Rocket

Abhinav Agrawal had recruited at major companies like McKinsey and Amazon, and later at his own startup that raised a $3 million seed round. Despite his experience across company sizes, he noticed a consistent problem: nobody knew how to find great talent quickly. Traditional recruiting agencies suffered from terrible reputations (scoring lower than Comcast on NPS) and lacked the deep expertise needed to properly evaluate candidates. Abhinav decided to build something different—a recruiting platform that combined human expertise with technology, inspired by companies like Compass and Atrium that were successfully blending high-touch service with tech-enabled operations.

Rocket launched in late 2016 with a lean approach. Abhinav and his co-founder (an experienced marketer and growth expert) brought deep domain knowledge to the table, while their CTO brought 20 years of technology experience. The MVP came together in just 2-3 months with 2-3 engineers spending under $50-60K. They had raised $2.9 million immediately after validating the idea, which gave them runway but wasn't massive for the engineering effort. "It's not really fair to say we built it on very little amount of money," Abhinav acknowledged, but the focus was on speed to market and proving the model worked.

The first customers came through direct relationships and word-of-mouth from Abhinav's network in the startup world. Early customers ranged from tiny startups like one that had raised $3 million from Foundation Capital to larger companies like Karda that were hiring 75-100 engineers. This diversity of customer size remained a feature of their business. By 2017, their first full year, Rocket had generated $400-600K in revenue. Growth accelerated rapidly: $3 million in 2018 and they were on track to break $6 million in 2019, representing 2.5x growth year-over-year.

Abhinav explained that their go-to-market innovation was critical to their success. While some customers wanted a pure SaaS subscription model, most preferred performance-based pricing (20-30% of first-year salary) because they were afraid of bad recruiting outcomes. This hybrid model became their strength: they offered flexible pricing options ranging from monthly subscriptions to performance-based engagement to retained models. By 2019, most growth was coming from the performance-based model and expanding their customer base—not upselling existing customers. They achieved this with just 20 recruiters (two-thirds of their 30-person team) and no traditional sales staff. Expansion revenue from existing customers was minimal, with about 3% annual revenue churn offset by new customer acquisition. Abhinav was honest about growth challenges: "We beat ourselves up every day that our growth should be a thousand percent," but acknowledged the business was seasonal and not like SaaS where revenue predictability came easier.

By the time of this interview, Rocket had 100 customers placing between 100-1,000+ employees annually across their platform. They were cash flow positive with $1.6 million remaining from their $2.9 million seed investment, despite being "basically break even" with minimal monthly burn. The company was planning to raise $7-10 million in Q4 2019 or Q1 2020, but Abhinav was strategic about partnership: "We care most about having the right partner who understands [our hybrid] model." He'd seen too many recruiting tech companies like Hired get the wrong VC partner and get pushed into pure SaaS models with liquidation preferences and ratchets that destroyed them. Instead, Abhinav was targeting 60-70% gross margins and 30-40% net margins—more like a software business than a traditional 5-10% margin recruiting agency. His plan was to use new capital to open 5-10 offices across the U.S., recognizing that recruiting was fundamentally a local market business where you needed to be in-market to talk to candidates and customers.