#185: Jordi Hays, Co-Founder & CEO of Likewise, the End-to-End Platform to Find and Work With the World's Best Creatives

Welcome to Just Go Grind, a show that focuses on helping you launch and grow a business and navigate the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Justin Gordon, and in this episode we have Jordy Hayes, who's the co founder and CEO of Likewise, which you can find@highlikewise.com this is the end to end platform to find and work with the world's best creatives. It's a company that recently raised a round of funding and has a tremendous amount of traction, especially given the COVID 19 circumstances we're living in now and in this episode. So we talk all about that, talk about how he's grown the company to this point, where he's looking to take it beyond in the future and so much more. As always, the show notes are just go grind.com podcast and you can support the show by leaving a rating and review over in Apple Podcasts. Without further ado, here is Jordy Hayes, co founder and CEO of Likewise. Jordy, welcome to the show.

Justin. Thank you. Excited to be here, man.

Yeah. Great to have you on and talk about likewise and the things you've done kind of in the past as well. I'm curious with, with like, likewise for people who aren't familiar with it, what exactly are you doing with this company?

Great question. So likewise, at a really simple level is a platform that connects highly skilled creatives. So that's designers, developers, photographers, videographers, copywriters, to work specifically with e commerce companies. So for people that are more familiar with this type of company, like we're a labor marketplace, but I like to simplify it as much as possible.

Absolutely. And it is such a great idea that it makes so much sense in this kind of world we live in now, especially if you look at remote work and everything with that, I'm curious as to how. I know it started January 2020, but how did this come about? Where did this idea come from for this company? Jordi.

Yeah, so I guess the. The idea came about purely out of my co founder and Maya's experience in the last five or so years working within E commerce. I think we brought this sort of unique point of view in that on one hand, we had worked a ton on the brand side and on the agency side, and it had seen how e commerce companies needed to hire. The reality is that in 2020, e commerce companies are completely dependent on creative talent at pretty much every single consumer touch point. Right. So if that's web, social, paid social, email, print, the list goes on. These companies need creative to engage with consumers and when we sort of looked at the ecosystem and the way that we were working with companies and the way that we were hiring, we realized that the sort of like legacy hiring process was just like fundamentally broken for hiring creatives. So obviously it spent time looking around the ecosystem. In the past I'd spent a really significant amount of money on sort of what I would call comps, so the upworks of the world. In the past I've spent over six figures on upwork. And so what we were realizing though is that upwork really missed the mark in a few key areas that high growth companies needed. In a perfect world, you can go on upwork and find somebody amazing in five seconds and begin working with them, but that's really not the reality. Right. If you've worked on there before, you know that as a company when you go on upwork, you're sort of inundated with a huge amount of talent that's really not qualified or really relevant to the project that you're doing. And then on the side of the actual freelancers as well, upwork creates this dynamic that really doesn't incentivize, it doesn't incentivize like highly skilled talent to continue to engage with the platform. There's certain dynamics at play, namely that the platform fundamentally creates like a bidding war among the freelancers which drives prices down aggressively. And while somebody will eventually get the project, what it means is that oftentimes like the most highly skilled people just, it isn't worth working on the platform because rates just simply get driven down too much. And so I think Matt, my co founder and I brought sort of an interesting point of view in that we really deep in E commerce, we kept having companies come to us asking for, you know, just, just as, as a friend or as part of our network to, to get access to creatives. And then on the other side at home, Matt's been been married for 10 years to a freelance graphic designer. My girlfriend of three years is a freelance graphic designer. My mom is a freelance graphic designer. Very tied into the other side of the marketplace as well. So mostly came about just because we were listening at the time. And today I had founded an ad network on YouTube. So we were working with a lot of sort of like later stage e commerce companies, helping them advertise across YouTube. And what I was just really realizing is that we were solving a pretty specific pain point there. But something that was absolutely like a universal pain point was just accessing creative talent obviously throughout history. And if you talk to really any entrepreneur they'll tell you that hiring is one of the biggest challenges that they faced. And so with likewise, we wanted to solve this problem around hiring really, really well for a specific niche. And I think we did that just because it was a lot bigger niche than anyone was really realizing.

