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The Only Thing That Matters
Welcome to "The Only Things That Matters", where we deconstruct the path to product-market fit of successful founders and extract the principles and frameworks behind their success so that you can apply them too.
The Only Thing That Matters
Raising $500M to build a meaningful business with Job van der Voort (Remote)
In this episode of The Only Thing That Matters, I sit down with Job van der Voort, CEO and co-founder of Remote—a company that has raised over $500 million, operates in 67 countries, and is valued at $3 billion. 🌍
Job shares the incredible journey of building Remote from a simple job board to a global platform solving one of the most complex challenges for companies—hiring and managing international teams.
We dive into:
💡 The moment Remote pivoted from a remote job board to tackling international payroll and compliance—and why it was the right decision.
💡 Going all in on venture capital: How Job and his co-founder Marcelo made the high-stakes choice to raise money and grow at all costs.
💡 The importance of timing: Why Job believed it was a "now-or-never" moment to build Remote and capitalize on the opportunity.
💡 Talking to customers from day one: Job’s approach to building a business by having constant conversations with customers and how it shaped Remote’s evolution.
From embracing the risk of failure to scaling with a global vision, Job’s insights are a must-listen for any founder or entrepreneur looking to solve big problems and achieve product-market fit.
Tune in to hear how Job built Remote into a billion-dollar company and the lessons he learned along the way.
To me, success is am I doing the activity that I want to be doing? For me, this is not about making a shitload of money. It's about doing something that I find fun, right and find challenging, and I like to be ambitious and have a change in the world, and so, in that sense, we've already been successful. So, raising venture money, I do think that the bar for success is insanely high. Right, you end up comparing yourself to well-known named companies, but those are one in a million, and so if you define success as, like, monetary success, I do think it's much easier to make less money.
Ariel Camus:Welcome everyone. This is Ariel Camus, and this is the Only Thing that Matters the podcast where I interview successful founders to deconstruct their path to product market fit and extract the principles and frameworks behind their success. My guest today is Job Van der V. He's the CEO and co-founder of Remote, a company that helps businesses of all sizes pay and manage full-time and contract workers around the world. Remote handles international payroll benefits, taxes, stock options and compliance in dozens of countries, making it easier for companies to hire globally. Making it easier for companies to hire globally. Since its founding in 2019, remote has raised over $500 million, reached an evaluation of $3 billion and has over a thousand employees serving customers in 67 countries. Before Remote, ob was the VP of Product at GitLab, where he helped grow the team from 5 to 450 people, gaining invaluable experience in building a remote-first company. Join us as we explore the intricacies of launching and scaling a very complex business in a highly competitive market With all of you.
Ariel Camus:Job van der V hey, job, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate you being here. You, I know you're quite busy. Thanks, thanks for having me. Well, I was checking on my inbox earlier today. When did we meet and it was on 2019, I think, august. Uh, we were introduced by nico, who he participated in your seed round too.
Job van der Voort:He participated in our seed round with General Catalyst and every round after. So yeah, good investor.
Ariel Camus:I remember having that doubt of like you know, is it a good idea to get an institutional investor in your seed rounds and you know, if they don't follow on that's the downside, but that they can follow on in every single round after that?
Ariel Camus:it's uh, it's, it's an amazing uh thing, and and he's awesome, I'm so glad that that you know we were introduced to each other by him and, yeah, the the thing is when, when we're introduced, I remember him mentioning, yeah, like job is like working on a way to like help people like find remote jobs, and I'm like that looks very different to what you're doing today. Maybe that can be a good way to start the conversation. Where did the initial idea come from and what was that idea? And then how did that evolve to what remote is today?
Job van der Voort:Yeah, the funny thing is that we're back at it. So today we again help companies find people. Yeah, the funny thing is that we're back at it. So today we again help companies find people. But indeed, so I joined GitLab before I started remote, very early on, just getting started as a company, and there we built a fully remote company and we found that that works incredibly well. It works so incredibly well, and I think the two things that it did really well was one it solved all these problems that companies typically struggle with, which is scaling and expanding quickly. That suddenly became really really easy, and finding great people became really easy as a remote company. And, inversely, we found that the people that we hired were incredibly happy, and so to me, it showed that the way we were building GitLab as a company, that's how companies will work in the future, and, given that, I should do something to help that, because we encountered all these problems at GitLab building that company, and so I always wanted to start my own company.
Job van der Voort:Always, when I joined GitLab, I told Sid, the CEO and founder. I told him I'm going to stay for a year and then I'm going to found my own company. I ended up staying five, because the company grew really fast and I was having a good time, but still I always want to start my own company, and so when I finally had the opportunity to do something myself, I think I had a bit of a financial cushion build up. If it wouldn't work out, I wouldn't have to give up on life. So when that was the time, I managed to acquire remotecom, the domain, and I got Marcelo, my co founder, to join me and we started building, and at the very beginning we had the idea of what remote is today.
