How to Build an HR Tech Startup with Techstars, gBeta, and Business Mentors with Darrian Mikell

from the crossroads of America in Central Indiana this is get in the show focused on the unfolding startup stories and most extraordinary Innovations happening in the Heartland today you might notice we're in a little bit different location today we have upped our production quality and that is thanks to glassboard glassboard is a product development and Innovation company based in Indianapolis uh you've got the glass board mugs here or all sporting and we're really grateful for them sharing the studio with us and today on the show is Darian Michael co-founder and CEO of qualify I was like by March well um by funding I know investors will have funding uh we'll have a bunch of customers we'll be good don't worry and uh March came away and it was like six months of you know no money coming to the door [Music] Darian Michael is the co-founder and CEO of qualify a software platform that powers the fastest phone interview experience in the world and helps recruiting teams hire great candidates faster than ever before Darren graduated from Indiana Wesleyan University in 2013 with a bachelor's degree in entrepreneurship and finance and he is also a two sport athlete in both basketball and track and field and was a national champion in the long jump he has been building qualify since 2019 and was a participant in techstars anywhere accelerator in 2021 today we're going to talk about why Darian went all in on qualify the impact of accelerated programs like techstars building a great place to work and so much more please help me welcome to the show Darian Michael Dan thanks for being here man yeah thanks for that intro thanks for having me as well yeah for sure man and you make the intro easy because you've done some pretty awesome stuff I could only long jump like three feet I think we might need to see that later and get that on camera we need to make sure to always include that on my intros because my brother is actually a better long jumper than me oh nice I get to like lay claim to some certain trophies that he doesn't have that's great man well can you tell us a little bit about that um Sports Athletics growing up what role did that have in your life and yeah it was everything that was my first My First Love is basketball um so I grew up idolizing Michael Jordan and then Allen Iverson is my favorite player growing up and I think I've been dribbling a ball since like three or four and just fell in love with the early so my earliest Ambitions were to be an NBA player be the best that ever was and um I was able to make it pretty far in that you know dream and get to the next levels and ultimately those Ambitions switched to you know the business world and Entrepreneurship but um it's it's still a love I still try to play a couple times a week if I can my body's getting older but I still I still think I have a little bit in me yeah are there anything anything that you learn playing basketball team sports that you bring to the team now with qualify yeah I probably use it's like so ingrained into my life it's like all the analogies and things that I learned from Sports and my coach just over the years makes it into you know Daily Talk track like with my wife at home and then like in uh how I lead the team I still think um especially the mic my time at Indiana Wesleyan I always talk about my head coach and my assistant coaches like two of the best leaders that I've ever had the privilege of you know being around in a lot of their methodologies and the things that they brought like are almost like a direct representation in qualify in terms of like our values how I try to lead the team and things of that sorry things of that nature so um yeah the sports themselves like the hard work the the drive like the determination but then also just leadership skills and you know how I approach that uh definitely very relevant there's stories of people out there that that use sports right in adult lives to see how people actually react on the playing field right whether it's golf or basketball yeah and because of that person's disrespectful you know or cheats in golf or whatever they might not want to be a person that you want to be involved with in business or is there anything that pops out of someone like that you we won't we'll go to the positive side of it like that throughout all of those playing all those sports that you remain in contact today with still in your professional life that was a result of how they acted and competed on the playing field a good question well one like when you're saying that like I just saw like a YouTube clip of that exact thing where someone was like talking about you know being on the golf course and witnessing someone like cheat and they're they're why I told him like Hey this person did that you shouldn't go into business with them and like later found out that like they cheat at a different level right you know the business field but I'm trying to think of like um you know trying to think of you know to answer your question a lot of my team I mean teammates like the people that you know especially when I got to Indiana Wesleyan there was a few of us that basically roomed together all four years and we've gone into different Industries different lines of work but that common Bond of what we value what we went through I think that's a big part of you know what I wish in some ways I could recreate I talk about it all the time at you know in a in a you know a company setting is going through like physical trials together and putting people through like hard work has a way of bonding people totally and uh you know right now actually we're in I've challenged the team to uh you know this like 40 day challenge internally of you know defining like what is a you know we're as a company growing and figuring out how to overcome some certain challenges that we have on the business level but at the same time I want to kind of each person challenge themselves and what is that one thing that you know you should be doing haven't got around to doing yet let's let's identify it and like go after it and be consistent about it so I know that didn't directly answer your question but that's great I love that just thinking through like the sports to business analogy it's like taking people out and doing that like there's no better way to judge someone's character than when you're like getting smoked in something yeah like you're down to 40 points in a basketball game and you're like how you're acting like trying to stay positive it's like so especially to the startup life like very very related there where it's like sometimes things are going to