From Weekend Experiment to Multi-Million Dollar Mission:
The RedBalloon Story

Introduction

When Andrew Crapuchettes decided to build a job board in a single weekend, he wasn’t planning on creating a multi-million-dollar business. Yet today, RedBalloon stands as one of the fastest-growing and most unique platforms in the industry, connecting employers and job seekers who value freedom, hard work, and a workplace free from divisive ideologies.

In our latest interview on the JBoard YouTube channel, Andrew shared his inspiring journey of turning a simple idea into a thriving business. From choosing a niche that resonated with an underserved audience to navigating explosive growth and unexpected challenges, his story is packed with lessons for anyone building or scaling a job board.

In this blog, we’ll dive into the key takeaways from the interview, including:

• How starting small with white-label technology led to rapid success.
• The importance of mission-driven branding in attracting loyal users.
• Lessons learned from mistakes and missteps in pricing and customer engagement.
• Why diversifying your offerings can future-proof your platform.

Watch the full interview below, or read on to discover the insights that can help you take your job board to the next level.

Key Takeaways from Our Interview

Start Small, Think Big
Andrew built RedBalloon over a single weekend using white-label job board technology. What started as a small idea grew into a multi-million-dollar business, proving that you don’t need a massive upfront investment to validate your concept.

The Power of a Niche Market
By focusing on a specific audience (employers and job seekers seeking freedom and values-aligned workplaces) RedBalloon carved out a unique position in the crowded job board space. Andrew emphasized how choosing the right niche can differentiate your platform and attract loyal users.

Leverage Your Mission as a Marketing Tool
Andrew’s passion for workplace freedom and his outspoken approach to controversial topics, like vaccine mandates, brought RedBalloon into the spotlight. This mission-driven focus resonated with a large audience, leading to explosive growth.

Mistakes Are Lessons in Disguise
Andrew candidly shared some of the challenges he faced, including pricing missteps and mismatched customer expectations. One key lesson: understand your customers' priorities - employers want applicants above all else, and tailoring your offerings to their needs is crucial.

Think Beyond Job Postings
Recognizing that job boards alone may not meet every customer’s needs, Andrew expanded RedBalloon’s offerings to include recruiting services and an applicant tracking system (ATS). This diversification not only increased revenue streams but also deepened customer engagement.

Mission Sustains You Through Tough Times
When RedBalloon faced challenges post-pandemic, Andrew leaned into the platform’s mission. The emotional impact of helping people find values-aligned jobs, like saving marriages and improving mental health, kept him motivated and committed to the platform’s long-term vision.

Don’t Overcomplicate Your Start
Andrew highlighted the benefits of starting small and using accessible tools to test your idea. For job board builders, white-label technology is an affordable and effective way to validate your niche and scale as needed.

Two-Sided Marketplace Challenges
Managing both job seekers and employers is no small feat. Andrew shared how building a “sticky” user experience, through tools like a recruiting database and innovative marketing, ensures both sides of the marketplace remain engaged.

Pricing Is an Ongoing Experiment
Finding the right pricing model for RedBalloon was an iterative process. Andrew’s insights on balancing affordability, value delivery, and revenue generation provide invaluable lessons for job board owners navigating pricing challenges.

Focus on Impact Over Income
Andrew’s advice to job board founders: don’t make money your sole motivator. Building something meaningful, like a mission-driven platform, will sustain you during tough times and lead to long-term success.

These are just a few highlights from the conversation. To hear Andrew’s full story, including how he grew RedBalloon to over 1 million users and the surprising lessons he’s learned along the way, watch the full interview above.

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Episode Transcript:

Martyn Redstone (00:01)
Welcome to the JBoard YouTube channel, the place where job board builders come to learn from the successes, challenges and insights of the most innovative job board owners out there. I'm Martin Redstone and in this episode, I'm thrilled to be joined by Andrew Krapuschetz, the founder and CEO of Red Balloon, one of the fastest growing job boards in America. Red Balloon has carved out a really unique niche by connecting job seekers and employers who value freedom, ⁓ merit-based recognition and productive workplace cultures.

Martyn Redstone (00:31)
free from cancel culture or divisive ideologies. Today, Andrew is going to share his journey in building Red Balloon, the strategies that have driven its growth, the challenges of running a mission-driven platform, and what other job board builders can learn from his experience. We're going to dive into the numbers, the lessons, and the future of Red Balloon. So whether you're just starting out with your job board or looking for ways to take it to the next level, I think there's going to be something here for everybody. Andrew, welcome.