Yeah. And I remember having the conversation with Matt somewhere in Los Angeles. I want to say it was downtown, and we were talking about this company and this idea, and, you know, it made a lot of sense to make it really easy to hire, to make it really simple on that, because I had. I've used upwork myself. I've used other kind of companies as well to kind of bring people on board. And it is a process that's broken. It is a process that takes way too long to implement. And obviously there needed to be something else. And you have other companies kind of trying to solve this, this same problem for you. Then at likewise, understanding this from your experience that you guys had, what was this initial, you know, version of this platform? What was it going to be? How'd you start with this?

Yeah. So proud to say that Matt and I are incredibly scrappy. We did end up raising for likewise, but, you know, for the first six months, I was entirely bootstrapped. And I think we're very, like, comfortable in that state. I think the reality is, and I'm sure that you've had many conversations about this before, is that there's a way to break down any business to be able to really. Maybe not any, but I would say, like, 90% of businesses can be broken down to a very fundamental level that allows you to test the product and see if there's actually any demand for it. So Matt and I started thinking about the idea, and while we didn't have, like, a product or a platform in place yet, we just started matching brands to creatives. Right. We already had the demand. We already had the supply, and we just started sort of like making the market that snowballed really, really quickly in that, you know, we were basically growing 100% every single month for multiple months in a row. And, you know, we quickly started spending a lot more time and attention on.

It with that, too. So understanding that side of things, like, that's perfect, like you said, it's echoed definitely by many entrepreneurs, like, what's the basic version of this product you can use to validate it? And I think someone else I had in the show recently, the episode actually released today was literally just having a text them, and then they would connect people, like, the same type of thing to validate an idea from that with likewise, then how did you look at this actual business model pricing behind it when you knew could match supply and demand? But then how'd you look at. Okay, well what's the business model going to be for us with this company then?

Yeah, great question. We looked at a few different. We looked at a variety of different pricing models. I think that the reality is that what we found is that labor marketplaces that charge, you know, very obvious fees to both sides of the market, like, encourage a ton of disintermediation. Right. And that's when people are just saying like, hey, this was a good match, but we're going to take this off platform. The model that we found that we were most excited about was having creatives come on the platform and set their own rates for everything from projects to hourly work. Right. We felt that that was drastically different than really any other marketplace and really empowered the individual freelancer. And that said, obviously we have to make money. So to do that, we charge fees on top of the freelancers rate to the brand. Right. So the brand is paying for it. We think that's how it actually should be. Right. Companies forever have, are comfortable with and have had to pay for a variety of legacy solutions to access talent. And so that was a model that we found worked really, really well and that we were just excited about. And I think that that's been reflected in the way that like freelancers are engaging with the platform. Just last month we had our first freelancer earn over $100,000 through the platform and his first six months. So we're really excited about, about, you know, basically the model is like really working. And now we're sort of shifting into a mode of like, let's just sort of like capitalize on this traction. And really, you know, how do we go from the number of freelancers that we have now to, you know, hundreds in the next. In the next, like six months?

Yeah. And to that point then, I mean, how with that 100% month or month growth initially, obviously it's just getting started, so numbers are smaller, but I mean, how are you acquiring people? How are you acquiring new businesses? And then even on the other side of freelancers, I, I mean, is it just your network you're working off of? Like how are you actually on the acquisition side early on with that?

Yeah, great question. So with likewise, we were, you know, we've just been incredibly fortunate in that like every single customer on the brand side and every single freelancer has really come from word of mouth. We Obviously had a initial sort of network that allowed us to sort of like jumpstart that. But today, you know, all of our freelancers have come from referrals from other freelancers and pretty much same thing on the brand side. We're lucky to have angels that are super connected and we're also able to help on the sort of like the brand acquisition side. But you know, we hit a million dollar run rate on a GMV basis without doing any sort of like outbound sales or marketing. So it's one of those things that we basically just had to. We very quickly were able to like prove product market fit. And now there's a lot of other things that we have to prove out going forward, but at a very basic level, like, you know, we felt really confident in that customers were finding us and, you know, staying around for a really long time.

Yeah, and with that too, I mean, for people listening, like, it's one of those things where too, if you look at your background, both of your background, your connections, what you had at your disposal, and you're very well positioned to start this company, like, that's just, you know, pretty clear from, from that perspective. And like, obviously you've executed to, to make it happen, have a really good idea and then execute to grow this. And at what point did you decide that, okay, we do, we do want to raise some outside capital. How are you thinking through that?