get tough and are you gonna be the person that pouts and complains about it or you're gonna like suck it up and drain three or ten threes around and come back right yeah and even if you don't lose or even if you you know ultimately lose in that moment it's like how you respond like what's your what's your response to that like do you quit do you become selfish or do you focus on the team and try to move forward and improve so yeah it's kind of like um life and business is in in my world view is very much about shared experiences and what you just said is kind of how do you synthesize those experiences yeah it's to like and it's partially because like I come from my whole life just being like basically like physically punishing myself or having coaches like physically punishing obviously you can't necessarily do that in like a you know a corporate environment but I think there is ways to um Bond through those shared experiences like um naturally companies face different trials and you how you respond as an individual and as a team kind of can be defining for the trajectory moving forward yes so you say that sports right always part of your life was entrepreneurship always part of your life I don't know if it was like I think the the way I tell my story around entrepreneurship is that I didn't always know what exactly it was I think it was innately within me and this is gonna sound super arrogant like I was listening to a podcast with there's if you're familiar with I hope everyone's familiar with Jay-Z he had a running mate uh name Dash in the early days that like kind of co-founded you know a lot of Rockefeller and everything that that kind of became and he was like one of the key drivers of everything that they were doing um they sent split but anyway I listened to a podcast with Dame Dash and uh he was saying that he didn't know what he wanted to do he just knew he was going to be great and that's kind of like what I think of in myself like I said I don't want that to sound arrogant it doesn't sound arrogant at all yeah like when I wanted to be a basketball player I didn't just want to like Excel I wanted to be the best of all time like whatever I was gonna do I wanted like my mindset is always to try to be the best and Achieve at a high level and um one of the things that I got that I know I'm privileged is seeing success around me I had family members and like close family friends that were VPS CEOs my dad like is you know started from but literally nothing he's like from the ninth ward in New Orleans and grew up in poverty too wow you know a very successful business person I got to see him achieve and and then like his network of people that I call my Aunt uncles you know them achieve my brother my older brother played in the NFL so like I got to see you know people achieve their dreams make it to these these Heights that are usually untouched and so yeah you know me and my brother and my cousin's like it's always we always kind of have this mentality of it's it's not like if it's a matter of like when and just approaching life that way so is there a favorite lesson or quote that you heard from your dad or your brother growing up that still Rings true in your head as a CEO now yeah I think maybe the biggest thing so like I've always considered my dad like my biggest um you know Idol like person that uh like influenced me the most and I think what he instilled in me is not necessarily one quote I could give you but just like a sense of confidence and pride in the sense of like taking ownership of what I'm doing you know like I think my natural tendency is to like play the background and um to be very passive with a lot of things and like sports was like where that showed up in my early days it's just like I like to you know pass the fall and he'd be like hey like you have a lot of skills that you bring to the table and you're you're not helping anybody by diminishing those and not letting your light shine and so um just instilling that like that confidence of taking pride in like what you do and wanting to be the best um at what you do yeah that's powerful um you mentioned kind of getting into entrepreneurship uh when you're in college what are some of those early entrepreneurial memories yeah so if you said you had War failures it would be fun to like dig into that we could talk for like days about that um yeah I think so I guess to go back into like early days of like why I kind of became an entrepreneur and like where it started to show up for me and even in like childhood is I was always very creative and inventive or wanted to be inventive like I saw all those commercials for you know you know pay us and we'll help you get your patent on your invention I was like they're like Sledgehammer Stone Wheels yes I love this buy now yeah three easy payments yeah I remember what you're talking about yeah like the caveman that's like chiseling the wheel exactly yeah so I remember all those and I was like spoke to me but no even before then I was like always just like trying to draw up random like harebrained ideas and uh so I think that's like one example I had like I wish I don't know if they're still around like I'm hoping they're somewhere in like some storage unit that my parents have um but yeah just the dumbest drawings of like random company give us an example there's only one that I really remember I think it was just outside on our like you know buy a grill and I was like oh like I don't know what the concept was but it was like a grill that was like could like rotate and do something specific I can't remember but it was like I just remember drawing a girl and explaining to my dad how this thing could like rotate on a hinge and do something fancy yet but obviously it wasn't very cool I do have somewhere I don't know what the invention was but my mom gave me like within the last couple years she was like Hey this you had this piece of mail where you like you know you wrote up the idea and like you remember like be like The Unofficial patent is like you you know write up an idea send it to yourself in the mail and it's like kind of time stamps oh yeah then I opened it and it was something stupid I can't remember I love it um and then like I think but in more practice uh that came uh more so in like in Early College days so uh just always trying to figure out hustles and ways to make money what was the first hustle would you make your first dollar on selling or flipping or whatever well I think the the truth I don't actually remember this but my friend my best friend from growing up told me that we charge people to uh get on the swings yes I don't know if that's like that is that entrepreneurial so um oh yeah these are our swings