Hire Club

Ketten started Hire Club on March 28, 2011, the same day he launched Cardflick (a digital business card app that would later fail spectacularly). Unlike Cardflick, Hire Club began as a simple Facebook group built on five rules inspired by Fight Club: "don't talk about Hire Club," "vouch for your friends," "post jobs you have access to," "be kind," and "fuck recruiters." The goal was humble: help people find jobs without spending money. Ketten had a design agency with clients like Adobe, Microsoft, and Twitter, and Hire Club was born from a 20% time idea.

On day one, someone posted a job. By the first week, someone got hired. Ketten was shocked. He realized that by making job posts social—allowing people to vouch for friends in the comments of a live feed—he'd created something fundamentally different from the static job boards that existed at the time. "We made job posts social," he recalls. "I think we were one of the first ones to do it."

For six years, Hire Club was essentially on autopilot. Ketten didn't even incorporate the company. He was busy running a consulting business and dealing with the fallout from Cardflick's implosion in 2013. During that time, Hire Club grew quietly—members inviting trusted friends, companies posting jobs, the community getting stronger through meetups in South Park and word-of-mouth.

By 2017, the group hit 10,000 members. Ketten started experimenting with monetization. He tried professional headshots ($5,000 on day one) and recruiting models, but neither felt right. Then in August 2017, a friend invited him to audition for "Meet the Drapers," a Shark Tank-style TV show. He had 10 days to prepare. On August 17, 2017, he incorporated Hire Club for the first time.

He bombed the pitch. He was nervous, unprepared, and pitching a vague Upwork-like vision no one understood. But the audience loved his optimism. When the episode aired, Hire Club raised $47,000 from the community through crowdfunding—people believed in the founder and the community, not a polished product. The episode sparked growth: 10,000 to 20,000 members in eight months.

In September 2017, Ketten had an epiphany. People in the group were getting job referrals, but many didn't know how to interview, negotiate, or present themselves. He started coaching individuals for single sessions at $59 each. Members asked for multiple sessions. By June 2018, he launched a subscription model: 30, 60, or 120 minutes per month with a coach for $79/month. It felt natural—a managed marketplace matching job-seekers with career coaches.

The first month: $1,000 MRR. Second month: $2,500. Then in September 2018, Hire Club launched on Product Hunt. Revenue jumped to $7,500. "If you do it right, Product Hunt was just an amazing launching point," Ketten says. TechCrunch, press, and potential customers started reaching out. The average SaaS company takes 450 days to reach $10,000 MRR. Hire Club did it in 150 days.

Ketten credits three things for success: radical transparency, obsessive user feedback, and a relentless focus on money from day one. Unlike Cardflick, where he chased growth-at-all-costs with no business model, he made revenue the North Star. Every milestone was shared with the community: $1,000 in revenue, $2,000, hiring an employee, rejections. This transparency built trust.

For user feedback, Ketten made himself accessible. He still responds to DMs, even with 30,000 members. He doesn't argue with feedback—he asks "why?" He runs weekly polls, hosts in-person feedback sessions, and tests daily. "People don't care about features," he says. "They care about: are you making my life better?"

What didn't work: Cardflick taught him the danger of no business model and no product-market fit. Trying to be an Upwork or LinkedIn clone taught him that imitation kills startups. But hiring failures, early pivots, and even a brutal YC rejection in late 2018 (they said he couldn't acquire coaches—he proved them wrong) were all learning. After the YC rejection, he was depressed and didn't notice Hire Club hit $14,000 MRR that same month. He took November to nurse his wounds, then returned to coding and talking to customers.

As of the podcast recording (approximately mid-2019), Hire Club has grown to 30,000 members and $31,000 in MRR, with 20% month-over-month growth for five straight months. Ketten is in what he calls the "awkward teenage phase"—no longer a scrappy startup, not yet a mature company, with new challenges every week.

The business is a managed marketplace: 20,000+ job-seekers in a community, hundreds of career coaches, a 70-30 revenue split (70% to coaches, 30% to Hire Club). Trust is the currency. Quality software, responsive founders, coaches who listen—these create the moat.

Ketten's immigrant background and exposure to both the dot-com crash and Cardflick's failure taught him resilience and optimism. "Being a founder is sort of an exercise in applied optimism," he says. His next challenges: scaling coach acquisition (though it's not been a problem yet), improving retention, and staying focused on the North Star—helping people get ahead in their careers—rather than chasing external validation.