YC founder raises $3.5M, keeps team to 3 people—then grows 10x to $2M ARR in 1 year. | Benjamin Encz, Founder of Ashby

Last month, Ashby raised a $30M Series C. Ashby is used by customers like Notion, Ramp and Sequoia. Benji built Ashby as an end-to-end Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that would replace several point solutions. He had to build heads down for 18 months and couldn't launch a simple MVP.Surprisingly, even though he raised $3.5M at seed, he didn't grow his team. He built the product with just 3 people. "We could spend time recruiting or we could spend time building"-- he decided to build.When they launched, they grew to $200K in ARR within a year and then 10x'd a year after that. Here's the story of how they found product-market fit.Why you should listenWhy keeping your team small helps you go faster.How to displace point solutions with an end-to-end platformHow to  validate pain points.How to move up market from startups to enterprise companies.KeywordsAshby, all-in-one platform, recruiting, reporting, pain points, product market fit, Series ATimestamps:(00:00:00) Intro(00:01:29) No Website, No Problem(00:03:08) A Viral Loop(00:04:40) Origin Story of Ashby(00:05:39) The Biggest Pain Point(00:07:50) De-Risking(00:09:26) A Sticky Product and Market Evolution(00:10:50) A Hundred Conversations(00:13:09) The Main Feedback and Key Learnings(00:16:16) The Pitch(00:17:20) Bundling and Unbundling(00:20:50) Building a Great Engineering Organization(00:22:26) Letter of Intent Stage(00:24:45) Validation and Feeling Ready(00:28:18) A Little Bit of Luck(00:31:51) Finding True PMF(00:32:44) One Piece of AdviceSend me a message to let me know what you think!