Job van der Voort:So we wanted to become an employer of record and we knew that we could do this as one of the options.
Job van der Voort:We also knew that it would require an immense amount of money, and on remotecom itself there was already a website, a freelancer connecting kind of platform running, and so we figured well, maybe we can make that work for a while, make some money while we work on other things, so we don't have to raise a lot of cash up front.
Job van der Voort:We did it for a while and it didn't really work out. And then we figured well, you know, the change in the world we want to see is more remote organizations, and so helping more people find remote jobs is certainly going to help in some way in that, and so that's how we started early on. So we built the job board and everything else, but then very quickly after that, we realized, well, the real problem we have to solve is this employer record bit, and that's what we started to build then for a long time, and I think around the time that we were connected, we had already started building that, but we still had a job board online and we tried to connect companies and made some money and nothing significant.
Ariel Camus:So the mission, the why, was pretty clear. It was more about, like the where to start building towards that right.
Job van der Voort:One thing that was really incredibly clear to us was that we either built the employer record thing that we ended up doing, but we would need to raise money. And if we need to raise money, like you and I were saying before you started recording, you have to go incredibly hard. Right, you have to grow at all costs, essentially, and so that's a. This is a really die-hard choice. You cannot calmly build a venture business. You have to be all in, really focused, really focused on growth for a decade. It's quite a commitment, and the alternative route for us was well, we're going to do whatever else, just not this thing to help remote companies and whatever else and then we can build more of a lifestyle business, right, so we can calmly scale it.
Job van der Voort:And so we ended up obviously choosing to raise capital and uh, and then we then things grow grew really really fast, but and and for us it was sort of like, well, it feels like the stars are aligning to do this right now. We want to do this, so let's take this opportunity and see where it goes right. We and I think we were extremely willing to fail as well. We were just we're going to work really hard on this if it works out out, it works out. If it doesn't, we can always go back to do something else.
Ariel Camus:Will you say, going on the venture path increased the chances of failing the venture path. You mean yeah, like? Do you think that by going with a more?
Job van der Voort:It just depends on how you define the. I think if you can sustain yourself, arguably, you're a successful entrepreneur, absolutely. And so, in a venture business, what is a successful venture business? Is it one that exits? Because many companies exit in a way that's not really profitable for the founders, right, and so very, very few of them actually have large exits. Is that success? Is it success reading a particular milestone? I don't know.
Job van der Voort:I think to me, success is am I doing the activity that I want to be doing, like, am I trying to? You know, for me, this is not about making a shitload of money. It's about doing something that I find fun, right and find challenging, and like I like to be ambitious and have a change in the world, and so, in that sense, we've already been successful. So, raising venture money, I do think that the bar for success is insanely high. Right, you end up comparing yourself to well-known named companies, but those are one in a million, and so, yeah, I guess I would agree with that. If you define success as, like, monetary success, I do think it's much easier to make less money, and if you don't have any external investors, then it can go to your own bank account, so to say and the moment you raise any kind of capital, that's no longer on the table. Now you have to find other ways to make yourself rich, if that is your goal.
Ariel Camus:And it's amazing how both things can be true. Right, the fact that it's harder to be successful monetarily speaking is true, but so is the importance of defining your own success, precisely because the odds are against you on the other side. So if you are conditioning your definition of success to that monetary success, you're most likely going to be unsuccessful. And who wants that? So I'm also of the belief that you have to choose something that you're going to be enjoying and proud of doing every day. So it's the the journey, not the destination.
Job van der Voort:Otherwise you're like setting yourself up for for failure yeah, you're going to be incredibly depressed, right, because you're going to struggle to do something and, at the end of the day, even if you make a whole lot of money, then you'll feel empty. I spent 10 years doing something I didn't like now, now I have some money, but what do I do with all the time?
Ariel Camus:It happens with anything that we say my goal to be successful or to be happy is to achieve X. Everything I say, if X has to happen, then it's a recipe for finding or continuing to be sad. But in this case, you ended up making a decision of like okay, we'll go with this venture path. Why? Why did you end up deciding not to go with the lifestyle bootstrapped model?
Job van der Voort:Because we had worked Marcelo and I, my co-founder we had worked at venture-backed companies for years but never ran one ourselves. So we had a good understanding of what those businesses looked like and we know a lot about the ups and downs. We were very ambitious and we knew that this potentially big idea would not be feasible if we were to do it in a bootstrap manner. And it turned out. You know, then the pandemic happened. Really, the stars aligned even more than they ever did before. But it was like, well, we are young, I mean, we both had small kids, but nonetheless we sort of were in a right place still to do it, and we felt like we had the skills, we had somewhat of the network necessary to actually do something big. But above all, yeah, it felt like, well, it's now or never kind of deal, right, like if you, I don't know.
