 % interview rate at best, to be honest. Yeah, that's very interesting. And like, I want to kind of understand the whole process better.

11:02Let's say I'm a student, I'm looking for an internship or a job. Like, how does it exactly work? Do I need to create a profile, tell you a little bit about myself, and then you will help me find jobs from the 200 ,000 companies that you're connected to? Like, how does it work step by step? Totally. It's, you know, A student who's looking for an internship or their first job out of school, they would sign up to Runway. You put in your resume, answer specific questions on what you're looking for and what you're interested in. And then right off the bat, we curate the entire job feed for you based on that information that you gave us.

11:37And so we're actually only surfacing jobs to you that you can actually get. So a lot of the other platforms, they blast you with everything that's out there. Because again, LinkedIn is motivated and incentivized to give the employers as many applicants as possible, not get the job seeker their dream outcome of getting a job. And so for us, we're able to do it a little bit differently. And we actively suppress like all the jobs that are out there in our algorithm and only surface the ones that a user can actually get. We develop their own models to effectively tell our users like match scores for each position.

12:12So if you're a student, you log in, you'd get your job feed, you'd see, oh, I'm a 90 % match for this Home Depot internship. Great. So you would look at that. We educate you on why you are a 90 % match because our product is as much educational as it is helping students get those interviews. But outside of educating them on why they are a 90 % score or fit for the job, we then have AI agents that effectively help them tailor their resume to each job, prepare for the interview and who to network with in order to try to get your foot in the door. Yeah. And what do you exactly mean by actually can get like a job that they can actually get?

12:50Well, so on your traditional job boards, what'll happen is if you're a job seeker and you go on LinkedIn, LinkedIn might surface you a job and say, Hey, you're a good fit for this job. That doesn't actually tell you anything. Like you don't really know. That's a qualitative statement. That's like super arbitrary. But for us, we, again, we have our own model. So we tell you, you're a 90 % fit for this job based on your background, who you are, and like the skills that you have gotten. And oh, hey, by the way, this job that's, you know, a little bit down on the feed, you're an 80 % match for this job.

13:21So our users can start educating themselves on their career readiness for specific jobs. And that simple feature of having like a quantitative assessment on your fit for a job, it does a lot for the user. Yeah, I think it also from the user point of view, I think it makes a lot of sense because you're not wasting your time. I think so many people apply to jobs that they're simply not qualified for. And if it leads to a no, it leads to a disappointment, right? It's like, oh, the job market sucks to your point earlier. So I think also just from a user point of view, it really helps you to avoid that disappointment, obviously.

13:55Totally. Yeah. I mean, just from some context, I ran the agency business for about three and a a half years before pivoting into a consumer product. And so we were not going to be able to build a product that we built today unless I did that agency for three and a half years and actually did the fulfillment start to finish on placing people into jobs. And so we've effectively productized our entire system that we did for three and a half years, helping people get their dream outcome of an internship or a job. Yeah. You talk about like it being a consumer product. Like, do you eventually also want to turn it into like a more of a B2B approach where actually the employers are your customers versus the end users?

14:34We've thought about it. It's certainly in the future looking ahead. I mean, there's so many as an entrepreneur, you have to be ruthlessly focused on a very small amount of things. So I mean, this year, we're definitely only thinking about the consumer angle, we see an opportunity to potentially work with universities and license our software and system out to universities. But going into the B2B play, helping employers hire candidates from our audience is on the roadmap. Yeah. And once you kind of match the two, so you use basically tell a student that there's like a vacancy that is like a 99 % match.

15:10After, is there something that Runway also does to actually help land that dream job? So we have one of our features is we help them prepare for the interview. And so we have AI agents that effectively create like personalized interview guides for each specific job. And so a lot of the information that's out there for interviewing is kind of general advice. Like here's how to answer, tell me about yourself, but it's not like personalized to like, here's how four should answer. Tell me about yourself to this Home Depot software engineering internship job. And I would have a totally different, I don't know, tell me about yourself answer if it was a SpaceX software engineering internship job, right?

15:49And so So we help the user effectively prepare for their interviews that's curated, tailored and personalized to them and that specific job that they're interviewing for. Yeah. And is there also a specific type of job or career stage that Runway is best suited for to actually help students find a specific job? It's mostly just like office jobs, so like white collar types of jobs. But the specific type of market that we serve is the young crowd. So college students and recently graduated from college. So we're only in the entry-level space. Yeah, there's actually a lot of buzz going on about the entry-level space because a lot of people say that AI is basically disrupting this.

16:29You see that many college graduates, they can't find jobs because AI is basically replacing those early entry-level jobs. What is your perspective on that? Yeah, I think a lot of companies today are still figuring out how to use AI in their company. And so currently, entry-level candidates are getting displaced a little bit. But I see that market totally turning around five years from now, maybe even three years from now, where with all the different AI tools that are out there, the young people that are learning how to use them, they're going to be the ones in the workforce that are actually much more valuable to employers because employers can hire them at a cheaper rate to do the work that a mid-level person could also do.

17:14And so right now, it certainly is a tough market and AI is displacing entry-level candidates. But for us, our business as a consumer product, that's actually kind of a market tailwind for us. The more people that need jobs and need help is the more customers that we can get. Yeah, I think that's very interesting. I want to talk a little bit more about you as a content creator. So like as we discussed, you have built a platform of over 400 ,000 followers, talking about the niche of career advice and hiring. How have you been able to leverage that platform to start and scale runway? Yeah, that was really, I feel like a consumer, the best consumer products just nail distribution.

