How Careerist CEO Alibi Duisenaliyev grew Careerist to $33M revenue and 6K customers in 2024.

careerist.com launched in 2019 after he sold his first company trucker path which hit 800 000 truckers using it and five million Revenue in 2017. career is today he put in fifty thousand dollars of his own money in a pre-seed round to raise 1.2 million seated at a 20 million post money valuation and then close it as series a in 2022 raising 8 million on 80 million post money evaluation for 6.6 X multiple today 500 folks that want to learn technology and transition into Tech sign up private's platform every month and pay four thousand dollars they'll do 12 they'll do 25 million dollars in Revenue this year they did 12 million last year and 5 million and 20 21. hey folks my guest today is Ivan sabayev he was born in Russia and lived most of his childhood in and near on an island near Japan he's fond of programming at school won many competition about the time there was no online education his parents were poor so he couldn't get a professional programming education and got a financial management degree instead way more boring okay his first job in finance was in Exxon Mobil but after a year he decided to start his own company he started company many companies But ultimately want to get into Tech in 2009 he moved to New York and 2013 moved to Silicon Valley to start a tech startup they built the most popular Tracker app in the US called trucker sorry trucker trucker not tracker trucker path which they monetized through financial services he sold it in late 2017 and in March co-founded the Ed fintech startup careerist where they finance train and place talent in Tech Ivan you ready to take us to the top yeah sure all right tell me about trucker app first what was the website URL for that uh it's trackerpass.com interesting and how many how many truckers I guess would use it in your best month uh uh uh I would say if you ask like 10 long cool truck drivers what app uh they use uh in the United States probably seven uh or around that will tell you they use the tracker path app uh so uh and we served only a long call truck drivers uh so there are around like uh 1.2 million of them and uh around 800 000 for our active users did you say coal like the black stuff coal truck drivers uh long call Long Haul Oh Long Haul long-haul driver yep okay and 800 000 were your users now did you make money from them directly did they pay a fee uh yes they either pay directly or their companies paid for them okay so how much revenue was trucker path doing uh on the top it was around like 5 million per year okay and what year was that uh that was uh 2017 2017. okay and why do you say on the top or your margins really bad uh yeah so um the industry is very tough uh so it's kind of hard to grow and uh we actually wanted to build um I kind of Transportation Marketplace connecting uh trackers with Brokers or with shippers and you know ultimately I'll figure out that's like uh too too difficult to do uh because the industry is very conservative um and we try to attack the chicken and neck Problem by serving trackers first so we were very successful uh in that but unfortunately we're not very successful in Syrian like the other side of the marketplace and that was like initials uh so we built it into monetizing mostly from financing products like factoring uh Factory is very super challenging in the industry uh transactions are slow like people still using the faxes to send invoices and stuff well what specifically were you doing if a long-haul trucker got a ten thousand dollar job with a net 60 payday they could give you that invoice you'd pay them immediately and then they'd go collect the net 60 later yeah so we pay them uh right away uh the issue was to collect from the company so uh we tried to collect within like uh 30 days usually but uh you you it took like much longer because of that document turned over uh there there is also a lot of fraud in the industry that's like another side of the problem and ultimately that created issues for scaling what was your margin let's say you factored a ten thousand dollar contract how much would you wire the trucker on day one yeah we usually wire 90 of the invoice okay so 9k there and then you've got what 30 days to go 60 days to get it back from the company and how what how successful were you and actually getting that money back on a percent basis uh I don't remember really that was a long time ago uh but I would say uh that uh we usually wait around like one uh two percent of the invoice snap like after like all the costs okay and how much money did you put out on your financing product in 2017 uh we got the credit line uh for around like 30 million and uh so we used like roughly around uh 15 million of that okay and what was your cost of capital on a 30 million credit line truth I'll remember I was quite expensive like 15 16 17 yeah yeah interesting okay so you didn't like that model it is by the way we're doing this at founder app it is a hard model it is not easy it's tough model so anyways you built this company you're doing five million year in Revenue then what you sold it yep how much uh we don't disclose uh this uh but the deal wasn't very good so basically uh the deal was mostly to return money to investors oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview who bought it uh we got several offers and actually it was like another issue uh for this industry uh if it was another industry we would be able to get much higher offers just because of large user base uh but companies in this industry developed us uh for the revenue like specifically revenue and margin specifically so that's why offers were like not uh that good and we got several offers from the companies in the industry and then ultimately uh one of our investors is a publicly traded company uh who made the best offer and they decided to take over the company and to this was this Alpine investors uh now it was a public company called Ren Ren say it again ran ran ran yeah oh interesting okay and again that website was truckerapp.com right uh trackerpass.com oh truckerpath.com okay interesting all right so you sell that company now take us into careerist what does careerist do and how do you make money uh do you want a short answer long or very long time explaining the problem yeah simple as simple as the hardest so simple as this is the challenging one yeah career list is an online education and feed tech company uh it finances the enrollment of underserved job seekers in the United States uh then trains them for tech jobs with software and freelance instructors and then automates their job search okay so who um I guess name a customer that might come to you is this someone who just graduated school that's looking for a job uh actually our sweet spots are people 25 to 35 years old with some career in the past and you know looking to switch...