Yeah, this was something we talked about a ton, I think. I think to take like one step back. I think like one of the reasons that growth has come really naturally that I would just call out, and that is something that I haven't felt in the past on certain companies that I've, that I've worked on is like, Matt and I just had this incredible level of like founder market fit with this business, like unlike really any other company that I've started. And I think that's like, it just gives you such a ridiculously unfair advantage. Right when you have like, you said that sort of like perfect background going into this and that. We deeply understood brands and how they wanted to hire and we deeply understood freelancers and how they wanted to work. And that just led to so much that just gave us like so much momentum. I'd say that the decision on whether to fundraise or continue bootstrapping was definitely like something that we talked about a lot. In the end, the answer was pretty easy. We felt like we had so much momentum and traction and the market opportunity was big enough. You know, I think that for us, when we felt like, it was clear that there was a path to $100 million run rate. That was when we made the decision to raise. We felt like bootstrapping is amazing. My last company, I raised a very small amount of money from friends and ended up buying them out after we reached sort of like a certain scale. And it's incredible when you own 100% of a business. One of the best things in the world. But yeah, reality was is that like with likewise, this was a business that we wanted to have the resources to build the company in the way that, like, we wanted to build it. Bootstrapping is obviously, I don't know, I think that we referred to it as like white knuckling it. We basically started the company like six weeks before the pandemic started. And so for us, it was like, you know, in the middle of a pandemic. We're fortunate enough that our business had some pretty massive tailwinds related to remote work and E commerce. But that said, it was still, you know, still scary in that, you know, at the time, my co founder was moving, having a kid. It was a pandemic. There was just like, there was a ton of stress as well, where it was like, you know, we could bootstrap for a little bit longer and then raise. But the reality was that it really made sense to raise at the time that we did. And I think most importantly, we felt like the people that were, you know, the people that were going to be on the cap table were people that we wanted to work with for years. So in the end, the decision ended.

Up being really easy and making that decision then and deciding to go that route. As you said, there are all these things. You're in a pandemic kind of really new company. I mean, how did that fundraising go for you guys?

Yeah, great question, I would say. I mean, in the end it went well and then it worked, I think, like, you know, we closed our pre seed in June. I don't think fundraising is really ever easy. Obviously there's some companies that get preempted by funds and it can be a much faster process, especially for really sort of like hot categories that we're all aware of. But that being said, I mean, for us to start our fundraise during a pandemic, it certainly took longer than we intended. But the end result is we got the end result that we wanted. I think if you actually look at the market right now, it's incredibly frothy. It's probably a great time to be raising as a founder. So I Think it's just obviously there's a lot off, but VC can definitely follow the public markets in that sense. So, you know, we'll see how the year ends up. I could see the fundraising environment being really different next year and I think that's reflected in a lot of companies trying to raise as much as they can now before, you know, uncertainty around the election and that sort of thing.

Yeah, taking advantage of that time and trying, trying to raise funds while they can. And to your point of what you mentioned earlier, one thing that's I think is important when you, you said that you and Matt really had this, this founder market fit. And that's actually something that Yuri Engelstrom I had mentioned before we started, but I just talked to him and he said kind of the exact same thing, investing in early stage. And that's, that's one of the major things he's really looking for is, is that founder market fit. Even if, even before these people start companies looking at like smart people in certain industries, like, oh, would they start this company? And that's what they're looking for. Some other kind of early stage founders, like, if you can find that it's also not only beneficial for you building the company, but also investors can obviously look at that side of things when they're investing in these companies, especially in the very early stage, looking at like the precede round of funding as well.

Like on that note, I think there's, if you look at the graveyard of sort of like classic Silicon Valley startups, like, you know, a lot of them end up, you know, companies fail for a million different reasons. But the reality is a lot of the startups that I see that don't ever sort of reach, you know, get any sort of significant momentum are companies where the founder had an insight, but not sort of like deep domain expertise. And it's not to say that you always need sort of like, you know, really specific deep domain expertise to start a company, but I think that it's sort of a classic thing in Silicon Valley to just like have the, like have this sort of crazy confidence in that one. One sort of like area that I would call out is like, because we were talking earlier and I was saying how I spent millions of dollars across, you know, podcasts and YouTube and influencers for brands specifically. And one, you know, there's an absolute huge graveyard of influencer marketing startups that were started by people that didn't necessarily have experience within influencer marketing or actually understood what influencers or brands wanted. And so oftentimes like companies are just being created that conceptually sound good, yet the founding team doesn't actually, you know, doesn't have the insight to actually know what really should be built. They're just building for a space versus building, you know, building for a specific type of individual.