Ariel Camus:I guess it's like inherent ambition that we had to do something big, and so that's why the now or never was more because of the timing of the pandemic or because of where you were in life?
Job van der Voort:No, this was way before the pandemic.
Job van der Voort:No, it was more about the time where we were in life Like we had a, really we were able to get the domain right. So we had a really strong domain, we had a really good idea and we had investor interest or we were able to, you know, drum up some investor interest. And so, you know, there's this moment where, if you feel like all the things come together really nicely, that you can choose not to capitalize on it. But for us it was like no, this is clearly something and you know you, I guess, many people that are in a world of startups often you look up to these startups being really successful. I kind of feel like, well, if that is something you want, why not try it? And so we did.
Ariel Camus:Absolutely. It makes total sense. And then the stars probably kept getting aligned in some ways and I want to hear about that. I want to double-click into something that probably is not the you know fancy, flashy stuff that is happening remote today, but I think it's a probably often neglected side that is really important. You said that the first thing you were doing with the job board website that you had acquired as part of the domain, you tried to give it a. You know, you give it a chance, but it wasn't really working. What did it mean back then that it wasn't working? How did you make the decision? This is not good enough.
Job van der Voort:It was not so much that we didn't think it was good enough, it was more that we decided we had a better idea and we wanted to start working on that. Because as a small business, it was working fine. It was making quite a bit of money. And because as a as a small business it was working fine, it was making quite a bit of money, and how? Just through blood, sweat and tears. But the product itself didn't have any particular moat, Right, Other than you know. There were a few small things, but like a strong domain, and it looked nice and it worked. It worked reasonably well.
Job van der Voort:We had some specific decisions that we took, but ultimately we were selling a slightly different thing of a commoditized product right, In this case, job ads and so you can make perfect money with that and you can make some people very happy with that. It just it was not a thing we wanted to build right, Like it was not necessarily like then there was no particular reason that it would be very successful and so. But the most important factor in all of this is that we didn't decide this doesn't work. No, we decided no, there's something else we want to do, and I think that is more how we took that decision at the time than anything else.
Ariel Camus:It sounds like, if I understand correctly, there were at least three elements of playing different weights. There was your passion for the problem you were trying to solve. There was the absence of a mode, of a sustainable competitive advantage that could actually make this a viable business for a long period of time, and then there was the opportunity cost of working on that instead of working on something that seemed to be a much better idea.
Job van der Voort:Yeah, I think so, I think so. I mean, if you were, you know again, I really believe that the last one is the most important one, like nothing else you know it's we decided it is also not a very intellectually interesting challenge, right to just create a job board, no matter how you cut or slice it like, it's just not a super interesting intellectual challenge. And building an employer record sure was, because we were facing unknown unknowns and that's very scary but also fun.
Ariel Camus:That's a part like as an operational efficiency nerd myself too. Really, really I can't wait to get to that part. Uh, but let me let me ask one thing before um, in which way did the pandemic play a role on the success of remote in the early days? Of course, maybe I know how things have changed very recently, but in the early days, what would remote look like if the pandemic hadn't happened? I think maybe that's one way to put it.
Job van der Voort:Well, smaller I think that's the main way. Smaller, we would have raised less money and grew a lot smaller. We didn't have a product before the pandemic, so we only launched right after the pandemic and, yeah, the whole world started working remotely, and only as a second order effect did people start hiring internationally, which is ultimately what our product allowed and allows you to do. Right Is to hire people in other countries, and so that trend of hiring more internationally, that was going to happen. It's just that we took a sudden leap 10 years into the future. Actually, I think we went like 20 years in the future and then we went 10 years back, you know, in the years that followed the pandemic, something like that. That's the main thing.
Job van der Voort:I think we would have grown obviously much slower if that it hasn't happened. That wouldn't have happened, um, we would have been able to not raise as much money, right, we wouldn't have as much organic interest. You know we had a strong domain and everything that comes with that. But eventually, like, the problem we are solving is a real problem, and we see this now. Now we're in, like the post-pandemic years. It's like, well, it's a real problem that really needs to be solved. And now we're also solving a whole bunch of other problems, so there is luckily more to be have done. It just has accelerated their timelines quite significantly.
Ariel Camus:So probably it increased both the amount of capital available to solve the problem, which I think you're able to capture it's like 500 million.
Job van der Voort:That's a lot in two years.
Ariel Camus:That's a lot, and also a much larger number of companies having experiencing the problem or seeing the opportunity and finding the problem on the way of that opportunity. So I can clearly see that, but also by the way, I don't know if you know this um, sid, uh, the founder of gitlab, also played a huge role on me as a professional and uh on the company and also as a person. I think you know the value of transparency. For example, I remember my I met sid in 2012, right after selling my previous company when gitlab. You were already there, probably as one of the very early team members, um, and but I remember gitlab solving I don't know 100 people, something like that 2013 I think, and but 2013, gitlab had five employees, so okay, five or four wow, okay, so, so it was that that tiny.