17:51And so that is where too, we really wanted to put an emphasis. And so my audience has served as the catalyst to getting all of our early adopters and users on to runway. And so our effective funnel is basically me posting organic content on my channels, educating people on how they should go about the job search and growing in their careers. And then we turn our followers on my channels into owned media that Runway has, which is effectively a newsletter where we send out a little bit more curated and personalized tips to those that sign up. And then that newsletter is then funneled down to the people signing up for our product.

18:29And so all my content is basically just top of funnel that then leads people into a runways product. Yeah, I think it's very interesting what you mentioned about kind of building a media product and then leveraging that to actually sell your core product. I was talking to a company last week and they basically said the same thing. It's like we used to be a beverage company, but what we're now going to do is we're going to become a media company that happened to sell a beverage. So they're creating a lot of shows around like specific topics and discussions where the beverage is always basically on premise.

19:00So, yeah, I think you're spot on with that analysis. With your own content, are there also like new formats that you want to develop in the future to really double down on the distribution ads that you have currently? Yeah, what we've done is, I mean, recently I'm doing a lot more like lead magnet type of content where I'm giving away something for free that is super valuable. Not even just educational, informational stuff, like an actual tool that someone could use for free or like a list of something that someone would want or a guide of something that someone would want that would help them.

19:32And giving away that for free to then help kind of nurture them through our funnel. I would say something that we're doing extremely well right now, which has helped us have a very good month of June is actually a UGC program, basically. And so it's been really interesting because I have obviously learned how to post like really, really good content online and how that can be valuable. And also how I can convert a specific piece of content into a user on the runway. but I'm just one guy, right? Sure. I have 400 ,000 followers, but you know, if you had 20, 10, 20, 30, 40 of those people posting that kind of content, that's converting into users.

20:08All of a sudden you almost have kind of like a Salesforce of people that are getting you users. And so what we're doing is we have different programs set up where we brought on UGC creators and I've personally taught them on how to post content that will convert people into runway users. And that has been an interesting thing that we've been working on that has come from kind of our

20:27Ford Coleman:content engine before we continue i wanted to share something quickly at hotstart pc we exclusively invest in brands founded by celebrities and creators think selena gomez jake paul katie perry if you are an accredited investor and want to co-invest alongside us we just launched hot start angels allowing you to invest in the same companies we back starting at just 5k per deal interested sign up at hotstart.vc slash angels or find the link in the descriptions accredited investors only and now back to the episode yeah i think it's super interesting because if you think about it like obviously you're one person and you're obviously also one demographic you're a white male for example but if you can actually create different media pillars to ugc where there's one female that talks about from a female perspective how to land jobs there's one person of color that talks about how it's different from his or her perspective i think it's super interesting because the niche is important, right?

21:21So the more specific problem you can actually talk about, the more deeper engaged relationship you can create also with your audience. Yeah. And I mean, the thing that helps us too on the UGC approach is, you know, since again, I've done this exact thing, I'm actually able to teach these people how to be effective. There's a lot of companies that try the UGC thing and they don't actually know how to post content or how to educate their, the people they hire on what content to post. And then, you know, they spend a ton of money and the math doesn't work when it comes to customer acquisition. But since I've been able to effectively own that skill and now teach that to others to empower others to do it, it's been huge for us.

21:58Yeah. And how are you also thinking about expansion to different platforms? Like if I take myself as an example, I started with LinkedIn and I really found like content market fit there as they like to call it. And then in the last couple of months, I expanded to like this podcast, I I expand it to like short form video content. I expand it to on like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. I expand it to a newsletter. I've been thinking about like longer form YouTube videos, but obviously you can't do all. So how do you kind of also think about to focus on specific platforms and also use different platforms to test?

22:29For us, what we're really trying to grow on is TikTok. Just that what I think about which audiences or platforms, I guess, to promote yourself on and build a brand on. I think about it as like where my audience is most apparent. And so for me, 18 to 24 year olds, right? Everyone's on TikTok. That's 18 to 24. And so really trying to focus on how to unlock distribution and growth on TikTok currently. We've been able to nail LinkedIn and Instagram pretty well. But like you said, it's what I found, at least for me, is taking like one platform at a time and trying to become like a pro at that one platform and then sort of adding it to your arsenal.

23:11So I started with LinkedIn and I learned everything about LinkedIn and how to be successful on LinkedIn. And then when I had like basically my entire LinkedIn content engine systemized, I was then able to focus on Instagram. And then I built Instagram. I grew on Instagram zero to 100 ,000 followers in 10 months. And it was because I was ruthlessly focused on like, how do I grow and like be valuable on Instagram to the people that I'm trying to serve? And so now with Instagram relatively systemized, I'm trying to figure out TikTok. TikTok has been much harder, but you only lose when you quit. Yeah, I like that.

23:40Nowadays, many celebrities and creators launch their own companies and you're obviously a great example of that. Are there any other creative entrepreneurs that you personally take inspiration from? Yeah, I would say some of the usual suspects that's in entrepreneurship. I mean, Alex Formozzi, Matt Gray, the system kind of, he's more of the systems guy. He's great to learn from. And so those are like two, just to name a few. Yeah. Do you think that many of them in the near future are also going to be building tech companies? Because actually what you see, a lot of these educational content creators, they create like these courses and then it's a great cashflow and business, but it never has the venture upside.