Yeah, and I want to go more into the project itself with likewise, how this platform works and a number of different things on that kind of you just mentioned. But one thing I want to go back to real quick is just with Unit co founder Matt. I mean one of the questions someone had asked me to ask other founders a little more is on the equity splits and kind of, you know, founder agreements and all these different things on that side of things. You don't have to go into details of what that is, obviously. But I'm curious on how you, how that conversation went in terms of like equity split and the kind of founder agreement early on with, with Matt?

Yeah, yeah, good question. I think that's, I think that's conversations that can either be really hard or people don't have those conversations. And you know, there's sort of this prevailing like narrative I guess, that all sort of like co founder relationships should be 5050 I think popularized by some of the partners at YC. That being said, it's definitely sort of up to debate with Matt and I. We approached the business, we made decisions around equity just like without a ton of emotions attached to it. And we have a very equal partnership. We are equal co founders. But those conversations were easy in that Matt, like our relationship was a lot deeper than was a lot deeper than just starting like a company together. Matt was one of the first people that I ever worked for. And while he was taking one of his last companies through science here in Santa Monica, and I knew within like 30 minutes of meeting him that I, that I wanted to work with him. And that was like years ago at this point or a couple years ago. But so our relationship goes way back and I think it allowed us to like have those conversations place of like knowing that like if likewise is a billion dollar company or if it goes to zero in six months, like we're still going to be like, you know, we're still going to be hanging out in 50 years. So like it's a lot deeper than just sort of the company. But certainly like in previous companies that I've started, that's been like a, a point of contention. I definitely used to take the point of view that all founder relations, you know, co founder relationships would be 50, 50. But I think going forward My perspective has shifted slightly, but every single situation is totally different. So it's hard. You can't just apply a blanket statement.

Yeah. And for those past companies, then just real quick then, I mean, how are you. I mean, there's this, obviously the perspective of going 5050 on partnerships, but how did you have those conversations? What were those things that, what was helpful for you as you're going through that? Because you've done a number of things now. What's helpful in those conversations as you're thinking through what this is even going to be for other entrepreneurs out there in terms of the split of equity?

Yeah, yeah. A company I started in 2019 that we ended up having to shut down for legal reasons. That business, you know, my co founder, you know, my co founder and I both went full time with it at the same time. I had let go. I was running sort of a small like consulting business on the side and working with, with one company with the majority of my time. But I basically like turned down all those opportunities and went full time with the company. My co founder was in a position that was, he was able to provide, basically provide like early capital for the business. And so that conversation was really interesting in that, like, I felt like, hey, we're both, you know, we're both. And this was just a, you know, I've matured since then. I would probably take a position, a different position now with this, but at the time I felt like he wanted significantly more of the company due to the fact that he was funding it. The reality though is that I felt that we were both committing full time to the business, going all in the amount of money that he was investing. I didn't feel like should have skewed our equity positions as much as he was originally intending. So that's something that we worked out and it ended up in a good place. But I think that's a super hard. I think that's a super hard conversation. All that I'll say is like, I've had friends that have lost out on millions of dollars of upside, you know, in just structuring these relationships in a poor way. I think that, you know, the most, I guess, like, tragic example of this was a friend who, you know, started a company that immediately did a couple million dollars in revenue as a consumer product company. You know, he ended up thinking that the right thing to do is bring on a co founder at that point because he wanted support. But he made the decision to give that person 50, 50 ownership of the company within an LLC, which effectively like you know, anyone would tell you that's probably the worst thing that, you know, that's a horrible, horrible idea. You're like signing over, you know, voting massive amount of voting rights in the company, deadlocking the company and giving up millions of dollars of equity for nothing. And you know, he ended up, you know, it ended up probably being one of the worst financial decisions of his life. So I think that, I think there's not enough, I don't think there's enough education out there. Like on this specific subject, I think that that's something that I've thought about before is like somebody needs to. And there's resources out here for this, but I don't think they're oftentimes done by really high quality people that are trying to start, that are coming at it from like a venture perspective. But like these types of documents need to be like open sourced. There needs to be more resources on this. That's definitely something that I'd want to be spending time on post likewise or at some point in my career because it just can lead to so much pain if you don't set these things up in the right way.