Ariel Camus:Today it's thousands too. And but I remember, um, a little bit after meeting sid, uh, finding out the concept of, like the handbook of gitlab and starting to read all the principles and the thoughtfulness behind the approach, connected to the fact that I had spent the last two years working remotely myself without really knowing that that was remote work. It's like this makes a lot of sense, right, and I had just, uh, spent some time teaching in burundi, in east africa. I had also just sold a company in silicon valley for millions, and also being an immigrant coming from South America, and I started putting all the dots together of the opportunities, the talent being kind of evenly distributed. What a huge missed opportunity this was for the companies, for the talent, of course, and I'm like this is going to happen, right, it's a matter of time. But then the way that that's it, and the guilt lab culture, like you know, came together, uh, and around values like transparency. For transparency, for example, it made so much sense in the context of building a remote company creating a lot of autonomy.
Ariel Camus:Without that transparency, it's hard to build the trust to have the autonomy but, at the same time, made so much sense to me as an individual, like to the extent that, you know, I preach transparency to everyone as the way to have fewer dramas in life that just share things as they are, share your feelings as they come, you know, share the truth, like, and you don't ever have to be, you know, second, outing yourself like did I say that or that? Like everything is so much easier, uh, so I'm I'm glad we both had that, that that shared, um, I guess uh, influence in in our lives and and yeah, and also that we have both experienced the problem and the potential of, of what's happening here now I want to get to the, the operational issue.
Ariel Camus:How did you get started with putting together the product? How did you know, by the way, what version, which features of the product were worth building, and how did you go about actually putting that together?
Job van der Voort:Yeah, I never thought of it like that.
Job van der Voort:What I did is the moment we started the company. I started talking with prospective customers from day one and I would talk all the time. I would just email people at remote companies or companies that would hire internationally and I asked them we're building this thing, you want to chat, you want to talk about it? And I would talk with these companies and I would do that every week of the company since the very beginning. Since before we knew what we were going to build. Once we decided, well, this is the problem we want to address, because I had the experience at GitLab of like we knew an employer of record was like a really shitty product and they clearly needed innovation in that, and it was, you know, further corroborated by speaking to all of these prospective customers. It wasn't so much about like, do we build what features? It was more about are we able to solve the problem? Right, then I I really like that approach and I I actually think that's a really good way of building products, especially in the early days, which is that, well, you got to solve a problem, you know, and so it should. It should not be, um, which features? Which things I'm going to do, because it sounds a lot like seeking for problems right, but with us the problem is really really clear. You have somebody in another country, you want to hire them. How do you solve the problem? How do you do it effectively and how do you do it in a way that is better than what came before it? And so what I did is I spoke to all of these companies and, like, tried to sense of like, beyond the core problem, what are other things that they struggle with, what are problematic parts of it? And I had some hunches, and over time you start to learn more and more. You know as you speak with people that, oh, it's a very opaque process, it's very slow, it's very expensive. And so then, instead of thinking about, well, what features should I build, we thought about, well, how can we approach this in a way that solves fundamentally those issues? And so we formed strong opinions about it.
Job van der Voort:In our case, we felt like well, a lot of the problems that one encounters when trying to hire somebody through an employer record come from the fact that there's loosely coupled third parties. So there's a company and they say we can help you hire anybody anywhere, but then they go to some local players, not incentivized to do the right thing. And all of that is all very manual work. And so we realized, well, if we cut out the middleman, so to say, and just do everything ourselves, we can at least streamline things. And if we do that, then we can also address the pricing issue. So, actually, when we launched remote, we priced it in a similar way to the rest of the markets at the time, which was a percentage of total cost of employment, and it made the business model incredibly profitable.
Job van der Voort:But the pricing was very non-transparent, so it was very hard to understand. First you had to understand what is total cost of employment, and then, oh, we're charging a fee over a percentage of that, which also disincentivizes employers from giving people a raise. And so, rather than thinking about, well, which features, one of the first changes we made was we changed the pricing model. So we just say, oh, we're just going to be a flat fee and there's upsides and downsides to it. But we put it low enough so that if you come from any of the existing players in that space, it was significantly cheaper. And so it was not at all about which features it was.
Job van der Voort:Can we do the work? And then why would they work with us being a new company versus other companies that have been long established and essentially offering the same thing right or, in a lot of ways, offering a lot more. And so, and because I've been talking to companies since the very, very beginning, there were a lot of companies who I knew might have been interested in some way. You know, I've spoken with 100 plus companies and I mean one has to be the first, and one was the first. I don't even remember which company, because it went pretty fast after that, because we and in our case, employer record you have to launch country by country. So there were only a small number of countries that were available and we chose those. Basically, on what is easiest, what can we launch first.
