What happened to our knight when he left the inn?
A somewhat brief and long overdue 2022 recap and thoughts on what's next.
Hi folks,
Here's that sporadic newsletter I promised I would send.
It's been more sporadic than I ever intended - I've always found "build stuff; tell people" to be a good mantra for creators, and I admit that I've been failing at the second part lately.
The simple-but-complex reason? Building a company is hard.
That's not new or shocking news to me or anyone who reads this. Still, I've found that building a company the way I've chosen to do it - bootstrapping, with a highly-distributed team, working to innovate in a historically innovation-resistant space - is one of the hardest things I've ever done, professionally.
Also, there is/was a pandemic.
We're almost always playing with limited resources in life, and I've felt those limits acutely when trying to decide where to focus and how to balance my work - and that's left very little bandwidth for writing - especially the kind of writing I like to do.
So, to catch us up - here is a brief update on what I've been up to:
Tenarch, my work to improve how leaders hire and build their teams, had a pretty great 2022.
Some metrics:
We're now a team of 12 people - spanning 6 countries and 7 timezones, from UTC+1 to UTC-8.
We worked with leaders at 10 awesome companies to help them find and hire amazing new teammates.
Generated slightly more than .5M in revenue.
Of course, we continued to build and refine our product to help leaders solve core problems with hiring.
When I started this work a few years ago, my initial approach was to build a product that helps leaders fix their blind spots around interviewing and assessment. I believed then (and now!) that poor interview practices result in missed opportunities and mis-hires.
Through experimentation and feedback, I've realized that a deeper core problem underpins a lot of what's wrong in hiring, namely a lack of data and transparency.
Hiring needs to be way more data-driven.
Again, not new or shocking news to anyone, but almost no one is working on ways to connect the dots for leaders - to give them the essential data about candidates and the hiring process to enable them to make better decisions about who to interview and who to hire.
So, over the last year+ we've spent significant time and energy building something that combines machine-learning, organizational psychology, and modern hiring methods into a very cool product. I'm excited about it.
At this point, you're thinking, "Ok, Rich - but hiring? Still? Amid news about recessions, layoffs, slowdowns, shutdowns, and more? Who gives a shit about hiring right now?"
There's no doubt that a big yellow caution flag is waving in the market. In the last quarter of the year, I saw many of the teams I worked with and quite a few of my waitlist teams decide to pause their hiring efforts for the time being.
As someone who is actively hiring people - I talk to folks that have been laid off and are looking for new roles and people who fear a layoff is right around the corner from them every day.
However, for the teams that need to hire, it's just as challenging a market as it has been for the last several years. Other teams pausing hiring or doing layoffs has yet to make hiring easier or make the market less competitive. This speaks to how supply constrained we've been and how much specific companies have over-hired.
So why am I still working on this? You can't time these things - building teams and, by extension, hiring well are evergreen problems. When I picked this space to work in for my next adventure, I knew I was investing in a problem space that I could stick with for the long term, even when the going got tough.
So, we go forward.
I'm definitely in the market for some new companies to work with, so if you know anyone who wants to grow their team(s) and is struggling with the general brokenness of traditional hiring methods - send them my way.
I'm looking forward to "showing and telling" more of what we've been building here at Tenarch over the next year. Next time you hear from me, expect screenshots.