Andrew Crapuchettes (00:56)
Thanks for having me, Martin, and I'm glad to be here.

Martyn Redstone (00:59)
my pleasure. My pleasure. So ⁓ without further ado, let's jump in. ⁓ Can you share a bit about your professional background and what led you to create Red Balloon?

Andrew Crapuchettes (01:10)
Yeah, absolutely. So I've always had this passion around creating prosperity and jobs for other individuals, because ⁓ if you meet someone new, you ask them, do you do? Right. And you're asking them what their job is. But it betrays a job's not a nine to five hobby. It's an opportunity to define yourself in a lot of ways. And so I've always wanted to kind of connect people with great jobs where they can go and prosper and do great things. ⁓ And so I've done that traditionally by starting businesses, hiring people.

Andrew Crapuchettes (01:38)
and giving them opportunities to grow in their career. And so I've had a lot of different businesses I've started. I've actually had six successful exits over the years, ⁓ which has been a fun little adventure. ⁓ Unfortunately, I got removed from one of my ⁓ businesses that I was running. It was about a $50 million tech business because I was a little too conservative and Christian. ⁓ And this is back in 2020 when ⁓ kind of the world went a little bit crazy on things. So, so. ⁓

Martyn Redstone (01:49)
I bet.

Andrew Crapuchettes (02:05)
That kind of happened to me. I'm like, great, I'm gonna take a year off. But then I realized, you I was kind of put into an interesting position where I had to make a decision between my job and my values. ⁓ And I had the financial wherewithal to kind of shrug that off, but thought, you know, what if other people want to be able to live their values out loud, bring their whole self to work, and their employer is simply not okay with that. And so I wanted to find a place for them where they could be free. And so...

Andrew Crapuchettes (02:32)
I literally started Red Balloon kind of on a whim of like, I'll just make a pro freedom job board what's gonna be the big deal. ⁓ But that's kind of where it all started. ⁓ And lo and behold, there was a lot of demand out there in the market, which we can go into. ⁓ But that's how we got started. so yeah, career in tech ⁓ and knocked out a job board using a white label that worked really well. And then we were off to the races.

Martyn Redstone (02:57)
Excellent. So really just did this on a whim based on previous experience.

Andrew Crapuchettes (03:01)
That's exactly it. And that's actually kind of the cool thing about job boards and the white label technology like Jboard that's out there right now ⁓ is literally ⁓ if you feel like, hey, here's a niche that nobody's touching, ⁓ I think my brother and I literally spent a weekend knocking out a job board and being like, ta-da, we made a job board ⁓ because the technology is very good for that kind of thing. So that's really where it started. And honestly, I didn't have this big vision of I was going to create a multimillion dollar business, which it is now.

Andrew Crapuchettes (03:29)
⁓ I literally was just going to try and do this as a hobby. And then I made some videos on YouTube just saying, hey, we believe in freedom. ⁓ And one of the big issues, and this may be controversial, ⁓ depending on where you are in the world, one of the big issues was the vaccine mandates. And my initial mindset on that was, look, if you if you're an adult and you want to go get a vaccine, you should knock yourself out. But it's probably a discussion you should have with your doctor, not your HR department. Well, that ended up being very controversial, especially in twenty twenty one.

Andrew Crapuchettes (03:58)
And so I put out a number of videos on that and I was one of very few people saying that. ⁓ And as a consequence, I ended up being on Fox News quite a bit, on huge radio stations like Glenn Beck, and all of a sudden I was adding like ⁓ 100 new customers and 40,000 new job seekers a day. And I'm like, okay, I wasn't planning on this being a business, I wasn't planning on it blowing up like this. ⁓ I was just trying to ⁓ speak my mind, ⁓ and which actually, as a job board person,

Andrew Crapuchettes (04:28)
This puts you in a very interesting position. If you are not so focused on, I've got to go and create a business, all these things, but I just want to speak my mind and I want to bless some people. I want to put some job seekers and some employers together who we think would be a good fit. Just I want to help with the matchmaking. ⁓ Sometimes that ⁓ puts you in a position where you're not so stressed out and nervous about what's the market going to say about this? I'm just speaking my mind. I'm just doing same what I want.