but in college I think though the first thing that I got into was uh flipping uh basically pretty cheap watches on eBay um the way I was I was like pretty into watches at the time I still am I just wear an Apple watch now I think at some point in the future everyone you know when I've made it I could invest in something nice yeah but I got really into them and I would buy them wear them for like a week and then like sell them back uh and tell me they were g-shacks I'm sure some of them were um I can't remember any of the any of the brands but they were just like usually like kind of gaudy like big yeah like yellow you know watch band and like big faces and stuff like that and just it was my early early college days when I was discovering who I was like oh my style was and stuff like that so that was my first kind of foray into entrepreneurship but it actually led into some it led into a lot of what I do like what I ended up doing um but tell us about how you got into viral launch yeah it was basically kind of that pathway so like I started in uh like my early entrepreneurial days where basically all e-commerce plays like started flipping watches flipping other things um and then what else how'd you find out how to do that like where did you start at the beginning of like you know I want to start selling stuff on eBay I actually don't know I think maybe it was by way of just trying to like make use of things that I had so like I think I had an ebay account in high school that I just sold things that I owned to to make you know just to get the value of those and then I actually had a pretty I was like I got like a perfect eBay score and yeah I could actually do something with this I think I still do it's a good asset yeah so yeah I had it for a while um so I think I just like learned from that way I do remember probably it was like after college where I started to like actually learn about entrepreneurship but yeah I think it was just by way of just trying to figure out how to hustle and and I didn't make really honestly that much money doing it but it was like good reps and good practice and yeah and then me and a friend of mine in college we we started a t-shirt business again didn't really make a ton of money we had like a really cool thought process I think our struggle was like actually marketing Beyond like our initial launch like we had a great first day we uh Indiana Wesley has like a really cool like Mall way and we had like you know a storefront basically set up for this launch day and they had graphic tees yeah they were graphic tees we worked with uh designers at the school to like you know uh make the graphics and um there's a team on IU campus that did that dope uh if you remember the brand dope they started out of uh Indiana University yeah there's actually a couple we had like there's it wasn't really like a competing but it was uh there's two different um T-shirt companies on campus the other one actually it was was a bit more successful than ours but um yeah that was like one thing and then that led to uh actually I guess that kind of gave me the practice I guess Flash Forward a little bit you mentioned viral launch um this is probably and I owe a lot to um the CEO or former CEO of Ireland is a guy named Casey he and I went to school together um we both ran on the same track team there he's a crazy pole vaulter and uh he started uh working on we started working on a separate project together that he he initially was you know working on himself I think I had already graduated at this point and was in a full-time just like Finance accounting position at a relatively large company and my mind was just like I was always itching to just do my own thing yeah but he was working on this project that was using ibeacon technology it's like a Bluetooth device is that pair like with apps and so the idea for us was a museum app where he could walk up to exhibits and if you have this app it would do some like interactive things with you we learned that selling to museums is terrible terrible Market um so we are all these early learning lessons but he got my brain into like technology and then um just like starting you know cool projects uh and then when that wasn't working he started working on viral launch which actually started taking off we were bootstrapped for the first few years but he had an original co-founder that wasn't really contributing at the time and he needed help to get off the ground things were rolling like customers Revenue coming in can you tell us what the business was yeah so viral launch in the first iteration of it was if you're familiar with I mean I know you are with SEO oh it was basically SEO for Amazon the difference with Amazon at least at the time I'm not as like close to it anymore but um SEO for Amazon is primarily based off of sales so we had a platform that on the seller side that like hey if you want to you know rank really high for a product like a coffee mug like coffee mugs is probably a keyword search term that you want to be ranking on page one for because most people don't go past you know the first couple pages when they're purchasing a product on Amazon so being on page one was everything and we helped people get to page one because we had a buyer audience where you could run promotional campaigns towards and is effectively guaranteeing sales because they're highly discounted and so it was kind of like this uh hindsight is like kind of like a hack to get ranking yeah but we figured out how to do it in you know the most legitimate ways and uh made people tons of money because we got them that ranking and you know you could still be selling any sorts of widgets and you know making hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars I remember going into that office when you were in your Heyday I think you came up on a hoverboard from across the office I was like what is going what is this office like that was yeah like everyone was riding High yeah it was a fun time so like a little context so Casey's two years older than me I think by the time I left I was like 27 and he was 25 at the time and I think we we had a really amazing run viral launch is still around I haven't been as close to the company as of late to to know you know what the latest is but um yeah we were growing really fast again we were mostly bootstrapped until my last you know towards the end of my time there I was there for three years and we went from and this kind of leads into like what I do now but like we went from uh he and I to over 70 people on the stream in in those three years and uh it was really fun because we got to like call all the shots away you know do what we thought was best and um what was the biggest