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Pivoting Your Way to Three Million Users with Vivek Ravisankar

Episode #030

The founder of HackerRank tells the story of how he and his cofounder went from multiple failed businesses as brand new founders working from India to the creators of one of the most influential websites for programmers and tech companies.

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    My Main Takeaways:

    • At this point, HackerRank had about 3 million developers that have attempted at least 1 challenge on HackerRank, and over 1,000 paid customers.

    • Vivek used to work at Amazon, and saw an inefficiency where HR would have to go through 100 phone screens to get 1 candidate. So he wondered if he could make a software to solve this inefficiency.

    • HackerRank is a two-way market, so Vivek first went to companies to get them to sign up, promising to relieve this pain. And then he began creating challenges for developers to do so that they could assess themselves and have a more fun way to get interviews at companies rather than having to go to top schools. This community of developers grew over time.

    • HackerRank's growth has been largely organic word-of-mouth.

    • Vivek's first product to solve this interview process was "interviewstreet", he had a spreadsheet projecting 1 billion dollars over 5-6 years, and in a year and half they made about $1,000. But this idea failed, due to a poor supply & demand match, and miscalculated operational costs.

    • He pivoted into helping students from India to get into a top school in america for their Master's. But this didn't work either.

    • Get to the CORE problem. Story: Eventually after speaking to companies about their recruitment process, they asked Vivek to build a parser that would parse resumes to find the best candidates. But this was NOT the core problem. The CORE problem was that companies were not able to identify who was the right developer based on a set of resumes. So the solution was to assess coding ability, which evolved into HackerRank.

    • Until HackerRank had a strong product-market-fit, the vision was driven primarily by customer feedback. However, when deciding on the future, the vision was driven on intuition.

    • Vivek and his business partner both had competitive programming backgrounds in college.

    • The fact that HackerRank is based on competitive programming is both a pro and a con. Because not everyone on HackerRank is a competitive programmer, a lot of people only want to improve their skills.

    • One way that Vivek generated his first few customers was by creating a fake PERFECT resume and submitting it to job postings, only to receive lots of calls back from recuriters, and when companies would call him, Vivek would admit that the resume was fake, BUT, he'd say that by using his HackerRank product, they can find REAL candidates like they have presented in the CV. This actually worked.

    • After getting some customers using the product, he had enough social proof to start getting even more customers.

    • Vivek did things that didn't scale at the beginning (like creating bespoke coding challenges provided by the companies, so that the programmers could challenge themselves)

    • Hire the right Executive Team.

    • Decrease the time-to-value.

    • Vivek met his business partner, Hari, from college.

    • Vivek got rejected from Y Combinator twice, and got accepted with his 3rd idea, HackerRank.

    • Vivek had 3 paths to get to Silicon Valley, as he wanted to move there. (1) was to study and do his masters and then work, (2) was to transfer from Amazon in India, to Amazon in Seattle, and (3) was inspired by asking himself "IS THERE A FASTER PATH?" because the previous 2 paths would take 4-5 years and a lot could change in 4-5 years, so he applied for Y Combinator.

    • HackerRank is a VC funded company.

    • Living in Silicon Valley is extremely beneficial, particularly for finding talent.

    • Vivek says that the Y Combinator experience has the tendancy to get founders to want to get VC funding, and compete with each others to see who will get the highest valuation.

    • Before you fall for the hyper-growth Silicon Valley culture, focus on your companies fundamentals.

    • Vivek says that his Determination and Courage and Persistence has been tested FAR MORE than his intelligence or IQ, while becoming as successful as has become in business.

    • Get a smart co-founder.

    • You HAVE to maintain the persistence and determination.

    • Choose your idea carefully, because you HAVE to want your idea to happen so much, because this passion will keep you going through the rough patches.

    • If Vivek had to start a new business that was different to HackerRank (And ONLY after getting product market fit), he'd make sure to do something that he was passionate about. And he'd make sure to keep the product simple. He'd put a stronger emphasis on the first 10 people he hired, because the first 10 people have a big impact on the trajectory of the company. He'd also enforce the core values of the company, and ensure that every single new hire embodied the core values.

    • Focus on getting product market fit ASAP.

    • You're always going to be doing "Things that don't scale" as you grow.

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    Hey Courtland, I think you're missing some setup in the podcast player, it's playing a strange message at the moment.

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      Good catch, pushing a fix now