Andrew Crapuchettes (04:55)
⁓ And ⁓ because I didn't spend half a million dollars building the job board initially, I knocked it out on a weekend. ⁓ It puts you in a lower risk position and you can actually live your values out loud, which was the biggest marketing tool that I had, even though I didn't know that going into the whole adventure.

Martyn Redstone (05:03)
Mm.

Martyn Redstone (05:14)
Well, that's really, really interesting. So it sounds like you've got some fantastic traction off of the back of some of those insights into why you did what you did in terms of founding the job board. So I suppose you're your own best marketer, ultimately, and best channel for bringing in both job seekers and employers. ⁓ And so obviously, that was then. That was,

Andrew Crapuchettes (05:37)
That's right.

Martyn Redstone (05:43)
three years or so ago. ⁓ Things have changed in terms of you know a lot of people have forgotten now about you know vaccine mandates and all those kind of things. So ⁓ what are you doing now? ⁓ How is the ⁓ mission driven aspect of your job board ⁓ aligning and resonating with employers and job seekers? What are you doing now to bring those on board?

Andrew Crapuchettes (06:05)
Yeah, great question. So you're right. You're absolutely spot on that we had this explosive growth through some of the vaccine mandates where we had, ⁓ we literally added thousands of businesses and over a million job seekers in a very small amount of time. ⁓ And it was, ⁓ and I could, I could give you a list a mile long of all the mistakes that I made, especially since I wasn't planning on running a business and didn't have any employees ⁓ or didn't really have, you know, it was just like, ⁓ here we go. ⁓

Andrew Crapuchettes (06:33)
But that's okay. Sometimes that's the best way to get a business off the ground. ⁓ But some of those fears did subside and all of a sudden we had people saying, you know, I'll just go to Indeed or I'll go to ZipRecruiter because they've got a lot more traffic or that's what I've always done. ⁓ And so we definitely saw this kind of dip that happened a bit over a year after we were into this. And so we kind of had a decision at that point. I think this decision that every entrepreneur is going to run into.

Andrew Crapuchettes (07:02)
is okay, do I power through and figure out what is the next step for this business? Or do I say, you know, I did my job, washed my hands, move on, I've got plenty of other things to do. ⁓ And we decided that we wanted to continue to lean in. And part of that, the big driving factor, was of all the businesses that I've run, and I've run quite a few businesses over the years, this is the only one where I've received ⁓ unsolicited thank you notes from perfect strangers just saying, hey, I found freedom in the workplace.

Andrew Crapuchettes (07:31)
And when I found freedom in the workplace, it had a disproportionate impact on the rest of my life, which I think people didn't realize. So I've now had dozens of people write and say, I just wanted you to know you saved my marriage because of the job that I found through Red Balloon. Because when you can come to work, bring your whole self to work, work really hard and not have to deal with some of the woke ideology that really sucks the joy out of the working day, then all of the sudden it impacts every other area of your life. I've had

Andrew Crapuchettes (08:00)
Literally hundreds of these notes about people marriage or you change the trajectory of my family or I'm happier again or I'm healthier I don't get sick as often I'm going to church again. So all this and I realized you know what I'm doing I'm almost a minister. I'm doing good for ⁓ people all over the country ⁓ even if ⁓ it's you know, it's the vaccine mandate is not necessarily the same panic moment that it was

Andrew Crapuchettes (08:25)
before and so that's really what kind of carried us through and I think that's the lesson for every entrepreneur. You need to have something bigger than just how much money I'm going to make on this because there will be days that you're not making money and if that is your sole focus ⁓ that will be a good time to throw in the towel or at least you're going to be tempted to throw in the towel whether it's a job board or any other business that you're kind of ⁓ going after and so that was really carried us through this dip and we had to decide okay what are we are we just the

Andrew Crapuchettes (08:53)
⁓ anti-vaccine mandate job board, or are we something bigger than this? And so, ⁓ you know, my little crack team, we spent a little bit of time, we might have had a beer or two to try and figure out like, okay, where are we going with this? What are we going to try and accomplish? ⁓ And we realized that the world of work is ⁓ a noble thing to try and make better, to redeem in any way that we can. And so we should continue to strive for this. And so...