lesson you learned in that whole experience ah there's so many um I think for that context it I think some of the things that we probably should have done that we didn't do was Trust trust our knowledge a little bit more I think one of the things because we were so young uh indexed on bringing in like advisors and investors and like you know gray hairs that that have been there and done that and their track record did speak for itself like they really had done those things but also they didn't know our customers they didn't know our Market as well as honestly Casey did um and so I think that created uh some situations where we did things that weren't like in my opinion like normal to us like it wasn't part of like how we had operated before and I think that led to some like uh misfires yeah it's so it's so critical right you see it all the time where investors invest in a company and by the sheer fact that they wrote a check they're on the board yeah and it just never made sense to me yeah right I mean the reason they invested is is in you in the idea in the culture and your attraction and your understanding of a different Dynamic right right and then they come in with a knowledge set from 10 years ago especially in a business like that yeah yeah it's changing emerging market right Emerging Market is changing so fast year over year yeah and it can really take you down a a road that's not the right road yeah no it's interesting and there's just some things that like we honestly hindsight now like we had like some fortunes of like we didn't have a sales team we were just growing like yeah basically organically and like marketing supported and I think that was fortunate but then now in my position I was like oh it would be great to like have like a real sales force that we were like you know building larger uh stickier relationships to customers and things of that nature and so um yeah there's there's tons of learning lessons that have it like fully unpacked but I think that's the biggest one probably before we pop forward to the next one can we back up real quick and um so you graduate from Indiana Westland and you ultimately went to viral launch so what was that time frame what was that Gap yeah I graduated in like 2013 the first two years out of school was at a company called Moorhead Communications it's actually now like the parent company is called round room um but they are the largest Verizon Wireless retailer in the country but they were headquartered in Marion which is where Indiana Wesleyan is and then their headquarters moved to Carmel which is why I moved to the north side of Indy um and it wasn't really like it's a large company but a small um corporate office I think at the time like 200-ish people and it's like I think the CEOs like saying is like he wants to be like the biggest small company or the smallest big company says it but like have that small company feel but be you know have a huge Emperor they have like you know thousands of stores nationwide and so I got to see I was like you know the lowest in the total that was a financial analyst there um but got to see like you know or I had a great boss great environment so I got to see something like uh early things of how to do you know how to put structure into a business that um actually brought to fire launch in some ways and so I had a little bit of practice even though I was pretty young yeah um so yeah how did um how did your time come to an end at viral launch yeah um it was like a really really tough um situation because like I had this um I was the vice president there I had this like a ton of uh I guess emotional ownership and um at the same time we were growing really rapidly our team as I mentioned was adding leadership and effectively the last year I kind of felt like the writing was on the wall because we we brought in you know a president coo and a CFO which I was the VP but my main uh responsibility is over internal operations and finance I was like oh yeah what's you know what's the pathway for me here um but it was in January of 2019 there's like there's more than that going on but ultimately what happened is I got laid off I got called into the office I forget what day it was but I know it was in January um and they let me know that I was going to be laid off along with a few other folks uh on the team the next day um the company was coming up against some challenges and so um they had to had to do that and so that's tough yeah it was it was it was weird because it was obviously very tough I had like a my family was growing at the same time too yeah um but it was like weirdly I felt a sense of relief in some ways too because like what do you think that is yeah because I had that like I had never really experienced like anxiety before yeah like that whole you know six months to a year before I was just like always felt like that call was gonna happen or something like that was gonna happen and then it happened and it actually um like I said it was relieving and it honestly repaired some things between you know not that there was like any like uh like uh hostileness between Casey and I but um there was like part of that anxiety was like oh like it's a pressure yeah like we've kind of you know built this together like what's what's going on in like in that moment we actually got to like have a conversation and you know be really be really real with each other and like it opened up the door to like now our relationship and uh we still you know are able to connect and like get coffee and catch up and like try to help each other out so um it was truly like a blessing and disguise and the way it happened but still tough nonetheless yeah a quick break from our normal programming I have Erica schweire CEO from Elevate Adventures here in the studio today Erica thanks for being here yeah thanks for having me and you're gonna tell us a little bit about this reality Innovation conference that's coming up yep so it's the largest cross sector Innovation conference in the world um we're gonna feature six Innovation Studios so think hard tech software Sports Tech Ag and food Healthcare and Entrepreneurship is gonna kind of be our catch-all I love that so tell me what is who's it for yeah it's for innovators entrepreneurs investors honestly anybody probably listening to this podcast it's going to be a multi-day thing that's multi-day in downtown Indianapolis yep people coming in from all over the country maybe even all over the world to be here that's our hope yep and the dates are actually August 29th to the 31st perfect and if people want to find out more information about speakers tickets things like that where can they go yeah so they just go to rallyinnovation.