Yeah, and that's why I wanted to bring it up because I actually haven't talked about it a lot in this show at all, but someone mentioned that in the question in different entrepreneur groups and one was through USC was mentioning this and I thought about it, I was like, yeah, actually this is such a really important topic for any entrepreneur because it's going to really dictate a lot with your company. And one of the things I always remember too, I don't know if you've listened to Startup, the podcast and when they had the early episode of like equity split with Startup with Gimlet Media, you know, that initial thing was, you know, he's talking like 5 or 10% for his co founder and then his co founder was saying, if I'm going to dive into this full time, like that's just not motivating to me. It's not worth it to me to even do this at that amount of equity. And like that's something you gotta think through as a founder as well. When you have co founders, it's like you're both committing full time and it's not necessarily gonna be a 50, 50 split. But what is the incentive that gets people to do what, you know, who really needs to be done within the company? Lots to think about obviously with that. But coming back to likewise for, for brands wondering for, for creatives, wondering. Take me through this process of, first off, I would love to know a brand working with likewise. How does it work? What's the process like?

Yeah, so this is something we've obviously thought about a ton. I think fundamentally, like, Matt and I brought this perspective of like we knew coming into it that companies weren't asking for a new project management tool, they weren't asking for a new chat tool, they weren't asking for a new video chat tool, they weren't asking for a new figma. What? Over and over and over, the problem that we were solving that companies were really asking for was like really easy access to relevant vetted talent. Right? So that's the problem that we were solving. And to do that, we felt like the best thing that we could possibly do was create a marketplace or a platform that layered over existing workflows. Right. So we never wanted to get in the way of somebody's existing workflow, whether that's like asana, slack, zoom, whatever that looks like. And so like basically our, you know, the brand experience for likewise is like, how do we make it as easy as possible for brands to access.

You.

Know, this like vetted, like highly relevant talent. Right. And so to do that, like every company that's coming on, we're still technically in beta. We haven't like launched or really made anything public yet. But every company that comes on likewise does like a 30 minute onboarding call. From there, they get matched to talent, typically within like a 24 hour period. Right. I think our goal with the entire experience on the brand side was a company to be able to spend less than one hour of their time to hire somebody that they can work with for months and months and months. So when you compare that to the sort of a legacy hiring process that takes days and weeks sometimes to hire the right person and you don't even know if you're getting the right person, it's obviously 10 times better. And then for creatives as well, like creatives get to come on likewise, like see opportunities that are relevant to them. We really focus heavily on matching. So unless a creative has like a 50% chance or more of getting a certain of getting matched with a company, they won't even see or hear about a project. And that's, that comes back to our like pricing model of like, creatives are setting their own rate for their work. And so we're not sort of like throwing up an opportunity and having every creative and a likewise network just like bid on it, right? That's not, that's like what exactly what we're trying to avoid. Right. And again, like, freelancers and creatives are welcome to bring their own tools. So obviously, in the design world, probably the most relevant tool, something like Figma, and then long term, like the platform will, you know, continue to leverage tools that are sort of like, standard within the creative and sort of like e commerce community. Right. But I think that we see likewise as very much like. What's most exciting to us is that we think that the marketplaces of the future are simply going to layer over existing workflows. Like, when you think about it, it's like upwork is. I never, I never want to want to trash upwork in any way because I think it's an amazing product and it's been amazingly beneficial in my career. But it does, like, force you to sort of, like, use their tools. Right. It forces you to use their chat tool and that type of thing when the reality is like, the future of marketplaces is just perfect integration between your current workflows and accessing that talent.

Yeah. And that's just making it as easy as possible at the core. It's like, what do companies want? They want to be able to hire workers really easy for whatever, whether it be a project base, whether it be longer term, and just make it simple for that. And you mentioned this kind of value proposition of, you know, in under an hour of their time to get someone that's. I mean, that's pretty impressive in terms of pulling that off. On the. On the other side, on the creator side, how are you. I know you're kind of in a closed beta right now, but looking at which creators to bring on, how you're evaluating which ones are, you know, going to be on the platform, how are you looking at that side of things? Jordy?