Andrew Crapuchettes (09:19)
⁓ I also realized that we needed to have technology that was going to be interesting for people. ⁓ And we needed to make sure that we had a business model that was sustainable long-term. ⁓ we ended up writing our own job board at that moment. ⁓ And so I have a technology background, my brother has technology background. There were some things that we wanted to do that, you know, as ⁓ a, a white label job board is a great way to start. It's a great way to experiment. ⁓

Andrew Crapuchettes (09:46)
you know, for a very small amount of money, try something, get out there and make sure that the market likes it. We solved that, we saw that, and then we went ahead and turned around and built our own technology so that we could do some interesting innovations ⁓ around job postings because we can't just, we want to be a mission driven organization, but we also need to make sure that our technology is the best. ⁓ And so that's what we did. We leaned into that moment. We also started adding more products to our offering because

Andrew Crapuchettes (10:14)
We wanted to be able to ⁓ achieve more revenue ⁓ and more reliable revenue. And so ⁓ we actually introduced a recruiting product to our offering to our customers. So yeah, and part of the reason for that is sometimes the best new employee is not applying to job postings because they're already happily employed, but they might be a good fit for that. ⁓ And so having a job board plus recruitment was kind of a nice one to punch because it allowed us to get our prices down for recruiting.

Martyn Redstone (10:24)
Yeah, I saw that. Yeah.

Andrew Crapuchettes (10:44)
because we had the scale of a job board already. We already had over 100,000 unique visitors a month. We already had people engaged with the brand. And so when we're looking for a new DevOps engineer or social media manager, well, we already had a database that was six figures large of people that we could tap on the shoulder and say, hey, we have an opportunity that might be a good fit for you. And so we kind of combine that with some of the LinkedIn tools to be able to start doing recruiting. And we've done over 350 positions this year.

Andrew Crapuchettes (11:13)
And so that was kind of this like, are we just going to be a job board or do we want to solve the problem? And we think the job board was part of the solution, but wasn't the entire solution. And so that kind of helped us through that trough ⁓ of the post panic on the vaccine mandates.

Martyn Redstone (11:21)
⁓ Hmm. Yeah, I love that.

Martyn Redstone (11:28)
⁓ No, I love that. That's great. So really using the job board as a mechanism to ⁓ grow a significantly sized database of people ⁓ that your employee, ⁓ employer customers are looking for ⁓ and create an additional service offering that basically allows you to tap into that database that's grown from the job board. I think that's a brilliant additional revenue stream ultimately that works brilliantly off the back of a job board.

Andrew Crapuchettes (11:38)
That's right.

Andrew Crapuchettes (11:58)
Yeah, and you can charge obviously many thousands of dollars for recruiting. ⁓ And then it's really interesting because you can get your prices down for job postings because it's almost a loss leader for your higher price, higher ticket item, ⁓ which just continues to drive more traffic. ⁓ We didn't get our prices all the way down to zero, ⁓ partly because we didn't want to have phantom job postings out there. We don't think that's a good experience for our job seekers. Then price is always a nice throttle for an employer to be like, no, do I mean it or not? Is it a real job or not?

Martyn Redstone (11:58)
Absolutely.

Andrew Crapuchettes (12:28)
⁓ And so that's part of the reason we continue to charge something. But we didn't want to charge a lot because that was almost a loss leader, not entirely. We generated revenue, which we're a big fan of, ⁓ but to build us relationships that we could turn into a recruiter relationship.

Martyn Redstone (12:43)
No, that's fantastic. And so how are you, ⁓ how are you going out to market nowadays? You know, we've talked about the kind of the initial explosive growth, ⁓ based on what was going on with society at that point. We've talked about the additional, ⁓ product service revenue stream, whatever you want to call it off the back of it. But how are you going out to market nowadays, especially with the fact that you're very much, you know, still, if you look at your website, you're very much to that, that, that mission driven.

Andrew Crapuchettes (13:13)
Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (13:13)
⁓ job board ⁓ So so what's your go-to-market strategy? How are you engaging new clients? How are you bringing on more candidates?