com and sign up for communications they can also get their tickets I love it you heard it here rallyinnovation. com we'll see you there you mentioned the anxiety of that um if there's anything more anxiety-inducing than being a leader at a tech complaints being the CEO at a tech company yeah what are some of the things that you learned through that experience and have now applied at qualify as you've scaled that company yeah one I mean that anxiety or that struggle time period led into like I know like there's there's been plenty of like highs in those with qualify um so for context I left viral launch at the same time qualify was like a side project that you know me and my co-founders now have been had been working on just like we each had full-time gigs and so it's just like a side you know side project um can you tell us how you had the idea yeah it was like during that wave of growth like like I said I was over the internal operation so part of that was the Recruitment and the HR function and so I was very busy and I was like constantly you know recruiting and screening candidates and um just saw how difficult the hiring process is all together but uh recognized how repetitive phone interviews can be I was trying to be really structured and ask the same questions and give a consistent feel and I was like it'd be great if I could just like record these questions send it off to the candidates let them you know record their responses and then uh we could you know streamline that process create a better experience overall and so that was the original you know Genesis of the idea and and uh like I said it just started off as you know something that we were working on to like um do in our off periods like late at nights like for a while the the team meeting that we now have at like noon on Mondays was like eight or nine PM uh in the evening on Monday or Tuesday when it was just like the four co-founders what we were all doing our own things you went straight into qualify was there any Gap there was not really so like I told my wife that we would we'd be good like hey I got a little bit of severance so we'll have like a couple months and then after that got too much to make it happen baby I told her like it was January I was like by March uh which by the way we also just came up on our four-year anniversary so um but I was like by March we'll um a lot of funding I know investors will have funding uh we'll have a bunch of customers we'll be good don't worry and uh March came away and it was like six months of you know no money coming to the door you know and so yeah I did go straight in and I told like I made I filled out I made a resume but I never sent it anywhere hindsight there's a lot of like now advice that I would give to people which are like uh think and be calculated about like the leaves you take I'm always a person that has taken ginormous risks obviously burn the ships like sheer exhilaration right you're like you know what I'm going for it now yeah I'm gonna pounce on the moment yeah because like I felt like if I didn't then I would just go back to a job and then it would just be a side project I would never go anywhere uh and it's like weird because like hindsight I would like never do it in that way again but also know that we wouldn't be where we're at if you know we didn't take that leap and um you know if I didn't take those risks you know a lot wouldn't happen you know wouldn't have been able to happen if I wasn't full-time invested in it and so um how'd you bridge the gap or you got to get a early family that you're developing and lost your income Source trying to build a new one yeah not in the smartest ways honestly not the smartest way so like my credit score is uh 520.

yeah it was exactly it was exactly that like like I said had a little like a tiny bit of Runway it was it was very unfortunate time because like with some of my other Ventures before it was I didn't mention like kind of part of the reason Casey wanted to bring me on is because I have familiarity with Amazon sure because I had been like selling stuff on Amazon too and the nature of Ecom is like you're fronting a lot of money on inventory to get costs down and so and then I kind of just my my problem was like I would I'm good I was good at launching things and not like operating them like consistently and like making sure the marketing and the campaigns are always there but so I had like a lot of money that was invested that kind of just basically became debt and we were already like pretty close to paying that off and then like got laid off and then it led into basically me running my life off of credit cards for you know I guess four to six ish months you know as we were trying to figure things out and uh who who was the first person how did you find the first person that uh well both sides the first person that joined you right to go take on this new company and who's the first person that believed in you believed in the idea right to give you initial funding like how did you get the initial team one or two three people in the initial dollars to like actually get it rolling yeah how they come together so first is my brother so my brother is uh my equal co-founder we have there's three total co-founders but Devin and I my brother were first in um and that like that I don't know of itself is a big reason why probably we're both still doing this is because I always tell people it'd be very hard I I was Phil either sympathy or empathy for like solo Founders because it's like they have to ride those roller coasters by themselves and like Devin and I have always it seems to work out where His Highest day is like where I feel like really low and like vice versa we're able to like bring each other back up and so that keeps us going Keeps Us motivated we can like remind each other of like all right yes we just lost that customer or that big deal but like hey check this out we have all this stuff in the pipeline or we have all these things going for us like it'll be good and we can kind of remind each other of those things how to be a good co-founder one-on-one yeah yeah like it's it's there's so many like we have a I mean larger than most co-founder teams like usually just like two or three we have four people um and there's I find a ton of benefits in that yeah um so yeah it was is there a tough Dynamic for leadership like making decisions or anything like that between like specifically Devin and I my brother like they should have four co-founders of like Vision to take the product how decisions get made like I think like more Cooks in the kitchen a little bit there yeah no I think we actually work really well together um and I think it was because of a little bit of like separation of Duties early on like I think we naturally fall into a few different uh I guess camps or departments and so that's one of the actual benefits is like part of my leadership style is like I want people that know what they're doing and then I just trust you to do that and I provide the team would