Target Recruit

Rina Gupta's entrepreneurial journey began unconventionally. While most women take career breaks after their first child, she launched Target Recruit in 2008—the same year she gave birth. Her path to this moment started earlier when she was working as an independent IT consultant. During one project, she discovered Salesforce.com and immediately fell in love with the platform's flexibility and customization capabilities. She recognized an opportunity to specialize as a niche Salesforce consulting partner, which led to her previous company, Avankia, evolving from IT consulting into IT staffing.

The timing of Target Recruit's launch in 2008 was strategic. Rina leveraged her deep understanding of the staffing industry and Salesforce's extensibility to build what was then an innovative solution: a CRM-based applicant tracking system. Unlike traditional ATS tools, Target Recruit was philosophically different—it combined front-office recruiting capabilities with back-office solutions like timesheets, accounting, and scheduling. The company initially focused on the staffing industry as its beachhead, later specializing in healthcare and recently releasing a workforce management version.

Target Recruit's growth strategy was remarkably efficient from day one. Rather than pursuing expensive direct sales, Rina leveraged the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace as her primary customer acquisition channel. This decision proved transformative. As Rina notes, "Salesforce App Exchange is an amazing world. They send us so many leads, inbound leads to us, and they literally say, here's the customer, work with them." One early champion customer, MedPro staffing in Florida, became instrumental in shaping the product. Since around 2010, MedPro helped architect healthcare-specific features and essentially grew alongside Target Recruit, demonstrating the power of strong customer partnerships.

Target Recruit's success despite minimal sales and marketing efforts reveals a powerful product-market fit. With only 4 dedicated sales team members (out of 50 total), the company achieves strong metrics: 300 customers generating "about 400, 500 grand a month in revenue" with "30% year over year" growth. The pricing model—$99 per user per month with an average customer deploying 30-35 users—creates predictable revenue. Retention is exceptional for mid-to-large customers (80%+ annually), though SMB retention hovers around 50-60% due to natural business churn.

Where Target Recruit struggled was sales and marketing execution. Over 50% of the team focuses on implementation and customer success rather than acquisition, reflecting Rina's philosophy that "making sure that they are successful is the most important thing to do." The company's largest marketing expense was attending Salesforce events ($50K for one event), proving the power of ecosystem participation over traditional advertising.

Target Recruit operates as a fully bootstrapped company running in "startup mode," constantly optimizing expenses and revenue. Its reliance on the Salesforce AppExchange as a lead generation engine has allowed it to scale without significant capital raising, a rarity among SaaS companies. Meanwhile, Rina has channeled her passion into Mom Relunch, a complementary venture that trains and places talented mothers—many of whom now work in Target Recruit's own organization. This expansion reflects her core belief: "There are a lot of women in my company who are in high positions, management positions, and they're all rock star moms. All they need is a little bit more flexibility in terms of how they can work."