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

Discover AIApply: Tools for Job Seekers Hello and welcome to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson, Thank you so much for joining me. If you like what you see, please like, comment, subscribe. The more engagement, the more visibility, the better guests I can get and the better coverage I can provide of the European tech ecosystem. I would also like to say a huge thank you to my sponsorscheckout.com, one of Europe's leading fintechs, and it is where the world checks out and surreal DB, the multimodal database for AI Agent, which is partnered with thousands of leading organizations, including the likes of NVIDIA and Samsung. So if you like both of those, check them out in the links below. Thank you very much. Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. I'm here with Aiden. Aiden is from AI Apply. Hello, how are you doing? Speaker 2 Very well, thank you. Big fan of the content so it's awesome to speak to you. Speaker 1 Thank you. It's interesting. I'm speaking to Joanna. 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 strategies, especially as I've moved from LinkedIn on to TikTok and Instagram. But I love what you guys are doing. I've been following you since that talk, which is probably 5 or 6 months ago, but why don't you just give a quick introduction to kind of who you are and what you've built? Speaker 2 Cool. Yeah, Joan is the the goal which I must say is probably star, but I'm Aiden Kramer. I'm Co founder of CEO of company called AI Apply. AI Apply is a consumer SAS company. So we have AI tools for job seekers. So we help them go from needing a job to getting hired faster by democratizing access to career services that were once reserved to people that could afford a career coach. But what that breaks 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 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. So, yeah, so sweeter tools to give job seekers an edge in this very challenging rocket. AIApply's Lean Growth and Sustainable Strategy And you've seen a lot of success. Can you, can you touch on some like traction stats, whether that's revenue or users or just what you've seen to date? Speaker 2 So, yeah, we're we're a couple years old. We stopped showing revenue after we started a bit of building public on on X and we were getting like two or three copycats sharp 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, I'm more for kind of openness and transparency, but not the, you know, the risk of damaging our reputation by people signing up to the wrong company. But yeah, we're two years old. We're growing insane quickly. So we just had a million users. We have seeds trapped. So we raised like a very small round of funding from an SCIS fund in London called Hatch, which have been awesome and a handful of very, very high value on sport of angels. And since then kind of April last year, we've bootstrapped in our scaling profitably grow or we grew like 5 or 6X this year in terms of ARR. 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. Speaker 1 How small is a team? Speaker 2 As is 7 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 that. Speaker 1 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 1,000,000 users. You're staying I guess, like bootstraps 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? Speaker 2 So it's a combination too. 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. 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, of pitching these unicorns and a lot of people that were in my vintage of starting a company at a similar time, so about 10 years ago now, went through that VC roller coaster and then came out the other side with very little to show for it. So this time around, 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. And it generates like real meaningful cash flow and it's 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, you know, how we build a sustainable business here. The truth is there have been parts of that journey where it's been very, very tempting to take additional capital 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 monks and 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, maybe we could hire this person that would solve that problem. 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. And the company is much, much better and healthier for it than it would have been otherwise. If we'd have raised the, you know, a few million towards the start of 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. And yeah, we're building a Better Business for it, which is something I didn't, I didn't really anticipate or expect and the and the level that we've seen. How AIApply Grew Organically Before Funding 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. 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, but 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 50XA100X. Speaker 2 Yeah. So it, it really helps having some aligned angels. So we raised a total of about 450K and we had yeah, we had 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 and there's a small probability that you're going to see, you know, 100,000 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. So the funds were great, you know, they were slightly de risked with SCIS 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 100K in ARR and we did that off absolutely 0 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 we could get a lot further with not taking on a lot more. Speaker 1 Yeah, it makes sense. There's yeah. I mean, it's probably refreshing for investors as well. Why to see an opportunity where you're growing without a lot of cash, you know, and, and, and 90% of investing, that's a great thing that the companies don't need the cash to, to grow that quickly. Where was the the growth coming from in those early days? Speaker 2 So early days there was a lot of short form organic content. So I was putting out a lot of content myself. So we were kind of testing product ideas, pushing stuff out on TikTok, Instagram, Reels. Yeah, I would find a format that kind of worked to talk about what we were doing. Had some good viral success, you know, 10s of millions of organic views shot went up a little bit. That gave us some more resources to scale that out. 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 1020 KMRR. And then we started kind of using some of that content for ads, started reinvesting in or reinvesting in SEO. And then it was pretty soon after raising that we made our first like a growth hike. So when Young came on board, we kind of showed him what we were doing. We were super early stage at that point and yeah, he's been kind of a rock star in that role. Again, like is not used to working with super limited resources we gave him, but has that mindset to just kind of keep endlessly digging to find gold. And yeah, has been an insane asset to the team and has helped us go from like what it was basically nothing to now kind of hyperscale it. One Support Person for a Million Users Yeah, I think it's so interesting the, I certainly find it in my own content that the, 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. And so you mentioned that he was kind of your first growth hire. You've got 7 people at the moment. What does a team make up look like? Speaker 2 So we just have Yon and Grove, we're of the few agencies for kind of content production, which kind of feeds into our ad libraries. We have Juana on support. He was just manning on AI assisted support chat bar. She's incredible. And then we have two guys working on our auto apply products, Roman and Martin and and we have our kind of product engineer guy called Ola who's working on kind of all of our core web and making sure we push stuff forward. And then we have Pizza Hut, my CTO. So it's like predominantly engineering and then kind of great and support. Speaker 1 Yeah, so interesting. That's such a small team. And you know, you mentioned you got one person support over 1,000,000 users. You've now hit that seems crazy. You know, are you able to touch on like the that person's support