Job van der Voort:We knew that to offer this service really effectively, after having spoken with all these companies, you want to be in as many countries as possible. It's impossible to do all at once to boil the ocean. So we just said well, we're going to take the path of least resistance, work on a whole bunch at the same time. And whichever said well, we're going to take the path of least resistance, work on a whole bunch at the same time, whichever available first, we're going to offer. And so we launched, we had availability for two or three, four countries. And then, you know, we kept working and opening them because we were convinced that that was the right approach. And 1.1 company said no, we're, we're interested in trying you all out.
Job van der Voort:And so the first version of product was essentially spreadsheets. It was like pretty front end. But in the back version of product was essentially spreadsheets. It was like a pretty front end, but in the back end it was literally all spreadsheets. But there was the agreement between us and our customers hey, you're the first customer. It's going to go. It's going to be bumpy ride for all of us, but we're going to work really, really hard. You know already that we do things in a different way and we're going to continuously improve. And some of those customers were exceptionally happy because they had to pay much less and they generally had a better experience. And some of them were not very happy because it was a bumpy process and maybe they didn't want that. But that's sort of how we got started and honestly, I think we never really wondered which features do we have to build, because it was all about are we solving this very fundamental issue?
Ariel Camus:I think that is one-on-one of entrepreneurship right and product in general.
Ariel Camus:It's like focus on the problem, not on the solution and also tapping into something that you already had experience with from your experience at GuildLab. Like you were not necessarily the biggest expert or representative of every single company in the world with the problem, but you already knew more or less a problem. And then talking to your customers like that's the, I think, uh, another one-on-one uh piece, uh here, how, how did you get um to 100 potential customers there? Where do those relationships come from? What are some tricks, resources? When I say trick, I mean hacks or simple things at work, and I would suspect that probably you already had some decent connections. You've mentioned that before. What would you do if you didn't have those connections? How do you get to talk to a lot of customers even if you're just very new in the industry?
Job van der Voort:Yeah, just email people. You send emails and LinkedIn messages to people. That's it. There's no secret to it. I mean, if you sell a product, you just have to sell it and you cannot be.
Job van der Voort:I think a lot of people, especially people that are builders right, that are very happy like myself, that are very happy like myself, that are very happy to just build stuff there's sort of this expectation Everybody knows it's not true, but still there's this expectation that if you build it, they will come, and it's not true. And so if you want to sell things, you have to tell people about the thing that you are selling, and then you have to assume that you're going to be incredibly unsuccessful with the majority of those people. If you accept that and just keep talking to people, it will get a lot easier. And so I actually don't think that we got our first 100 customers through any connections or network that we had. Sure, we knew some investors and whatever else, but that didn't really bring a lot of business. What brought business was talking to companies. And how do you talk to companies is by approaching them, by talking about what are you building? Like I said, I spent. It took us almost 18 months to launch the first version of the product. In a time.
Job van der Voort:I spoke to so many companies that I think a lot of them over time became customers. Some took much longer than others, but like and I just kept doing that you just talk to customers, you just reach out to them, you say this is what we are building, this is what we're doing, and I or hey, I know that you're working at this, or are you hiring people internationally? Do you want to talk about it? Then things work out. That really is all there is to it. I, I don't. I don't think there's any actual hacks you can do. Yeah, sure, there's ways to approach a lot of people really quickly, and they have meaningfully changed since since then to to now.
Job van der Voort:But, um, above all, I think the best thing you can do is just solve a real problem, talk about it publicly, which we did a lot on linkedin, on twitter, on whatever else. Talk and approach people that you think might be interesting and be ready to be rejected a lot. I never, and I think nobody at our company, especially in the early days, was bothered by rejection ever, because we were like oh, we're just building this thing, let's just keep, we're just going to keep going like if it's not good enough, we'll work until it is so, and I think that that approach helps um helps a lot, and just don't give up and don't run out of money. That helps as well. And in our case, you know the hacks we used were the hacks that venture-backed companies use. So you know we raised a lot of money. If you raise a lot of money, that's a great way to get PR right, and if you get PR, that's potentially a great source of recognition that helps companies find you, and so obviously we use that.
Ariel Camus:Makes subtle sense and I think maybe an interesting insight that I've heard before that I think applies here and it can be a way to deal with the rejections is you need to have at least one of these two components for things to go well. Either you have a market that is desperate for your solution right which definitely it's a really good check to have, yeah or you have an immense amount of conviction and passion for the problem you're solving right.
Ariel Camus:If you have neither of those two, it's going to be really hard, and I think it helps to recognize that, probably especially at the beginning. Even if you're tackling the right problem, even if you have really good ideas for how to solve it, you might still not know how to talk to your customers. It's like language market fit thing, which means you will still be rejected and that's the only option you have left. There is to have a lot of passion and conviction. It sounds like you and the team had, you know, the absolute conviction that the problem was real and that it was worth solving it, that you could solve it, and it was a matter of time in finding the customers with the right product that you needed to be able to solve their problems.