Andrew Crapuchettes (13:21)
Yeah, absolutely. So a job board is an interesting model business because I haven't run one of the business like this. It's a two-sided marketplace, right? You have to have job seekers and employers. Everybody knows this, right? But unless you really stop and think about it, ⁓ just is, it's a very interesting business and you basically need to achieve scale or stickiness. ⁓ let me know, ⁓ I'll tell you what I mean by that. Basically, if you look at it indeed,

Andrew Crapuchettes (13:49)
Well, they spend a billion dollars a year on marketing. So they've achieved a scale. So they have so much momentum on both sides. And the job board's a really cool business, because two-sided marketplaces like a Facebook or a social media are really hard to get going. But once you've achieved critical mass and you kind of have the flywheel going, they just know about each other. And you don't have to have that same effort. And so...

Andrew Crapuchettes (14:11)
⁓ We did a variety of marketing efforts with different radio stations. I've now done over 500 media or podcast interviews like this one right here, which allowed me to kind of be out there. And those are free as long as you can be at least mildly interesting ⁓ and have something that people want to hear about. Then all of sudden ⁓ that gives you free advertising for your job board. ⁓

Andrew Crapuchettes (14:36)
Most that is probably our most effective. I remember I was on one particular podcast, a really big one, Andy Frizzella's podcast, Real AF. ⁓ And ⁓ it was I think we got ⁓ almost a thousand new customers coming out of that podcast. So if you can find those right avenues where you have something interesting to talk about, talk about your niche, talk about why you're different, what you're doing to really change and bless the lives of employers and job seekers. ⁓ That's an extraordinary opportunity.

Andrew Crapuchettes (15:06)
Now, at this point, RedBalloon doesn't have to spend a lot of time or money on marketing ⁓ because we continue to kind of be out in the world and people just start to know about you. And this is the advantage of that two sided marketplace. So you get to scale or you get to stickiness. Stickiness means you need to maintain the information as much as possible of your job seekers and your employer. So if a job seeker shows up and there's not a good job for them, they're going to leave and maybe never come back again, even if the right job for them shows up 20 minutes later.

Andrew Crapuchettes (15:34)
And so ideally you want to grab as much information on that job seeker. So when that job does show up, you can say, Hey, you know, get a little stickiness there. You can say, Hey, we have an opportunity that might be good for you. that's, you know, emails or whatever it is. ⁓ so honestly, that's really what we do at this point is we have a huge database of people who are interested. We continue to engage them. ⁓ and now I'm building a sales team that's selling both our recruiter package, ⁓ and our ATS, which we've launched, just last month. ⁓

Andrew Crapuchettes (16:03)
And then the job board just continues to kind of do its thing and we're adding multiple new businesses every day ⁓ and they are posting, they're getting success ⁓ and we now have an opportunity to talk to them about some of our higher ticket items.

Martyn Redstone (16:16)
fantastic and I think ⁓ I think I first came across Red Balloon probably I think it was earlier this year I think ⁓ and and you know if I'm honest you know there was a lot of ⁓ dare I say kind of negative sentiment around the kind of anti-woke job board and I remember seeing this and thinking okay it's a like you said it's a niche you know and and what have you ⁓ so how ⁓ has that been good for you I know that sounds terrible but but you know

Andrew Crapuchettes (16:32)
yes.

Martyn Redstone (16:45)
All brand ⁓ all opportunities to get your brand out. There are good opportunities, right? So so ⁓ what's been the kind of ⁓ The outcome of some of that more negative sentiment towards ⁓ the job board and the brand

Andrew Crapuchettes (16:50)
Right.

Andrew Crapuchettes (16:59)
Yeah. And you're absolutely right. So Wired Magazine did an article basically saying this ridiculous little job board with a CEO with a horrible last name. So it's like, wow, that got personal, didn't it? ⁓ But Wired Magazine doesn't do a lot of articles on job boards, right? And so all of a sudden, everyone who's reading Wired Magazine is hearing about this pro-freedom job board, heaven forbid. And your audience, the people who actually want that, are going to go like, hmm.

Martyn Redstone (17:08)
⁓ Very quickly, yeah. ⁓

Andrew Crapuchettes (17:28)
That might be something interesting that I want to go check out. And the reality is that our employers are paying for job postings because we are a filtering mechanism, right? They could go to Indeed, they could go to LinkedIn or ZipRecruiter, any of the big ones out there and get way more candidates. But they see Red Balloon as an opportunity to hire someone who's going to be values aligned with what they're doing. And we're going to be the filtering mechanism for them. We're almost like a bouncer, right? They want to, they want to.

