Hire Mojo

John Younger's journey to Hire Mojo began in the late 1980s when he was VP of HR at Bank of America, managing recruiting for two divisions with 16,000 employees. "I asked the question: is this really the best we can do?" he recalls. That question would set him on a 30+ year course in recruitment technology.

Younger's entrepreneurial path was winding. He founded Winet in November 1996 and sold it to Trinette (an HR outsourcing firm) for roughly $4 million in stock just nine months later. At Trinette, he watched the company land on Inc. magazine's 500 fastest growing companies list for multiple years before General Atlantic invested and took it public. In early 2000, he launched Acolo, one of the first recruitment process outsourcing companies, positioning it as a "turnkey internal recruiting department."

Acolo's timing was brutal—the dot-com bubble burst in 1999-2001, and no one wanted anything recruitment-related. Younger liquidated his entire retirement account ("a couple hundred thousand dollars") to survive. He built version one by recruiting nine unemployed developers in Fremont, California. Despite the market headwinds, Acolo grew into a respectable business, eventually becoming the 42nd fastest growing company in America in 2006. He raised $4 million in 2007 and hit $2 million per quarter. Then the 2008-2009 financial crisis hit. Most competitors went out of business; Younger even took over a competitor's customers as they filed for Chapter 7.

By 2015, Acolo had recovered to roughly $8-9 million in annual revenue. But Younger realized something critical: Acolo's high-touch professional services model (the recruitment process outsourcing business) was fundamentally different from the underlying technology platform. The platform could potentially serve hundreds of thousands of businesses that didn't need white-glove recruiting but desperately needed help filling jobs.

In January 2015, he executed an unusually creative split. Rather than do a typical asset sale, he issued convertible notes to preferred shareholders and warrant holders, converting their preferred stock to common shares. This created two companies with completely flat cap tables—no Series A/B/C complexity. Hire Mojo retained the original corporate structure but with all common shares; Acolo became a separate entity. The investors agreed because they started receiving cash payback, with no guarantee of repayment before.

Hire Mojo's platform is deceptively simple: it incorporates a recruiter bot and integrates with premium job boards (LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.), which Younger bulk-purchases and includes in subscriptions. The pricing model evolved as they refined it: companies pay for "mojo points" based on annual hiring needs. A software engineer position might cost 7 mojo points, covering outreach, screening, and interviewing. The platform finds, screens, and interviews candidates autonomously.

By late 2017 (the interview date), Hire Mojo had 200 customers with an average contract value of $20-25k annually. Renewal rates exceeded 90% on both logo and revenue basis. Most customers started conservatively (buying fewer points than needed) but scaled up after seeing results. Monthly recurring revenue hit ~$180k—up 3x from roughly $60k in December 2016, representing 8-12% month-over-month growth.

Customer acquisition cost was just $1,700, paid back in the first month given a $20k annual contract. Hire Mojo remained bootstrapped with a lean 10-person team in San Francisco, generating approximately $150-200k in customer lifetime value at 90%+ retention over 3-4 years.

The dominant growth channel was word-of-mouth referrals. "In the absence of a big bucket of money for carpet bombing marketing campaigns, the referral activity is so robust that that's keeping us going," Younger explained. He wasn't aggressively pursuing paid acquisition—the product was strong enough to sell itself through happy customer networks.