probably tell you I provide a decent like a good amount of input and like opinion but I never try to like hold strong to that opinion and my mentality is like being able to trust people and so I know I don't know like product and Engineering like and Devin's technical right Devin's not so like Devin is he actually designed our first like like he was a product designer for a while that's what I thought yeah he he he's self-taught on a lot of things but he he's our like go to market guy so he oversees the go to market team okay for a while like in the early days he was designing the product that's what I remember yeah yeah so he's like first minute on sales first win in on marketing and all those sorts of things it's like helping us grow the business he's you know like he's closed most of all of our biggest deals and so and then my specialty is like on the internal upside but I'm I like to think I'm pretty flexible to jump into a lot of areas except the non-technical part where I would just like say hey we need to do this are we like here's an idea like here's like a you know product concept that I think could be cool very much an ideas person um so that's my my input and my Landing just helping to prioritize but they're the ones that like actually know how to execute that and so yeah if there's anyone listening to this podcast that has multiple Founders just just on that on that item um there's really there's great ways to deal with this right up front right when you're starting a business and you have multiple co-founders everybody's excited yeah right and wants it to move forward and that is the perfect time to bake into like your operating agreements how that decision making works it's really super easy to do like XYZ has final decision on product engineering and you know yeah you have final decision making on X Y and Z you know it's just like it's really they're really simple ways to big into the operating agreement that decision making at a super high level and then also having all of the co-founders uh vast it's like everybody has their ownership on day one but if you leave inside of four years here's this waterfall and you're going to lose and sure there's no discussion right if somebody flies a coupe yep then they only get whatever it whatever was agreed to and it's super simple it seems like something I've learned too like um and what I've brought in like from day one I was it was quote it was my idea right but uh like when it came to talking to that with Devin I'm like Hey we're going 50 50 like like he would probably have deferred more to me yeah I was like no like let's I don't want this especially with family like I don't want this to like create any issues early and then as we like grew the team and like grew the founders it was like Hey we're splitting you know from our Equity equally to our Founders and then establishing that really like you said and I think one of the good things is like we're good at like deferring to like who the you know expert in the room is for certain things and then I you know I hopefully am doing a good job of like knowing and sharing that hey at the end of the day the buck stops with me like that that means I will have like in some cases like override and they acknowledge that but then I also take ownership of that hey if it doesn't work if it fails yeah I'm taking the ownership of that and so I don't think it's like a give and take there and so talk to me about the financial side of things who who finally came in and provided a little bit of relief for your credit card yeah not like the first like and this isn't like on this isn't like an official somewhat official document but it's more so like family like my parents like actually uh were truly like the first believer it was awesome um and they gave us a couple thousand because we originally were like Hey we're gonna go find this person on upwork to like build this MVP yeah um I think we ended up using it for separate a different purpose but it did provide like um you know a month or two of like relief in that regard yeah um and then we went through I think our First Investors came by way of uh our our pathway through like generator so we went through um G beta it was a pre-accelerator it's free um but we got to meet a lot of uh people and investors and I think our first um I I don't want to miss quote but I believe our first uh checks came from um a guy named Roger Lee he's a local yeah yes Roger's great yeah Roger's awesome um and uh he brought his friend in Jason and so that was like our first I want to say like around 20 25 okay yeah and then for a while we were just living check to check as a business like at first it was just me full-time and then uh the next big believer that moved a big needle for us was uh one of my favorite investors his name's uh Jason Riley um he is in the industry so he's in um in HR at a very high level he's uh most recently he just switched but he was most recently um head of town Global Talent strategy for GE Healthcare yeah that's how he put in a a check with us that allowed Devin to come on full time and so we slowly started to get things rolling and then for a while it was like I think it was like effectively two years of fundraising to like you know live Check to Check and like actually build a real round which came about and uh early 2021 where we put together a convertible note which Elevate was a part of and at the same time got accepted into techstars um just dive into that real quick I want to come back to techstars let's go back to generator how did you how did you discover how did you find Generator how did you reach out to them did they find you what that first initial conversation looked like what resonated didn't resonate what would you do differently yeah and then how's that parlay into techstars as well yeah I don't remember how I found out about them I think maybe my brother Devin put us onto like you know mentioned like hey like they're like super legit like there's a company that he was aware about a Terre Haute that had gone through um gone through G beta and I'm just like sure I'll go like I'll go meet Chelsea and and talk with her and I was like what's 10 more dollars for coffee yeah exactly I was like so I was like just trying to like I think one thing that I learned through G beta and just in this whole process is when I was at viral launch I was like I know everybody I need to know here in Indy and um my Network's great and then I like started meeting a ton more people and it just led to like oh I don't I don't know enough people and like really investing in building the network and I think that was one of the biggest things is like actually being diligent about like meeting people sometimes I lead you down like fast as you don't need to go down in terms of like oh you thought that they were gonna be a customer or be an investor and like they never were but you get reps at that and also some things you know the one individual might not be the end thing but they might introduce you to somebody it's just like you