Yabs

Raphael Danilo and his co-founder were both European transplants working for startups in the US, always hiring remotely. They felt the constant friction of conducting interviews over Zoom—consolidating notes, capturing key moments, ensuring team alignment on candidates. They realized that while interviews have the highest impact on hire quality, they also have the highest error rate (about 50% of interviews reach conclusions that don't match post-hire reality). The timing of COVID and the talent shortage made this problem acute: companies needed to move fast, conduct just 3 interviews per candidate maximum, and still make precise decisions. That's when the lightbulb went off: what if you could record, transcribe, and analyze interviews the way Gong.io does for sales calls?

Launching in 2018, Yabs took an unusual path. Through a personal connection at Nissan, they landed one of the world's largest automakers as an early customer. Rather than grinding through startups first, they went straight to Fortune 500 companies. This gave them large contracts quickly but came with a cost—heavy enterprise customization demands and security requirements that distracted from product-market fit. By the time of this interview (2021), they had 20+ enterprise customers paying per recruiter seat, ranging from roughly $1,000 to $5,000 per month depending on team size. The strategy felt like a land grab, but it came with handcuffs.

About 2-3 months before this interview, Yabs launched a free forever plan with integrations for Greenhouse, Zoom, and Google Calendar. This was the turning point. Raphael deliberately chose NOT to chase bigger contracts at any cost, even as competitors like Clovers raised $10-30M and went all-in on enterprise sales. Instead, Yabs bet on product-led growth: make it dead simple to sign up, offer genuine value for free, and let users get hooked. This long-game strategy required capital, which is why they'd just raised $2.5M in seed funding from operator angels (including Adam Grant) at an 18-20M cap on SAFEs. The capital gave them optionality—the ability to absorb the cost of free users today in exchange for a massive long-tail customer base tomorrow.

Yabs has grown 3x year-over-year. A year prior they were doing roughly $7,000/month; now they're at $20,000/month in revenue from their 20+ enterprise accounts. With 12 people on the team (including 6 engineers and a couple of PhDs in organizational psychology), they're building proprietary technology on top of third-party transcription vendors. The freemium launch happened only a few months ago, so the real acceleration from that strategy hasn't fully materialized—but Raphael's conviction is clear: while competitors chase giant contracts, Yabs is quietly capturing every scrappy startup and scale-up that feels the interview pain but can't afford 10-20K annually. The land grab will be won by whoever owns the long tail.