From Brazil to a US HRTech Success Story: Talentify: Othamar Filho (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did Cielo find you?

Othamar Filho: Three years before, they had a scout go to Brazil and to many other Latin American countries to talk to RPO companies there. I had an RPO company in Brazil. That person was at Cielo. When I had the solution ready, I showed it to him. He presented that solution to the CEO.

Sramana Mitra: Before you raised money, what was the deal size that Cielo had put together with you to use your product?

Othamar Filho: They already had one marquee client. They presented the MVP to one large client. They had the client ready to go. When they invested, they became my biggest client.

Sramana Mitra: So your business model was they were selling your product to their customer base?

Othamar Filho: We were white-labelling. They added the service part.

Sramana Mitra: What was the business model? What was the pricing model?

Othamar Filho: It was a mix of a monthly subscription and performance. The more clients they sold, the more hires they made, we got a small cut of that.

Sramana Mitra: What was the size of the Cielo relationship?

Othamar Filho: Rudy told me at that time, “You don’t have any other options. You’re here to get your company growing. You can’t say no to this. What I have seen before is that once you get an investor and a marquee client so early in a startup life, you become very dependent on that. You either become like a software company for that company and they buy you for a low valuation or the relationship sours because you find your own path to growth.”

That really happened. Because of his advice early on, I was able to say no to some requests. They were trying to mould us to fit their needs. At the same time, my entire team was trying to find our own path to growth. We went from 100% coming from Cielo to, two years later, less than 20% of our revenue coming from them.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s trace that journey. You started this in 2017, right?

Othamar Filho: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How long was it just Cielo?

Othamar Filho: For the first six months, it was just Cielo. Then we started to get a few clients by the end of 2017.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of clients were you going after?

Othamar Filho: We had exclusivity with Cielo. The easiest path would have been to go to every Cielo competitor. We didn’t have that option. They were our largest investor and biggest client. We went to focus on companies that had similar problems but wanted to solve the problem themselves. We saw such a hard market.

One thing about HR tech is you’re not only dealing with compliance issues, but you’re also dealing with the vendors. They are not as open as the marketing and sales automation platform. There is no marketplace for HR tech. Everything is very hard when you have to integrate and move data from one platform to the other. The sales cycles were long and hard. That’s when the journey started to change.

One thing that we also started to do was follow the money. We would have to become an end-to-end solution ourselves. To do that, we would have to raise lots of cash and try to go big. That was never attractive to me. I didn’t want to risk everything that I’m building here. Or I would have to specialize and be very good at one thing. That’s when we changed.

This segment is part 2 in the series : From Brazil to a US HRTech Success Story: Talentify: Othamar Filho
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