Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe (Part 5)

Ryan Fyfe: The biggest learning there was, if you’re going to scale to new channels, be mindful of how you view your metrics. For a long time, we blended all of our metrics. This sounds silly in hindsight, but it was very easy to cover up the problem when you look at blended average acquisition cost across inbound, outbound, organic, and paid.

It can be easy to cover up the inefficient channels where you should have cut them off a long time ago. We went through that for a period. That’s something that I and the business had to learn. We still do have some paid marketing. The evolution is less about channels though and more about how we optimize the current channel that we have.

In that perspective, we’ve gotten a lot smarter about segmentation. Rather than treating all businesses the same, we understand what is the potential size of each. The new stuff that’s on the horizon and what has been working really well is partner and integration.

Sramana Mitra: What about competition?

Ryan Fyfe: Competition has come from all angles. In the first few years, there wasn’t a lot. We got on to Web 2.0 pretty early. At that time, we were the only scheduling provider for SMB that had real-time dynamic interface. That helped us propel us to market leadership. Of course, the market catches up. We started employee scheduling. Eventually we did time and attendance. It really becomes a workforce management platform for small businesses at that time.

Now, it’s a very competitive space. It’s much harder to drive true product differentiation, especially on small business. Small business or individual needs are not as complex as market or enterprise. It has become commoditized. We really try hard to stand out, and this has driven us further up market. We found a sweet spot where we can scale and handle the needs of bigger businesses. We focus more of our energy and attention there.

Sramana Mitra: What do you see now given that you have reached a certain amount of scale? You can provide some metrics to us to anchor that scale. What do you see now around you?

Ryan Fyfe: The company has 150 people. We have three primary offices in Pakistan, Serbia, and San Francisco. We’re doing $10 million in revenue. We brought the business to profitability the past year. Around us now, there are still the same players there used to be but as we shifted our attention up market, the landscape has changed lightly.

What we’re trying to do is bring up the typical consumerization of enterprise. We’re trying to bring what we did really well at the bottom end and bring that up. That’s the mobile first, easy-to-use part. In that sense when we compete against traditional enterprise companies, there’s not a lot of competition on the peer scheduling space, but buyers in the enterprise are thinking a lot more about how the scheduling solution integrates with their HR tools.

From that perspective, that’s the big difference on how things have changed. We’re becoming more of a point solution rather than an all-in-one solution for workforce management.

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about what’s behind these three operations. You said Serbia, Pakistan, and San Francisco.

Ryan Fyfe: Our headquarters is in San Francisco where we have our go-to market strategy team as well as our sales and marketing team. Pakistan has client success and support. Belgrade has the full stack team from marketing, finance, development, and product design. The origin story for that is, we were completely distributed. I was finding individuals wherever they were. Then we started to scale with those individual people. It was natural to add people that they knew. That’s where the three teams came from.

Sramana Mitra: What is the size of your team right now?

Ryan Fyfe: It’s 150. San Francisco is the fastest growing now. There’re about 65 in Pakistan and the same in Belgrade.

Sramana Mitra: What are the metrics of the business right now in terms of the number of customers, ARR, whatever you feel comfortable sharing?

Ryan Fyfe: We have over 7,000 customers. There’re over 50,000 individual business locations. Our customers are also multi-location. We are doing over $10 million in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: What are you seeing in the marketplace right now in terms of competition and partnership?

Ryan Fyfe: I just recently stepped down. I handed the CEO role to a fantastic member of the team about a few months ago. I just started my second company for real-time payroll. Within Humanity, the core focus is around partnerships. If the software is not connected, you don’t really get the full benefit of it. The core strategy moving forward is really around integrations and key partnerships.

Sramana Mitra: When you say you have stepped down, does that mean you have sold your holding?

Ryan Fyfe: I’m still as much of an owner as I was before I stepped down. I’m just no longer involved in the day-to-day operations.

Sramana Mitra: All right. Is there anything that you’d like to add from your journey that you specifically want to highlight?

Ryan Fyfe: I would just say thank you for having me on this show.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe
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