Job van der Voort:Yeah, I think if you are building a company, especially if you're venture-backed and you're not profitable, you're constantly looking into the abyss. Right, your company is going to die. And so I don't think it's really an option to like not go really really hard at that problem. And I don't mean to make long hours, I mean it's just you really have to work hard, to keep going until you're done, until it works, and then learn from that. But it's hard for me to relate because I never felt like rejection is like a big deal To me. It's just like well, that's a challenge to do a little bit better. It's a big deal To me, it's just like well, that's a challenge to do a little bit better. It's a learning opportunity. As much as somebody gives you feedback about something you can do better, that's a gift.
Job van der Voort:And the same is rejection, like I always you know, even today, the other day a company they didn't that I knew and they knew me and they decided to work with another, with a competitor or something, and so I emailed them. I'm not there to be disappointed. I genuinely want to understand why is it that people would not want to work with me so that I can adjust and be better and that should be your only attitude. And if you do that really hard and given that your market is big enough, right, and you're solving a real problem, then you'll get there eventually. Right, you'll get there. Eventually. You'll find that there's a common denominator across all your rejections. You're going to solve that one and then maybe one of these companies is going to move over to you. Ultimately, that is all there is, all there is to it. It's a really difficult thing, but I think it's incredibly important.
Ariel Camus:Focus on the problem and I think there are two approaches there and it's clear which one you took. You can just try a, can just try reaching out to a lot of people with slightly different messages until one message starts connecting. Or you can accelerate that probably a hundredfold by asking them why did that message not? Why did that not solve? Why doesn't it solve your problem right? Until you get enough feedback that really tells you what to change in the message, what to change in the product so that it actually resonates with people. But I think sometimes the hardest part and it's not easy to solve it's how do you get to convince them to tell you that why not right, exactly what you were saying with this customer. And I was thinking about this this week because we're working on a new product to help software engineers with their English for their careers, and we had to change the entire flow, the signup flow of the process, to force those conversations to happen exactly at the moment of rejection. So before, let's say, you could, like you know, do a self-serve sign up thing and eventually you get to try the product, the pricing, say no, not. For me it was really hard to get people to tell you at that point why they were deciding not to buy. So instead, what we did, we did the other thing, which is do things that don't scale. We flipped and it was okay. We're going to do sales calls, where you think you are getting a word into the product, but what we're truly doing is observing you and really understanding. First, you know what's confusing, what's not there that you're expecting, and then, as you get to the pricing page, you know what is your reaction and then I can ask you face to face hey, um, why yes, why not? And what worked here, by the way, was because in this case, the audience and software developers were saying hey, do you know how much it sucks to go to a job interview and the employer rejecting you and you asking for feedback and not getting it? Don't do that to me. Especially if it's negative feedback, I want to hear it. You know how hard it is to get it. Don't do that to me. And that has worked really well.
Ariel Camus:But I think it's important to recognize the importance of doing things that don't scale here. You mentioned before that nowadays there are tons of tools to automate, to scale the outreach process, and with AI it's just getting mind-blowing. I haven't seen this working well enough in the very, very, very early stages In a way that gives you this quality, like really quality, qualitative. You know, uh, conversations, it gives you more of the, the quantity. You agree with that, or what will you do in the end of this? Will you look for a scale or you look like you know extreme personalization and you know customized outreach to get those conversations?
Job van der Voort:no, I mean until today, I just wrote everything myself. I mean, I think if you're, if you're looking for any kind of feedback, or even if you're just reaching out to people, for whatever reason, you can get away forever by just doing it instead of necessarily using a particular tool, if that answers your question. Like I, even today, I regularly reach out directly, especially if somebody so, for example, in remote, we have this product. Like you, can rate the experience at different parts and, depending on your user and a lot of users, they don't write any feedback. So I just reach out directly myself.
Job van der Voort:Like hey you left some negative feedback. Could you might elaborate? Do you want to call about it? Um, it's a whole motion.
Job van der Voort:Both me, my co-founder or ceo, we all all, all the times, jump on calls with customers on to understand like, well, if, how can we make the experience better, or if you are unhappy, how can we make you happy, etc. I don't know. I I've nothing really replaces just talking to people. Like that, it's, it's really straightforward. There should never be a point and I often hear you people say like, oh, when a company gets really big, I'm only delegating things and I'm only managing people, and to me especially, it's like a leader and to me that's um, that should never happen. Like you should always be busy with the actual product, the problem and the people using the product, and by by just talking to them. You should always be talking to people. It it sounds so simple, but it makes all the difference. You have to deeply understand people. You cannot deeply understand people just by their one sentence reply to some form that you sent them. That's also useful and you should also do those things, but you should continue to talk to people.
Ariel Camus:That makes sense but you should continue to talk to people. That makes sense and it's easy to fall in the trap of scaling the team, delegating and delegating also the talking to the customer right, but then how can you really guide the direction of the company if you don't deeply understand the audience and the problem?