Andrew Crapuchettes (17:55)
have people come into their party that apply to their job that are actually going to be a fit. And so we're the, you know, big guy in the black t-shirt standing out front saying, you know, everyone's welcome, but you need to understand what you're signing up for. ⁓ And in fact, this is kind of a funny story. We had a lot of people coming from LinkedIn over to Red Balloon ⁓ and they were just applying to jobs. They didn't necessarily understand the vision or where we were going with this. And so ⁓ I don't know if this will make sense in the UK context, but

Martyn Redstone (18:03)
You

Andrew Crapuchettes (18:22)
We just put a big American flag in the background for kind of their landing page coming off and our bounce rate went from 20 % to 60%. I was like, okay, no problem because we're trying to find those 40 % that are going to be a good fit for our employers. But it was interesting, an American flag was all we needed to do to really see people, you know, they quickly understood, ⁓ that's what this is. This is a pro-freedom, you know, pro-America job board. ⁓

Andrew Crapuchettes (18:50)
And there you go. So kind of funny things you do and you learn along the way, but that's ⁓ that's where our focus has been.

Martyn Redstone (18:57)
Absolutely, absolutely and and you you mentioned about learning along the way and earlier on you mentioned about you've made a you know a multitude of mistakes along this journey as well ⁓ and I know that our viewers and our listeners are going to be really interested in in learning from other people's mistakes as well So I suppose you know as we kind of head towards the end of this ⁓ of this ⁓ session What would you say are the top three things that you would ⁓ give advice on ⁓ to to aspiring?

Martyn Redstone (19:26)
Job board founders.

Andrew Crapuchettes (19:27)
Yeah, okay, so the first one is ⁓ just understand how you're gonna take care of your customers. ⁓ I experimented a lot with getting a higher priced customer service person ⁓ for a low priced product, ⁓ and that was a mistake, it was a waste of money. ⁓ And it almost didn't matter how much that person served the business, all they wanted was applicants. They didn't want emails or phone calls, they just wanted people to apply to jobs. And so realizing that you don't have a huge lever,

Andrew Crapuchettes (19:57)
If ⁓ you're just a job board, there's only so much you can do to really make your customers happy. ⁓ Because at the end of the day, they're just looking for people who are going to apply and then come and work for their business. ⁓ And so I tried a lot of different things to try and make someone happy who maybe wasn't getting enough applicants, but at the end of the day, they just wanted applicants. ⁓ So that was kind of helpful in understanding like what is the main focus and the driver and the motivation for our job seekers. ⁓ So I would say that was the first one.

Andrew Crapuchettes (20:24)
⁓ I have messed around with a lot of different pricing models ⁓ and ⁓ I don't know that even we've nailed it now. ⁓ We're constantly trying to figure out what is the right pricing model that would be ⁓ A, sustainable for Red Balloon ⁓ and B, ⁓ kind of more long term because ⁓ we put a lot of people on subscription models. ⁓ had literally many thousands of people paying us 20 bucks a month.

Andrew Crapuchettes (20:52)
And we're like, okay, let's try and get our price up. And a lot of people dropped and I realized they were paying $20 a month for a movement, but they were going to pay $50 a month for a movement. ⁓ Because many of them didn't have open jobs anymore. ⁓ And so I realized, that's a business model problem that I've got people who are excited about what we're doing, but ⁓ don't hire all the time. Because many of the customers of Red Balloon are small businesses that are gonna hire, they're gonna post a job, they're gonna get applicants, they're gonna hire.

Andrew Crapuchettes (21:19)
and then they're gonna go away. So it's not really a subscription model. ⁓ That's just coming into that, understanding that. ⁓ And I think connected with that, I would have some employers who would pay their 50 bucks at the time, we charge more now, and they would get five applicants and they'd hire someone and they'd be like, that's the best $50 I ever spent, and they'd still go away. And then we'd have someone who would pay $50 a month for three months.

Andrew Crapuchettes (21:44)
They would get a couple applicants, but they weren't the people they were looking for. And they'd just be furious like, man, I paid 150 and I realized it's very binary. You're either getting value because you got an applicant that you hired or you don't get any value. And there's kind of nowhere in the middle. And so just trying to figure out that's part of the reason we started doing recruiting. Cause we're like, I want to guarantee that if someone's giving me money, I'm going to give them value. ⁓ and so, ⁓ that has kind of driven our thinking around doing more recruiting connected to the job board.