Yeah. I think we have the amazing benefit of being in the creative world and that the result of that is that every single person that we would ever want to join, likewise, like, has this visual history of their work in the form of a portfolio. So that gives us an incredible advantage around being able to quickly and easily vet talent. Right. Obviously, just, you know, doing a portfolio review isn't. Isn't enough to determine if somebody's a fit for likewise. But we do have the benefit of being able to see, like, you know, we can tell within one second if somebody is really, like, qualified and is ready to be on likewise, sort of like at this stage in their career. I would say that, like, the comparison is something like hiring, like, other types of freelancers. Right. So if you're hiring A marketer, for example, it's really difficult to determine if somebody's a really high quality marketer. Right. You're not going to get access to the ads account that they, you know, the ad accounts that they previously ran. That's like proprietary data. Whereas like with creative work, there's this amazing sort of like visual history of that person's like growth as an individual and they're sort of like track record. And so I'd say that that's like one thing that's allowed us to really efficiently scale the supply side of the.

Business with, with the fundraising early on that you, you brought on. So this pre seed round, what was that really going towards in your minds to grow this? Obviously you've had some amazing growth in the last number of months for you in that fundraising. What was that pre seed going towards in terms of your growth?

Yeah, I think the pre seed, you know, the way it's actually like worked out is I think we initially intended to launch a little bit sooner. I think the reality is that we were still having the growth within just the beta, that it actually made sense to keep things a little tighter, like really invest in sort of like infrastructure and sort of the team. The last few months have been building out sort of like internal processes. Like without a doubt, we cut a lot of corners in the first six months. Just as a team of two, you're super nimble and you don't really have to rely on process to execute and scale. But that said, like, that really catches up to you. And so last couple of months have been really focused on process infrastructure. We've brought on two people, we have a third that's like part time and so that's really been our focus. I think, like at this stage we're, you know, we're in the process of raising a seed as well. So that will, that, that's sort of, you know, the round where we'll actually be capitalizing a lot more heavily on, on our traction to date and kind of give us that year, year and a half Runway to really just, just double down and invest where we see fit. But that said, obviously the seed will primarily be going towards product and growth as well as team, obviously.

Yeah. And always evolves depending on where you're at with that and how big of a round as well, you're going to end up raising. I notice we were talking some of yuri earlier again, just about how some companies are raising too much and then you're obviously trying to prepare now, which is a weird time to be in during this global pandemic of, okay, we don't know how next year is going to be. We want to raise now, but also then you have some historic companies that have raised a ton, let's just say, and then become too bloated and really kind of tanked because of that. A lot of them are related to like kind of softbank companies. And, and with that, I mean, I guess I'm curious as to how you're looking at raising your next round then in terms of how big of a round you're going to attempt. Attempt to raise at least. How are you even just thinking through that? Jordy?

Yeah. Again, something I've thought about a ton recently. I think we, you know, this business has the potential to be super capital efficient. Right. Day one we were generating revenue. From day one we are, you know, technically like profitable. Right. We had to be obviously a really long time without taking any sort of like salary. But yeah, I'd say that with this round like we're looking for, I would say like the precede round was great and that allowed us to, to start investing in some of these areas. But like the reality is it didn't really give, it didn't give us a year plus long Runway. Right. So the seed is really to do that, to be able to not really have to think about fundraising, you know, for a really significant amount of time and be able to invest where we need. I'd say that like, yeah, as far as like typical like Silicon Valley standards, like we're not, we're raising a pretty small round. We're only raising like up to 2 million. And so I'd say that, you know. Yeah, it's funny that that used to be sort of like a series A. Yeah, yeah. On our end, like we're, we can do a lot with very little that's sort of like in our DNA and that's how Matt and I like, like building companies. Right. So it's definitely been something I've had to get used to and that like previous companies, you know, I was never really in a position to be spending more money than was coming in. Right. That's certainly been a shift for me with this business and just like getting comfortable being in a, you know, having burned, being in a deficit and yeah, it's something that's, I guess like as somebody who's bootstrapped, you know, in the past, it's sort of like nerve wracking, but it's also, it's also exciting. It's an opportunity to, you know, it's an opportunity to, like, prove ourselves. And like, there's no, there's no excuses when you raise capital. You know, like, I feel like when you're bootstrapping, it's easy to make excuses around, like, oh, like if, you know, if we only, you know, if we have this money, we can invest here, but everything's sort of like out in the open and when you raise, I sort of like that. And so it'll be a, it'll be a fun next year, but fortunate to have like all of these. You know, I think that the exciting thing for us is that, and we're just really fortunate to be in this position is that like, if you had told us, hey, there's going to be a global pandemic, this is probably one of the best companies that we could start. It sounds sort of like twisted, but the reality is that the business is centered around remote work and E commerce, two things that have absolutely, like, exploded six months. And so we think that this is a great time to be building this business. I think that internally, one of our goals is to deliver like $100 million in earnings to creatives within the next, within the next few years. And I'd say that we're, we're. We're less than 1% of the way there yet, but, you know, growing significantly, so that'll obviously speed up.