never know you know just by you know happenstance what's going to happen somebody told me once early on um that in the early days especially I've been entrepreneur and I think it still applies today and and sometimes I I regretfully have to say no but like in those early days it's like if you ever get invited to something whether you want to go or not you're a little bit tired and get a bad day that was one of the fetal position days um like I don't want to do that thing at 6 30 you know another damn coffee yeah and and then but you you go you drag yourself to do it and you just show up because you never know yeah even if that one's a dead end they might have a oh you know what I actually need to meet me yeah you know exactly yeah yeah I was just gonna say like that was like the biggest piece is like starting to build the network that I didn't have and then early reps of like telling the story because it's like I think that's what they really index on and something that I didn't have a ton of practice like again like viral launch we were bootstrapped we didn't like we had the you know the privilege and the fortune of like not really having to pitch to investors but like also in this new thing I needed to know how to do that I didn't like we didn't have you know we didn't we were bootstrapped and we didn't have a sales team so I never had to pitch anything period And so two totally different ways to grow business right yeah exactly so I had to learn that I remember one of those early powder cake events I I you and I ended up in the same Circle two three times in one evening yeah uh it wasn't early powder cake but it was early qualified days yeah yeah and I remember just seeing the progression of your pitch yeah throughout the evening oh that's awesome and that's one of the things I love about events like that is like you get you can get in like 20 30 reps in one evening yeah and you were clearly like iterating and like because I think you know we you were there early hanging out and so I was there for for the the rusty one shaking off the rest while you're still kind of Shifting Gears from being heads down to yeah you know out and socializing and I think I was there for one later in the evening where you're just like yeah you know you had a an audience around you yeah and I think I don't know timing wise when that was versus like when I had gone through different because we've gone I think it was 20 20.

yeah so we got through like G beta um and then Tech Stars and again both of those scenarios uh they both have their own kind of versions of but like she beta it's like winter swarm techstars calls it Mentor Madness and just basically you're gonna meet like a crap ton of people in a very compressed time period it builds skills for like other things but like I know for techstars it was like 70 people in like two weeks that you like have to in like 15-minute meetings catch them up on like what you do who you are and then try to extract some help and like you know next steps with them in some sort of way and so yeah you're able to iterate yeah what's the elevator pitch yeah I haven't someone yet I got out of like I'm not in fundraising right now so I haven't like and I've been actually like reworking my uh like very recently because you know some of my uh you know standard like email templates and things of the nature that I send out but uh you know the high level pitches were the phone screening solution for high volume recruiting uh typically the people that work with us have significant hiring volume and hiring needs and they don't have enough bandwidth to uh hire great people in the time period that they need to hire them a lot of their business depends on getting people hired in the door so I think hospitals call centers things of that nature and the phone screen is the biggest bottleneck in that process usually and so we automate it streamline it and turn it into a competitive Advantage for the folks that we get to work with so um the first sentence right yep I I can visualize what you do yeah it's great I love it one of the things I love about a good pitch is that it it helps not just with investors and customers but also attracts talent and I know that's one of the things you've really focused on as you've grown qualify yeah um what have been some of the biggest things you've learned growing your own team as a CEO yeah I think that's one of the things that if I was to see my own Hornet something it would be partially because it's my favorite part is like the two things I love about being an entrepreneur is getting to put ideas into the world and then getting to collaborate with people and I mentioned like my mindset is finding the experts and trusting them and and enabling them to do their job best and so that's kind of the approach I take when it comes to uh building the team and I think it's start I mean it's resonated with how we've grown the team so far um go back to your question real quick like what what's like yeah what have you learned in building that culture yeah I think some of the things that we've I think done really well at qualify is establish what we who we are in early so when it was just the four of us I remember one of the first meetings we had might have been the first meeting we had in person a lot of stuff we did was like just over Google meets or sure and whatnot but one of the first meeting we had was you know beers and pizza and just talking about like uh our values and what our mission is going to be and things of that nature and it's like uh you know there's been iterations you know over time but um I think getting alignment at the founder level of what we're going to be why it's important to us and uh having that mindset even before we were like really honestly a little business it might have been like too early to do some of those things but I think it helped establish um what we are today and so far you know our team loves us so we're up to around 20 people on the team we're hiring right now and it's weird because like maybe the market but like we're getting tons of applications and um people aren't just it doesn't seem like I'm sure there's a lot of just like people throwing their resume but like the people that we engage with like they actually really want to work for qualify and so that's like a gratifying feeling like what's the number one role you're hiring for right now maybe there's a listener that wants to come work for you guys yeah we're hiring for two different account Executives so um we're looking in honestly anywhere in America but uh in our Northeast region and in the west region we're looking to really start to build out our our sales team um and we're also hiring for a product marketing role too so all right let's hear the yeah out there listeners send us your best sales pitch pitch qualified to us and that might get you the job well now would be a good time to join I know you mentioned you just uh set a new record for 10 times your historical highest deal you just closed your biggest deal by a factor of 10.

