20
34 Comments

Intervue just hit $50K ARR & became a top 30 startup to watch. AMA.

Hey everyone,

I am Rahul Arora, Founder of intervue.io.

I launched Intervue while I had a day job. I encountered few problems after taking more than 500+ tech interviews in 2.5 years in my last organization.

In every tech interview taken on Zoom/Google meets/Teams:

  • The first 7-10 minutes are wasted in environment setup for evaluation of coding skills.
  • Follow-up questions are asked on another tool - outside of video call, just to share a code snippet with the candidate.
  • Feedback of the round is often delayed & submitted several hours to few days after regular follow-ups.
  • Rounds are not well-structured & many times, the same question is asked across rounds.
  • Collaboration between HRs & interview panel is manual & involves a lot of back & forth.

How is Intervue solving these:

  • You can playback your 1-hour long interview in just 5 minutes and share it with your team.
  • The feedback is taken by the panel on the platform and is auto-submitted.
  • It is built for teams so anyone can do an easy search to find out more about an interview.
  • The environment prep takes < 1 second for 35+ programming languages making it blazingly fast.
  • Access to a question bank. Organize questions with your team to standardize your rounds.

We are soon about to release our next big feature called consolidation of a candidate's journey.

Consolidation

Would be more than happy to answer questions as we are on the path to touch $100K ARR in few weeks.

AMA!

  1. 3

    Is Intervue bootstrapped or did it take funding? I'm not sure what it took to build this too but did you do it yourself or hire an engineer - curious to hear more about the early days of you building the product.

    1. 2

      @sethking
      I was taking interviews almost every day in my previous job. It became really annoying going through the above problems. Was also using some of the existing tools but they did not address the problems mentioned.

      I and my co-founder started coding it before and after office and over weekends. Our background in tech for about 7 years helped us a lot there.

      A typical day for us would look like this

      • Come early and sit in a cafe and code on Intervue
      • Go to the office and complete 9-11 hours
      • Go back to this cafe (Which was 24x7) and code again till morning.

      Sleep for some time and repeat.

      Saturday and Sunday were a bonus and allowed us to speed up the process.
      We were bootstrapped for the initial days.

      We launched our MVP in 4 months of coding. Worked closely with 2 companies and matured the product which took another 1.5 months.

      We immediately got 2 customers after that organically who signed up and paid.

      That made us believe that we are heading in the right direction. Over the next 4-5 months we iterated more on the product (still bootstrapped) and got few more customers organically.

      Our SEO was very bad. I started working on it a little as well. We were not in the first 10 pages of Google for relevant keywords.

      Earlier this year, we got funded by very well-known investors from India after bootstrapping and learning from the market.

      We are catching up on SEO (we rank on page 1 now for few keywords) and many product-based companies have adopted the product.

  2. 2

    Awesome work. I'm interested in "35+ programming languages" - that's huge! How early did you have such wide support? How did you prioritize? Did you follow customer requests or did you add programming languages as you saw fit? Or do you plug into some other service to achieve this?

    1. 2

      We launched with 6 programming languages only.

      We shortlisted the 6 to be included by seeing the most widely used languages across the globe.

      After 1 month we added 5 more. This was when we got 2 customers.

      After that, we got some requests as well as it was naturally clear that we need to include other languages as well if we need to increase adoption.
      It took us 1 more month to reach 22 languages. The remaining we released in several iterations.

      We are still expanding our language support to 70 languages.

      1. 1

        Thanks. I like the iterative approach!

  3. 2

    What tech stack are you rolling with? Is vue in any way a part of it😂 (had to throw in the joke, but still interested in the stack)

    1. 3

      Haha "Vue" in Intervue is NOT for vue.js.

      It was just a substitute because I could not find a better domain name.

      Here's the tech stack that we use.

      Intervue's tech stack

  4. 2

    Your pricing seems quite high, how will you justify that?

    1. 5

      It's like 50 USD per month. Doesn't seem expensive considering it is a B2B startup.

      1. 1

        @bhch
        yeah, I second that...!

        1. 1

          i was looking in rupees

          1. 1

            The math and explanation are still the same.
            Plans start at ~3500 per month for any Indian company.

            Anyway, what matters is the value generation as I explained in my comment below. Rest everything falls in place automatically.

            We have seen companies with 10 employees to unicorns use the product.

    2. 2

      Our pricing has been kept after a lot of market research. Our product is used by a lot of early-stage startups and even unicorns.

      The problems mentioned above costs way more to a company than what our product asks for.