Yeah, the, the growth will help. I mean, there's a number of companies I've talked to recently who have, from because of the pandemic as well, have really just blasted off. I mean, look at coming like 00 grocery, which 15x in a number of. Of months. Dumpling, which is a company that's basically battling Instacart, doing it in a way better way for the actual shoppers and such. They like 20x in a number of months. I mean, some crazy growth numbers to hear about during this pandemic because some companies are just really aligned perfectly for the situation we're in now and with that. So as likewise it's grown, I'm just curious about kind of your role and Matt's role. How has that evolved? Has it always been kind of the same in terms of the separation? Just take me through that a little bit.

Yeah, I guess something I hadn't mentioned is we've been distributed from the beginning. When we first started, likewise, we were both living in la, but as you know, that doesn't mean that you're in the same place. Matt lived on the east side, I'm over in Venice. So we were effectively distributed from the very Beginning. I think that what's funny is that when Matt and I first started the company, we felt like there was too much overlap in our skill set. And I think the reality, what the past six months has shown is that we're actually, we do have overlap, but we're sort of uniquely strong in sort of different areas. And so that's been kind of cool to see how that plays out. Matt and I, I think, have an awesome partnership and it's something that we're committed to like investing in something that we probably. Maybe this is not even possible, but I would say we might have even gotten a coach sooner than we, you know, than we really needed to. But it was just something where you know, our, you know, for us, we have like a commitment to. Commitment to learning and like growing together and like becoming better leaders individually and better leaders as like a partnership. And so our, you know, the executive coach that we work with, a guy named David Sherry, who's incredible. Like, we actually have him spend time with our entire team as well. So it's been something that I think has been a great investment so far. And it allows us to like, pick up insights and allows our coach to have a faster sort of like feedback loop too, which I think is interesting, and that there's stuff that he picks up from the team that we're not necessarily picking up. So I'd say it's something that I think will become more common. It probably is more common among bigger organizations, but it's just something that I would push more early stage founders to invest in. I think that, you know this from starting your company, it's like there's nothing that puts you sort of like face to face with your own demons, like starting a company. Right. So like having a guide throughout that and having a, you know, I think that Matt and I together, like, we can sort of like prop each other up. You know, everybody has good days and bad days and hopefully you're in a situation where, you know, it's. It's counter. Sort of like counterbalance. And I think we definitely, definitely do that.

Yeah, definitely. When someone's having a great day on the day of their partner isn't, you know, help balance that out. And one of the things that I actually just interviewed this week probably be live in a couple weeks depending on when this is released. But is Holger, who's the co founder and CEO of Blinkist, and he mentioned not necessarily the executive coach, but he was, they invested pretty early on in HR and like he said that's something he would have even, I think done more of is like invest in kind of an HR people person. Because really building that team out is going to be so important, especially as you plan to grow faster, like taking the time to invest in something that's not normally seen as, oh, this is going to directly affect our growth. But if we invest in the HR kind of human resources person, that's going to really help us as we build out this team. And that was something he had kind of hammered home, which I thought was pretty interesting to think about for early stage founders as well. And as you've gone along and kind of this journey, I'm a big reader, so I'm always curious, has there been any particular books that have been useful, whether it be business or personal for you?