yeah um I think we're probably gonna have to have you back on the show to talk about that talk about this next hiring spree yeah that you have because there's so much to dig into with what you're doing with qualify yeah um so if you're open to it we'd love to have you back on no this has been awesome um yeah I've last year I got to do quite a bit that we were you know I wasn't guessing that quite a few podcasts and um some of them better than others I think this one was like one of my favorite ones uh to do so awesome man I love it yeah we love talking to you um but we're we're at Nate's favorite part of the conversation come on there and we're gonna work through the lightning round all right so we have three questions for you very hand selected goes to all of our uh all of our guests we're gonna start with outside of the amazing entrepreneurs what is Indiana known for outside of Indiana just rapid fire well I mean outside of the entrepreneurs what's Indiana known for Yahoo just one thing Sports I was gonna say sports there we go love it what is one Hidden Gem in the Hoosier State I don't get out enough this is revealing I don't know I don't know and I should have warned you right before I'm a terrible quick thinker like we can Circle back before you pass or yeah is there anything in Marion I I've never I've never been up there so there might be some hidden gems I don't know about I was gonna say like I hate to shout it so I went to Indian Wesleyan our rival school is Taylor I'm not even a huge fan of there's a ice cream spot called ivanhoza everyone always stops at um when you're like anything up at Marion I was like it's not too far it's in Upland okay but I like I don't it's weird again so Taylor's our rival school yeah it's called Uh Ivan hose I'm in Hopewell Indiana all right sweet yeah all my rival teams by the way have been purple and I've always hated purple growing up like literally from a child that's all the Rival scenes I ever like how did you end up with it as your brand color and qualify yeah like that's weird I like it out but all right yeah I just kind of happened I think it was right now my area like it definitely wasn't my original idea I think our the person designed the logo in oh yeah actually I didn't yeah everyone seemed to like it so that's amazing all right final lightning round question who is someone that we need to keep on our radar someone that is doing something big oh can do they have to be in Indy because I have a uh so three of my Tech Stars Network and hopefully my other techstar CEO friends don't hate me for this but there's a company called pipe dream I think it's like the like it's a moon like one of those moonshot ideas but actually very practical in nature they're called pipe dream they're literally literally building pipes underground to enable 30 second deliveries like eventually anywhere in the city wow like using robots that can navigate in these pipes and like just put yourself in a portal shoots it over to where you need to go you don't have to like own certain things like this fancy Bank like if you use the ATM yeah similar but it's like robots with wheels instead of I forget what the name of that sort of that's the Assumption I forget there's a name for that that's cool yeah we'll look it up maybe we can have them on the show sometime yeah once they hook up Indiana the pipe dream yeah I try to get them to come over here with all the uh well we know some people we might we might be able to hook something up make it worth your while yeah um Darian thanks so much for being on the show man and congrats on everything you accomplished uh with qualify but also just uh your whole career man both uh on and off the the court yeah no I appreciate it yeah thanks so much and hopefully I don't uh injure myself on the court yeah I'm right there with you yeah thanks Darren yeah thank you so much this has been get in a powder kick production in partnership with Elevate Ventures and we want to hear from you if you have suggestions for a guest or segment reach out to Matt or Nate on LinkedIn or on email to discover top tier tech companies outside of Silicon Valley in hubs like Indiana check out our newsletter at powderkeg.

com newsletter and to apply for membership to the powder cake executive Community Check out powdercake. com premium we'll catch you next time and next week as we continue to help the world get in since you just listened to this podcast you might be thinking about starting one for your company lucky for you our partners over at cassid have you covered cassid is the first and only podcast in video marketing platform made specifically for B2B Brands I love this about them the platform makes it possible to publish Syndicate amplify and measure the value of your podcast and video content in fact we use it for our podcast here at Powder Keg and if you're a startup you should listen up because cassid for startups is definitely for you they are offering exclusive deep discounts of up to 82 percent off retail price for qualifying startups connect with casted casted. us slash powderkeg