Martyn Redstone (21:52)
Yeah.

Andrew Crapuchettes (22:14)
⁓ last mistake is probably trying to do too many things at one time because I'm also doing a housing development, a massive housing development, which feels a lot like a startup. And so doing two startups at the same time in your mid forties is a terrible idea. would recommend it to no one. There's my last mistake.

Martyn Redstone (22:32)
Fascinating. I definitely empathize with the final one. ⁓ But no, think the pricing piece is exceptionally fascinating. I think that's the biggest blocker for a lot of people is getting the pricing right. And I don't think there's ever a correct answer to it, but it's what fits with your market and your clients and what have you. So that's great. ⁓ So finally, as we wrap this up, ⁓ what's next for Red Balloon?

Andrew Crapuchettes (22:35)
Yeah.

Andrew Crapuchettes (22:48)
Mm-mm. Yeah, that's right.

Martyn Redstone (23:00)
⁓ Any exciting plans any new features? I know you've just launched the ATS product, but anything else on the ⁓ on the horizon?

Andrew Crapuchettes (23:08)
Yeah, so we have just launched the ATS product and we have, you know, in a month we added a dozen customers to that. It's a little higher price. It's an annual subscription. Gives us a little more that SaaS revenue. And we've developed that from scratch and we're actually very pleased. And the customers who are using it extremely pleased as well. So that's a big step for us. And so I'd say the next year to 18 months is all about building our go-to market for that. We're going to continue to innovate on the product side, but building out a sales team.

Andrew Crapuchettes (23:38)
I mean, honestly, we have literally a million customers in the US that are part of our TAM for our ATS. These are ⁓ small businesses, 50 to 500 employees who are hiring a couple of times a year ⁓ who are more values aligned on the right. ⁓ And there are literally a million of those in the US and many of them don't even have an ATS yet. So ⁓ huge ocean of potential customers at a price point that we think we can move.

Andrew Crapuchettes (24:06)
a lot of solutions towards those customers. So I'd say the next 12 to 18 months is that. ⁓ Beyond that, we're going to continue to look at adjacencies. And that's the best way to do product development is if you're solving a problem here, what's the thing that a customer does right before or right after they use your product? And that's where you're going to basically be able to bring some innovations because you want to bring more of a total solution. If you read Crossing the Chasm, that's a big part of getting across that chasm. And so

Andrew Crapuchettes (24:34)
you know, starting to look at, are we doing some onboarding software or are we doing ⁓ some of the HRAS needs of a customer? ⁓ And so we'll probably end up going down that road because a lot of people are terrified of HR and they're honestly terrified of HR tech because they've seen HR kind of take over the culture of businesses in a bad way here in America. ⁓ And so I think that anything we can do to ⁓ bring HR technology

Andrew Crapuchettes (25:02)
that is ⁓ trustworthy to businesses who are ⁓ just conservative and small ⁓ will win us a lot of new business going forward. And so I think that's probably where we end up going. ⁓ But you never know. You always ⁓ roll with the punches as they come.

Martyn Redstone (25:18)
Absolutely, absolutely. Well, Andrew, ⁓ this has been a really fascinating conversation. I'm so glad that you agreed to ⁓ come on and have a conversation with us. ⁓ I think there's so much that our listeners can learn from your journey ⁓ and your experience with Red Balloon. So I just want to finish by saying thank you so much ⁓ for joining me today ⁓ and giving everyone the benefit of your experience. And I look forward to seeing how the next 12, 18 months goes for you. And let's keep in touch on it.

Andrew Crapuchettes (25:47)
Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ yeah, everybody feel free to go check out red balloon dot work. It's dot work, not dot com, because I think work is a good thing and dot com sounded too much like communism to me. ⁓ And the other thing that I would encourage you to do is go follow me on LinkedIn. try and post every day ⁓ on how to build culture, how to hire well. ⁓ And hopefully there's some great content that you're welcome to reuse ⁓ in any of your marketing. So it's a crap you shats on LinkedIn. ⁓ Love to have you follow me and see what content we're putting out there.

Martyn Redstone (26:17)
fantastic offer. Well thank you so much and we look forward to seeing how your journey goes. Thank you everyone.

Andrew Crapuchettes (26:22)
Thanks so much.