role, how they're leveraging AI? Because that seems like yeah. Speaker 2 It, it is crazy. And that has been a role that's been really, really hard not to hire for because the house has been on fire multiple times. And, and we've, we've, you know, we've all jumped in and I've jumped in. I've been kind of answering sport chat. We built kind of a custom AI sport chat bot. So plugged in kind of all our docs, we plugged it into crisp and that kind of assisted her for a bit and that was really good. We built kind of a very decent prompted library to answer most requests. We then kind of upgraded and using intercom that have FIN AI support, which is great. That takes away a lot of requests. But when we kind of have had like inflection points and new things have broken, 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? An example, you know, 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. And we realized I was taking up no 20% of Faun is time. So we prioritize building something that was like automatically refund if certain conditions and that And so just, you know, going back into our backlog and making sure that we can ultimate 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, you know, such a lengthy. The Freedom of Building a Lean, AI-Powered Company And when you look at what's coming down the road, what your next hires will be, do you have a, a view, is it going to be more operational growth products and engineering? Speaker 2 I I think it's all going to be engineering, all products and products and engineering. Speaker 1 Interesting. So you think you're you're going to be fine, One person with AI support, one personal growth and it's just going to be building shipping. Speaker 2 I hope so. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's amazing. It's such an interesting that'll. Speaker 2 Be the the dream outcome, I think. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's so interesting. You know, we, we, we're sort of hearing all this stuff about the, the, the, the explosion of AI and how it's enabling people to build leaner and grow faster. And yet simultaneously we're seeing more and more companies raise bigger and bigger in rounds. And the, the two don't really seem to add up, right. You kind of expect, OK, well, country companies should be able to stay lean 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. Speaker 2 I'd like to think so. Like I definitely believe in this kind of notion that like a 10X engineer becomes 100 X engineer if they can utilize these tools effectively. And I think it's the same with like a cross functions, right? Like a 10X support person becomes 100,000 X support person if they know how to like update the prompts, update, I'll support, write tickets to support engineering. Like the same with gross, like 10X per person becomes 100 X 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, it's, it's a very unique and exciting time to be building 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. Speaker 1 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? Speaker 2 I, I love it. I absolutely love it. I love the freedom that it gives us. I love the ability, you know, just to really control kind of our, 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 teen. 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, you know, a passive sideline investor, that's also something that's very important to us. Speaker 1 And, and is that part of the cell? Because you know, a lot of people who work in tech and I know you and 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, a much smaller team, a much scrappier way of life. It's it's 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. Speaker 2 You have to ask him because I, I think truly like he must have done his own kind of mental modelling 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 IP OS. And I remember when we first joined, we were talking about the kind of daily ad spend budgets that he's used to having. And we were like 1% 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 seen like what these successful companies actually look like and what the metrics look like and that there might have been something there that he kind of scale into. But yeah, I it's also, you know, what we're doing is fun and it's new and we're like truly building something people don't, users are braving about us. We've got like an amazing engineering team and it's just, yeah, it's fun to be kind of on the upwards growth trajectory, 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. Reinvesting Profits for Future Growth Bets 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 is tough. Speaker 2 Yes, yeah. And I think that's like also a big thing that kind of reflects across the team and day-to-day is like we are, we're default alive, which is a very, very different place to be in. You know, we're not thinking about our next race to extend our runway. Our runway is infinite. And the additional cash we generate like each month, like that's we treat that as new bets we can make. And we're just constantly like, you know, collecting chips, placing new bets, the whole team's aligned with that. And that's, you know, a fun way to think about growth, you know, trying to place like profitable asymmetric bets versus, you know, your manager giving US ad budget and saying, you know, do the best you can with it. So I think that's also part of the the difference and and also makes it quite fun. Speaker 1 And are you using all of the cash that you make, the profit that you make just to reinvest into the business or are you getting to the stage where you can start kind of taking cash out? Speaker 2 So at the at the moment we're re messing everything. It's all kind of, yeah, trying to hit some kind of revenue milestones and then we're kind of call the lever back a little bit and then give ourselves a bit more of a buffer room to place like much bigger bets, potentially acquisition level bets and and think about the different type of business we can be building. Speaker 1 Yeah, amazing, super exciting. Why Human-Generated Content Outperforms AI I always want to talk about content more generally, right. You you're such a content LED business from into the early days scrappy doing it yourself, to hiring a a growth person to getting agencies to help. Are you seeing or are you leveraging AI and content generation? Are you seeing that as either a threat to good organic content, or are you seeing it as a tool to help you in your own? Speaker 2 Content, so we probably used every like AI tool, AIUGCAI content creation system. We know them all. We know the more intimately, like we've never really had anywhere near the same level of success. Through using like pure ARUTC or AI created that we have based like compared to real humans, real people actually like doing it the hard way for things like statics. I know like we've put out a lot of variance using AI tools, but yeah, like real human content forms best for organic by a mile. And for us, even like our paid content, 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 AI generated and I think we've tried a lot. Looking Ahead: AIApply's Next Big Announcement Interesting. So for you, human always wins. Speaker 2 Yes, strangely. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's I, I stay away from it, from my own content, It's good. Some of the AI tools to help Clearpool 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 like, thank you so much for joining me. Like we're out of time, but I think we're building a super exciting. I love speaking to founders who are doing who are taking this route and not the the flashy raise. Those are millions hit loads of hit 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. Like I'd love to talk about it and post about it, but yeah, thank you for joining me. Speaker 2 Cool. Now it's been a real pleasure and we should have a big milestone to share in the in the coming months. And we'll, yeah, we'll be shouting about it. Speaker 1 And lazy while I'll look out for it. Speaker 2 Cool, great to chat. Speak soon. Speaker 1 Thanks, Aiden. Bye. Bye. Speaker 2 Bye.