Shine

David Koppel spent years as a CTO at a previous SaaS company, watching it grow from 6 to 50 people. Throughout that scaling journey, he became increasingly frustrated by the recruitment process—specifically how difficult it was to assess whether candidates would be a good cultural fit based on resumes alone. "You get recruiters sending you CVs or resumes and how do you say if, how do you manage that process?" he recalls. He'd often find out only after candidates walked from reception to the interview room whether they'd actually be a good fit. This pain point stuck with him.

After exiting that company in 2014, David spent 2015 bootstrapping and refining the idea. By 2016, Shine launched as a video interviewing and values-based recruitment platform designed specifically for HR teams and recruitment agencies.

David's first customer acquisition story is delightfully scrappy. Armed with nothing but printed-out materials, he walked into the UK's largest holiday park operator with a paper-based MVP and a pitch. He walked out with a verbal deal—and that customer remains a client today. From there, the company built a small in-house sales and marketing team (3 inside sales reps, 1 marketer) and leaned heavily into outbound sales, exhibitions, and trade shows.

The model worked. By the time David talked to Nathan, Shine had 55 clients paying an average of $10k per year ($833/month per customer), generating roughly $45-50k MRR—up from $30k just a year earlier. That's 60% year-over-year growth. Critically, churn stayed healthy: less than 5% logo churn annually, with zero competitive losses. Even better, existing customers were expanding their usage, creating negative 5% net revenue churn (meaning expansion revenue actually outpaced churn).

The CAC was about $3,500 per customer, with a 4-month payback period—solid unit economics for a young SaaS company. David and team spent most of that CAC on headcount and commissions, with some external spend on trade shows and content marketing.

In December (just two weeks before this interview in April), David closed a $350k seed round from UK VCs—the first capital the company had raised. Until then, they'd bootstrapped entirely. The goal was straightforward: use the capital to become more aggressive on the sales and marketing fronts. With 10 people on the team in the Northeast UK, operating at breakeven before the raise, David was ready to invest in product development and aggressive sales expansion. As he put it: "When you're bootstrapped, it's a little bit more difficult... But what's quite exciting now is we can look at product development and look at other ways we can expand out and really aggressively go after the sales side of things."

At 37, married with a 4-year-old and 4-month-old, David embodied the scrappy founder mindset: "Shit happens, but it's usually got a way of working itself out."