Job van der Voort:Yeah, but there are great tools for that, for what it's worth, right? So you know, we have a very large sales team, as you can imagine. So we record sales calls, as you can imagine. So we record sales calls and then you can look those back, so sometimes you don't have to have those calls, but you still got to watch those recordings, right? You still have to see what a customer says, and you have to make a point out of teaching people to actually ask for feedback, which is also a skill that you have to acquire, right? It's very easy to just accept the rejection without digging deep into why what is the reason for the rejection? And so I mean there's a million different tools that make all of even this part easier and better. We use Dovetail, for example, for feedback, where we have recordings of interviews with customers and prospective customers on different things that they like and dislike and how they think about it, and that can be really useful to dig into it.
Job van der Voort:But in early days, I don't think you should make things that complicated. You should be talking a lot to people. Your focus should be gaining an understanding of your customers and prospective customers and then trying to solve their problems and then see how you would do. I think you know. For us, as I told in the beginning, a big learning was that the problem was not in any piece of software. The problem was in that they didn't feel like they could reach out to somebody. They felt like it was very expensive the services, and so that's what we addressed.
Job van der Voort:And I still wanted to build beautiful software, but when I started the company I figured that was all I would be doing. In the end it turned out to be well, that's actually not even the second concern of our customers. It's like somewhere down the line oh yeah, the software should be nice to use. No, it's. Primarily, does it solve the problem that I have? Is it affordable? Is it easy to understand? Do I feel alone or do I feel supported? You know if you can solve all, for us, solving those things were much more important than anything else Makes total sense.
Ariel Camus:And you did all of this from the very early building of the first person, of the product, in just you know a few countries, all the way to where you're today, surrounded by a lot of competition, with also very, very deep pockets. In which way did the competition like influence? Um, what you had to do, what you had to prioritize, didn't really change anything at all, both positive and negatively.
Job van der Voort:I mean ultimately. I think competition is positive because it forces you to do better, it forces you to focus on what is actually delivering value and what isn't.
Job van der Voort:And you have to learn to be very good at not copying products, because it's very easy to fall into the trap of trying to copy what others are doing, and I think that's a very dangerous trap to fall into, because there's always going to be somebody bigger raising more money than you, and so if you're going to follow, you're going to lose, right, and so you have to be really, really strict on that.
Job van der Voort:I think the most interesting things are very specific. You know, pricing dynamics are pretty interesting because obviously there's going to be a lot more pricing pressure on the industry as a whole in which you are in, but nobody wants to give away the product for free. They have to build a sustainable business. So that certainly is a very interesting angle, and beyond that it's it's mostly just good like it creates more awareness, right. If if you have a competitor who's suddenly very successful or raises a round, it will also have a positive impact on traffic to you and people looking at you, because even if you're much smaller, they will look for Google alternatives, and so with that, it probably helps the industry as a whole and grow your market as a whole, given that you're solving a real problem.
Ariel Camus:Absolutely, and especially if you're a venture-backed company and there are many investors that won't be able to get into the rounds of the other competitor that will want to get in the rounds of other players, and those are really good opportunities for any company, especially if it's a very competitive market. Everyone's trying to get a slice of the opportunity. Everyone's trying to get a slice of the opportunity. How do you approach differentiating yourself from the competition, especially when there's a lot of capital, a lot of velocity? What was your hypothesis, and why, behind how we're going to compete?
Job van der Voort:We never worried about differentiating. We worried about solving the real problem and then being able to show that to customers. How we think about solving this problem, what do we think is important, what don't we think is important that's the most important thing. If you do that, then you don't have to do this feature checklist thing, which is very dangerous, because if you fall in the trap of, like, doing feature checklist, it's just whoever does more checklists right, and of course in the end in many sales conversations you are going to fall into that. So to some degree you know you don't have a choice in that matter.
Job van der Voort:But above all, you should be able to really worry about the problem that you're solving, not focus too much on your competition, because the moment you start focusing on competition, you're focusing. You know, maybe something will happen to the market and, like everybody will walk past you, and that has happened many times in the history of companies right, that competitors are so focused on competing with each other that they missed, you know, the the forest for the trees and and, and you don't want that to happen. So, again, focusing very clearly on what do you think is important, how do you solve the problem and why are you good at solving the problem, then it's much less about how others are doing it. It's more or less about what we believe is important, and that in and of itself is enough.
Ariel Camus:Makes sense too. Like, yeah, just focusing on the problem and not in terms of the competition. Like, probably you are your biggest threat by losing focus on the right things.
Job van der Voort:Yeah, for sure. I mean like the biggest threat is like you breaking up with your co-founder or you running out of money, and like that's mostly up to you.
