Show IH: How one programmer built an enterprise level HR system for growing businesses
Hello everyone! Devan from HR Partner (https://www.hrpartner.io) here. I think we were one of the first 20 or so startups to be listed on IH way back when it was just a startup directory listing services!
Back in those days, we had only just started out and had $0 revenue. But since then, we have grown to have nearly 2000 customers in 70 different countries, and tens of thousands of employees using our HR platform for managing their leave, e-signatures, recruitment, onboarding, and many other people related tasks.
Our revenue is hard to peg, but we are currently at around $35K MRR, however we do also make revenue from consulting services, lifetime plans, partner commissions, affiliate deals and other sources. We've tried to many way to generate revenue that we've now got a few things that work (and don't work) for us.
I started this SaaS as basically a one guy sitting on a laptop in my bedroom and thinking of what small and medium businesses would want in an HR package. In the intervening 5 years, we've grown to a team of 7 (all remote) around the world, but it is still really myself and another part time programmer cutting all the code while my co-founder takes care of marketing and the rest are in customer success, graphic design and web site maintenance.
We've had customers come to us saying that our system has more functionality, and is easier to use than the enterprise grade (expensive) HR systems they used previously, and they cannot believe that such a small team built something so complex and feature rich, which makes me happy.
I know we haven't grown as speedily as many others on here, but our motto is to grow slow and steady, and we tend to put personal care into onboarding every new customer. This is shown by looking at our customer reviews on Capterra and other software directories - We've kept up a 5 star average rating all these years and customers always talk about our dedication to support and listening to them in order to make changes.
HR is a very "red water" marketplace, and we are up against some really big, well funded players, however we differentiate ourselves via our personalised touch with customers, that most big companies have forgotten about.
Growth seems to be picking up of late, and throughout the 2 pandemic years, we have more than doubled our customer base and revenue each year, so it is all onwards and upwards from here! We are here for the long haul.
How do I find these first 5-10 members?
Hey Devan, this is excellent! Would love to know more how you got started in this industry. As you said, there's a lot of big players out there and HR software can be quite overwhelming.
Did you have any previous experience developing or working with HR software? How did you start getting customers?
Cheers
Hey Paul - great question. I actually spent 25 years of my life consulting and installing accounting/payroll software for hundreds of businesses. During all that time, I kept hearing the same sort of story from business owners/managers about their challenges with managing staff.
I took all that feedback over the years and when I finally sold off my consulting business, I sat down to write HR Partner based on all that learning I had. So no, I am not HR trained at all (we have 2 excellent HR people on our team now though), but I wanted to translate all that real world experience into a SaaS.
Congratulations on your success so far!
I noticed your feature a Capterra logo and review link prominently. Has that been a useful acquisition channel for you? Is there any benefit to those kinds of software comparison services? It seems like a lot of effort to get people to leave reviews and I always wondered if it was worth it.
Thank you Colin.
Yes, Capterra has actually been one of our best referral channels for new customers, especially a couple of years ago. It is full of businesses that are ready to buy and are actively looking.
These days not as effective because they are getting quite expensive to advertise on (plus they tend to compete with your own AdWords campaigns - grr!), but for any B2B SaaS, I think these software directories are really useful, and a 'must do' over ProductHunt or any other channel.
And yep, it did take us a long time to get reviews on there initially, but these days, we do it as a 'deal' with our customer base - i.e. if someone asks us for an easy to add feature or just a little more capacity for extra employees or admin users, then we say "Sure, we'll do that for you in return for a review on Capterra/G2 Crowd/SourceForge etc.", and they nearly always fall over themselves to do so.
We also ask straight after a really good support interaction when they are still happy and glowing, and that seems to work well for us too.
With B2B, customer reviews really build trust and a track record, which is why we have a dedicated page for them on our site, plus separate case study pages on individual customers.
Hi Devan, this is pretty inspiring. When you were building your product, how did you get your first customer? Did you use your experience and past customers and pitch the product to them or was it someone totally unrelated?
Thanks Pragyan. When I sold my business, part of the deal was that I wouldn't approach my old customers. Plus, I wanted to broaden my outreach to more than just local businesses, so I started from 'scratch'.
It actually took me one year(!) to get our first paying customer (We had a few on an old free plan - actually a lot of those are still with us on the grandfathered free plan).
Marketing an online business worldwide was SO different from marketing a local consultancy - I was so used to word of mouth referrals, that I thought the same would happen online - LOL. I basically had to re-learn marketing and setting expectations.
Well, actually, I lucked out with finding a co-founder that was really good at online marketing, which is when things really started to take off.
Wow, one year. That gives me hope :) Do you have any suggestions on how to reach out to people to understand if your product actually solves their pain point?
The thing with B2B, is that you have to really show the customer that you can solve their issue. Which is why I think the whole 'MVP mentality' really doesn't work with this market, as customers expect to see all the bells and whistles and to see proof that it does what it says on the tin, and that it is flexible enough to suit their needs.
I think in the early days, hanging out where our customers were - i.e. LinkedIn and Capterra, NOT ProductHunt or HackerNews, was what we should have focused more on, and from there, 1 on 1 demos was the way we got people on board.
In fact, we still do a lot of 1 on 1 demos now. It is one of those 'non scalable' things, but works really well to showcase what we can do and answer all those 'edge cases' that every customer of ours seems to have.
Thank you Devan, I have been focusing on MVP demos which was not working out quite well, as you rightly said. I'll spend more time taking the product to a more complete state, and then reach out to prospective customers for demos.