Yeah, good question. Some, a book that is a little bit more maybe that you hopefully haven't heard of that I read this year that I think was, I thought was an amazing read. I read it in a few hours on a flight. It's called like Built to Sell. It's about like building companies, like with the intention of selling them. And I would say that most founders would tell you that like, you shouldn't get into it, you know, you shouldn't start building a company just because you want to sell it someday. But when you build a company in that way, it forces you to make decisions and, and around the company that are just really beneficial for a huge number of reasons. Right. So that's a book that I'd call out that I'd say has been, has been sort of powerful for me. I think that like, as a founder I'm, I'm not as like an individual, I'm not sort of process driven. And so what I find is that I have like counterbalances in place now and we specifically hired to sort of like meet some of these shortcomings. But like Built to Sell was a wake up call and that if you want to build something with like enduring value, and if you want to build an organization that has enduring value and isn't dependent on you, you need to like process and focus and all these other things are super important. So. So that's something that I recommend everyone.

Yeah, I think to hammer that point. I mean, processes or systems in place is really everything. Especially as you go out and hire people. Having that in place is so much easier than to run it just from running a podcast in this business. It's like having systems in place to how do I produce an episode, how do you get guests in the show, how do you promote it? And all that stuff is really. These are all systems in place that in theory you could outsource to almost anyone to handle that. And with, with, with tools like Loom for instance, where you have these like stream recording video like. Yeah, it's so beneficial to, to do those. Where I've used Loom videos and have a virtual assistant like in the Philippines for instance, do some tasks you need and literally you were doing the exact task and then them just seeing it like, oh, this is how you do it. It's really easy to do that from that perspective. And, and for you, I mean, what is your kind of day to day look like now, Jordy? I'm curious.

Yeah, it's funny. It's certainly obviously everyone's day to day has shifted because of COVID I was working out of an office prior to January and February. Now it's funny that the lines between work and non work have definitely blurred. I'd say that I think everyone's probably realized this but work just will always expand to the time that you allow for it. Right. So because I don't set any boundaries around my work anymore and I'm happy working from, you know, I'm not necessarily happy, but I'm very comfortable working from 7am to 10pm the work just consistently expands to that period. So still, you know, make, make time for walks, you know, if my neighbors would probably laugh because I, you know, when it's not when LA is and blanketed and smoke, I'm pretty much. I try to take as many calls as I can just walking around the neighborhood. So I probably get plenty of steps in there. But yeah, it's gotten to a point where my day to day is just like pretty much, you know, entirely allocated towards likewise. That's in a way this year has been the like the misfortune of this year has been really unevenly distributed. Right. Like trying to see this. I mean the silver linings, at least personally is that I would have spent this year indoors working 10 hours a day regardless of what was going on in the broader ecosystem. So yeah, for me it's like been a year to sort of like focus and really align my day to day with the business.

Yeah, you miss out on less because, because of COVID I mean it's just like you were gonna be working regardless. Like yeah, now you're missing out on less. And that's how I've kind of viewed the same thing and just go grind. It's like there's just because of this weird situation, obviously unfortunate. But there is less going on in terms of like distractions and things that you would have had at your display. You know, now it's like, okay, well, I'm not missing on that. Like, I get this time to build, which is also, you know, exciting for founders. Like, time to build. Like kind of Mark Andreessen was saying. And a blog post of his is the time to build is now, basically. And. And where can people go to learn more about likewise connect with you as well, Jordy.

Yeah, we could have a whole conversation around just, just your. Your last point there. But I'm at Jordy Hayes on Twitter J O R D I H A Y S and then the website is hirehire likewise.com awesome. Those are. That's where you can find me. This is awesome man. Thank you for the time.

Absolutely. And I'll be sure to link those up in the shownotes just to grind.com podcast great talking with you, Jordy. And we'll have to have a round two as you continue on at some point as well.

Definitely, definitely. Can't wait. Thanks Justin.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Just Go Grind. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen. The Weekly Grind, which is my weekly newsletter, comes out every single Friday. You can find@just gogrind.com Newsletter this is filled with tips, tools and strategies for growing your business. You want to launch a business, how to grow it, how to get it off the ground, find employees, all these different things. There's a few tips, tools and strategies every single week. I deliver right to you. JustGrowGrind.com Newsletter Check it out. Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you in the next episode.