Ariel Camus:How is that? Since you mentioned the people element, how is the process of, like choosing who to build this with and I'm talking both about you know, Marcelo, your co-founder, but also the early team? How do you make that decision of what kind of team do you need? And I will suspect you'll say what do I need to solve this problem, which makes a lot of sense, but I'll let you provide your answer.
Job van der Voort:Yeah, so with Marcelo, we were best friends. We were always planning to build a company together. We tried before several times, and this was just the one time it worked, and so that was a really obvious choice. We had already long ago committed to doing this together. Then the first people you want to hire are just indeed the people you need to solve the problem. But I think in particular, when you're building a company, you want to have builders on board right, and so our first eight hires were just people building the product in some way shape or form. In our case it was a mix of engineers, operational people, but, above all, people that just get shit done, independent of what their title was before, independent of what they cared about before. We just wanted people that could do whatever work we needed them to do and would be willing to do that, would be excited to do that. That's the kind of people we hired.
Job van der Voort:And also you know people that are willing to join a startup, which is like super risky and is very likely to fail. So and then you know a good way to do that is to hire people that you've worked with before, or that people that you know very well have worked with before, so that they have really good references. I think that that certainly made a huge difference to us.
Ariel Camus:What do you do if you are like a new entrepreneur, maybe don't have as much experience working with people before, and you want to find the people that get shit done? How do I identify those people?
Job van der Voort:You know it's an attitude thing, right, and so you learn about it in several ways One by working with people, right, ultimately, that's the way to do it. And so you have to get really comfortable anyway when you're a founder and entrepreneur really comfortable firing people, because if it's not working out, you have to deal with it immediately. We were really lucky and we had to fire very few people in early days, but nonetheless, like you have to get extremely comfortable just saying to people sorry, this is not working out Because we need certain skills or whatever, and you just don't have that. I think that is one of the most important things. But on the other hand, yeah, it's an attitude thing. You figure it out by talking to people and explaining to them hey, I need you to just build the product. All the direction you're going to get is make the product and now we're going to figure it out. We're going to do this together. And if somebody is not excited about that, if somebody wants very specific specifications early on or only wants to do a certain kind of work, you know it's not going to work out, but I don't really want to make a.
Job van der Voort:I wouldn't make blanket statements about where those people come from, because you know I have a background in neuroscience changements about where those people come from, because you know I have a background in neuroscience. Um, you know, one of our our first designers had barely ever worked in a company, only worked independently. Another one of our designers, um, she was educated to be, uh, drawing like technical drawings of, like insects and such. So you know, it's all over the place. Uh, our our first salesperson was also our first support person and she had come from a very different place. So, yeah, it's I.
Ariel Camus:I think it's, above all, just an attitude kind of thing yeah, it's about the capacity and the willingness to do it, not so much the, the previous experience with it. Right, sure, yeah, all right, how? How have things changed? Uh, after the and I think we are now getting into the after product market territory for sure, but I'm just curious to see where it's, like, you know, remote going now.
Job van der Voort:So we went from doing only employer records to now providing all services and HR team names. So we provide payroll for everywhere, but also all the other. First, you can find people through us, you can hire them directly, you can onboard them directly, you can onboard them, you can manage them etc. And everything. Anything else really, you need um as an, as an hr team you can do instead of remote, and we do it particularly well for international teams. I think as a market as a whole, it's been very interesting. Right, because we went from pandemic, which really accelerated us as a company, but we also went from this like zero interest rate time to a very different environment where interest rates are really really high and venture money is much less available. So there's a lot of companies struggling and we also benefited a lot from startups growing fast and getting funded really, really fast, and it's much less the case today. Luckily, we did well and we're still growing well and faster than before, but certainly the market is very different.
Ariel Camus:Makes sense. If you had a way to tell your five-year younger version of yourself give some piece of advice for this journey of the last five years, what would it be?
Job van der Voort:uh, I don't know, I think we did pretty well and I'm not a person to be harsh on myself, so I, I don't think, uh, I don't think I would have much to say other than good luck, but uh, it would be very specific things. I think. You know, I I hear other people say this as well but if you've, you have a strong intuition about something as a founder, you should probably trust that and not lean too much on other people's opinions. I think that's the most important one.
Ariel Camus:Well, it goes well with this other saying that if everyone thinks it's a good idea, it's really not a good idea, right? Those ideas are. Usually they don't have consensus in the market. So, yeah, you need to find the people telling you that's not a good idea to know that it's a good idea.
Job van der Voort:Maybe yeah.
Ariel Camus:Well, yeah, it's definitely a really good idea to invite you to the podcast. Thank you so much for your time. Again, I know you're super busy. It's been super insightful. It's a roller coaster of a story and I look forward to seeing what happens next with you on remote. Thanks for having me, thank you. Thank you so much for tuning in. Your support means the world to me. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review. It's one of the best ways you can help this podcast get off the ground and help more entrepreneurs like you. Thank you, get off the ground and help more entrepreneurs like you. Thank you and until the next episode.