      Just some real scenarios:

      • In my last organization, we were selecting 1 in 35 candidates interviewed.
      • In my research across 100s of organizations across India and the US, I saw this number to be 1 in 100 in the worst case and 1 in 10 in the best case.
      • The candidates that are not getting selected are a cost to the company because some recruiter is sourcing them and many people from the Engineering team are interviewing these people.

      I found out that the core reason for having such a bad selection count was because of bad quality candidates being sourced.
      There was a big feedback loop missing from the Engineering team to the sourcing team.
      A person from recruitment has to follow up countless times with the interview panel to submit candidate feedback.

      Companies did not have a complete visualization of their recruitment as most of this data was being prepared manually before Intervue which was a loss to them.

      Intervue gives meaningful consolidation automatically with the help of crisp playback.
      All this saves a lot of back & forth and time for people involved in the interview process which has proven to improve the selection count.

  5. 1

    Hey Rahul! Congratulations, for reaching the mark.

    What was the most exciting and challenging task during your journey so far?

    1. 1

      @tuubow
      Our infra side of things are really stateful. Most challenging part was:

      • To make sure we are doing justice to the auto-scaling part of the infra and at the same time make sure costs are not huge
      • At the same time we wanted to make sure we are releasing features so product improvements do not stop (with the moto that Momentum once built, should never be killed)

      Exciting part:

      • Getting some known brands to come and adopt the platform company-wide. Although it was expected because the product was made after so much research, seeing them adopt it was really crazy.

      I think the most exciting part & the challenging part is yet to come as we scale 10x from here.

  6. 1

    First of all congrats on the launch and getting to 50kARR. One glance at your website and I figured out your main clientele is Indian companies. The recording and playback could have some liability / legal / privacy issues in the US and EU. Have you thought about this? For example, California is a two consent state, meaning you are not allowed to record unless you get explicit consent of both parties and a whole lot of engineering hiring happens in state of California.

    1. 1

      @hemanpage
      We do not record the screen.
      It's a playback generated very smartly by capturing keystrokes done on our editor.

      It's not even a video, it's a series of events that we are looping through which makes it look like a video.
      So typically for a 1 hour long interview round, it's a 5-7 minutes of gist.

  7. 1

    Can you share the percentage of indian customers and others?

    1. 1

      70% India
      30% US, Canada and Europe

  8. 1

    How are you promoting it?

    1. 1

      Right now we are doing a lot of:

      • Cold emailing
      • Cold reach out/messages/DMs
      • SEO
      • Content syndication to target very specific people
      • Writing about it at relevant places
      • Trying some unconventional PR as well.
      1. 1

        Hiya Rahul,

        Glad to know DMs & posting on places like Quora is working for you as that will be my approach once I launch. I'm curious though - What do you mean by unconventional PR?

        1. 1

          @Janinah
          Unconventional PR might be anything that generates some media presence for your and might not be directly in relation to what your product is solving.
          This might get you some attention and you may get some pull from customers to use your platform.

          1. 1

            Thanks for the tip ^^

      2. 1

        rahul since you do cold emailing any thing you find could be added to cold email outreach tool to make it better for you?

        i am building a cold email outreach tool called sendsimple app and want to make it the best i can

  9. 1

    What was your day job? sounds like you took/developed coding interview questions?

    1. 1

      I was an Engineering Lead at a big organisation managing a team of 20+ people and taking care of tech.

      I have been an Engineer prior to this for 7 years with my career spanning across:

      • Frontend
      • Backend
      • Infra
      • Product

      And yes, we were scaling our team to 200+ engineers. That is how I got to take so many interviews.

      Repeating them over and over again (almost every day) made it very compelling for us to build Intervue to solve the problems that I faced.

  10. 0

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 2

      It would have been better disclosed to the team privately. Posting an exploit publicly without any heads up to the team is not very ethical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsible_disclosure

      1. 1

        @irinka
        I second that as well.
        Anyway, we have checked, it's not a vulnerability. The code here only accesses things in the docker container which anyway is dedicated for a particular user & it is the intended purpose to expose the container to give a real-time feeler of having a system with you virtually.

        Containers on our platform are mutually exclusive.
        @khalidbashir: Please DM for further details.

    2. 1

      Thanks @khalidbashir
      Our team is checking this and we will get back on this very soon.

  11. 2

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

    1. 2

      The first two customers signed up from a quora answer (to my surprise) and directly paid for the product.

      After that, the next 3 came from some blog posts that I wrote.

      Post that, the next 4 came from cold messaging on Twitter.

      I used to deliberately message very selected people who seemed more inclined towards adopting a new product. (Example in my mind was: people who are using products like Superhuman). So I started finding people like that.

      Post that, it started picking up. We are right now gaining traction from multiple sources mentioned above.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 14 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments