Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the first ever episode of the Seed series. My name is Danny. In this show, I will talk with early stage founders to get them to share their journey and what made them successful. In today's episode, I'll be talking with Luther Del Port. He's the CEO and founder of Ditto. We connected over LinkedIn as part of my customer discovery outreach for Fincast AI. We had such a blast talking that I wanted to make him the first ever guest of the seed series. So sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee or tea and enjoy. Hello, everyone. Today on the seed series, I have Luther Del Port, founder of Ditto.
I had so much fun during our last conversation, and I know founders will learn a ton from your experience. I'm so excited to have you on the show, Luther.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me, Danny. Great to be here.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Why don't we start with can you tell us about Ditto? What does it do? Who does it serve?
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Dittojobs.com and dittohire.com. it's basically a recruitment software business, right?
Daedto hire is essentially a large scale recruitment software company focused on recruitment agencies and staffing firms and hiring managers, basically anyone hoping to do bulk hiring.
Then, of course, on the flip side, we have dadojobs.com, which is for the candidates. That's where people all over the world basically visit our platform and find new job opportunities.
So we currently operate in 28 countries. We have clients all over the world. Absolutely loving what we do. And yeah, we are kind of building this massive ecosystem for people looking for work and people looking for candidates. So we kind of sit right in the middle. So that's us in a nutshell.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: That's amazing.
I want to take it back to when you first started.
I saw LinkedIn that you had quite a career before it began, before founding ditto. And it always fascinates me, you know, like, how entrepreneurs can quit their job and oftentimes pursue the harder way of a harder way of life in general. And the heartaches, the headaches, you know. What inspired you to quit a job and pursue this?
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Well, look, I think it's a couple of factors.
Always find it quite funny. I studied advertising for three years, only to work in advertising for six months and then just start my first business. Right. So not really the most, let's call it economic or intelligent way of approaching it, but yeah, look, I've always been surrounded by excellent mentors.
And I think, you know, even as a kid, I was always going to be an entrepreneur. In high school, I was delivering newspapers. I had my own guitar tutoring school in university. I was a bartender. I was interning and kind of trying to do everything and as much of it as possible. So I think when the time was right, it just made sense to kind of take the plunge, I don't think. You know, starting the business was the first business was like this little tiny social media marketing agency that we started. So that was a very, very micro kind of scale of business.
But, yeah, I think slowly but surely you kind of learn how to deal with all these challenges. I mean, you just take on more and more.
Hence why we have Duro today.
[00:03:34] Speaker A: Wow. Tell me about that first business that you started. What was that like?
[00:03:39] Speaker B: Yeah, that was quite interesting. So when I started that business, I was working for a traditional ad agency, and on the side I had some projects with some of my own little clients that we did social media stuff for. And, yeah, that eventually, you know, I started getting more contracts and more contracts and then just decided, let's actually get this going, started hiring a couple of people.
Slowly but surely, you know, the business just started growing.
We started with just social media, then we moved over to building websites.
Before I knew it, we were building mobile apps, and then towards the end, we were building these massive backing systems for banks and stuff like that. So just naturally pivoted every couple of months. I wouldn't say pivot it. I think it's more of the. As we did more and became more experienced, I think the team was actually, you know, capable of handling more complex tasks, and that's kind of how ditto eventually began.
Yeah.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Right? So you took the very common route, and as an entrepreneur, right, like, obviously you have to sustain yourself. You have to somehow bootstrap it. So you take on consulting clients, and as you work on them, over time, you yourself became more experienced. You acquire new skill sets, which sort of led to ditto, 100%.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: Right? It's funny what you are capable of doing when you get thrown in the deep end. That's always a very funny kind of human reaction. So when a client all of a sudden needs this kind of product, it's like, of course we can do it. But you never say no to a project.
So that's basically learning.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: I remember that feeling. I remember that feeling. It's so scary, isn't it? It's like, well, I know how to do it. Give me that money and I'll get it done.
And you take the money, you sort of figure out, like, how the hell do I do that?
[00:05:50] Speaker B: Exactly. So just get the security deposit first. Right. And they will figure it out.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: I love that.
I love that. And so going on to ditto, what was the, what was the first iteration like?
[00:06:06] Speaker B: This was actually a pretty cool story. So when we still have the dev studio, we took it on major, major project and we had to hire a bunch of engineers.
I can't remember the exact number, but I think ten or 15 engineers had to bring on board.
And on top of my normal day to day, I just didn't have time to kind of like hire all those people myself, try and network and try and get people through friends and family.
So what we essentially did was we started digging into recruitment software products, looking for something to kind of like streamline the processes. And we came across like some of the big guys out there. We found them to be overly complex and overly expensive. We looked at some of the smaller ones, too light, didn't really suit our needs. And basically everything looked, well, recruitment software back then, everything looked like an excel sheet, which we also thought, I mean, there must be something better out there. So being a development studio, we decided, let's try and just build a prototype. Let's see what we can do. How would this suit our needs? And the guys came back to me with a prototype. We took it to a couple of people just to get some feedback from it. And some of the recruiters that used it said they loved it. So like, okay, well, now we're going all in on this. There's a huge market out there, right? So it's an 80 billion us dollar kind of industry out there. So let's try and get our slice and. Yeah, that's kind of where we're going to start it. But I. Back to your first part of a question, or like the first iteration, look, it was a bit of a disaster, let's be honest. You know, we just made very, very rookie mistakes. I think what ended up happening with us was because we were so user feedback focused. We kind of took everyone's feedback and created this little Frankenstein's monster of a product. So it wasn't a very good, cohesive product.
It just felt like features were living in isolation and, yeah, it just didn't make sense. It kind of. We try to please the entire crowd, which you can never do. So I think looking back at the first iteration, look, it's a different product than it was six years ago, seven years ago. So a lot has changed. And of course, every single founder would pretty much laugh at the product they launched with versus for one day after day. I think that's the case for everyone. We were joking about it earlier.
We actually put up in our reports, we put up a new chart, and this is literally the first month that we launched and no one thought to check if we're actually using real data. No one tasted it. So for about a month, we were using placeholder data in our report and no one even checked that. So it's like you make those little boo boos, right? So just want to recover from them and learn a very valuable lesson in the process.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: That's a really cool story.
Starter journey is full of these little embarrassing moments that you look bad and you go, what?
But that's a really, really interesting journey that you took. First you had to talk to users, and then everyone gave you a different feedback, and it took everyone's feedback and built this product that served no one. Right.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:09:49] Speaker A: You know, I guess the, you know, in the startup world, they tell you, hey, you got, you got to run a lean startup, talk to users, taking their request.
But how did you deal with, you know, how do you deal with, I guess, axing or narrowing down the feature sets? Like, how do you decide which one you want to go after?
[00:10:07] Speaker B: Well, this is a very interesting way of looking at it, right. But we started classifying our clients into various kind of funnels. So we said, you know, this client, we estimate their revenue to be ABC. This client, we estimate their revenue to be XYZ. They focus on this industry. This client focuses on that industry.
And we kind of made a call quite, quite early on which kind of clients we want to work on because, you know, that old story, you know, 90% of your support queries will come from 10% of your clients.
And very early on, we started identifying clients that, I don't want to use the word, you know, problematic, but clients who they needed help should not be. Yeah, they needed help and they, they were not the ones that should be dictating product and product strategy.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: So that was a lesson we, we had to learn quite, quite early on.
So I think it really comes down to, to focus. Right. I think we were completely unfocused in the beginning, and that's just due to bad product planning. That's literally what it boils down to.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: Did you end up firing the 10%?
[00:11:22] Speaker B: We still do from time to time, but it doesn't happen often.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: Uh huh. It's kind of counterintuitive. I forgot who said it, but I read somewhere that part of being a sort of founder or part of running a tech where any kind of company is knowing when to fire your customers.
It sounds counterintuitive and probably really hard to do because imagine yourself as a early stage founder. You finally got, you know, you finally got these paying customers, but they're actually doing more harm than good to your platform. Right. Because they're actively trying to shape your platform into something that, that is not good for the 90% of the customers that are enjoying the experience.
[00:12:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's exactly that.
Over the past couple of years, we have had clients would approach us, either build this feature or we're going to your competitor. Unfortunately, yeah, it has happened.
But we're now in a position where we feel, great, is this feature adding value to our product? Great, we build it. Is this feature just for you? We don't build it and we wish you, unfortunately, the best.
We can't work together then. Unfortunately we can't work together. So you kind of need to always make sure that, yes, you need to listen to your clients by all means, but never be almost, want to say, strictly dictated to by your clients. There's a clear difference between those two.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: Right. I suppose the hard thing is where to draw the line. Right. You know? Yeah, that's it. I think that's so much of that is up to you. You as a, as a founder, like where, where do you see your vision? At the same time, you got to take in your customer feedback. You always want to be customers first. Right. Because customer centricity is really important. You know, you never want to be, sorry. I was on your twitter, I saw you reached out where you tagged zero and they told you to turn it back, turn it off and on again to see if it works.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: Yep.
Yeah.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: You never want to be that. You want to be customer centric, but at the same time, you need to know where to draw the line. That's always a tricky.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: Of course. Yeah, look, it really is. And it's something that only really comes with experience.
We have seen in the past, other founders.
It can come across as being extremely arrogant, can come across as being disrespectful, disrespectful to your clients. But it's really not about that. It's making sure that you maintain the integrity of your product and your business beyond what every single person just wants. Remember, software, these types of specialized products, it's not a buffet and you cannot treat it as such. You have to take the full package. You have to consider what happens if you order of a steak for mains. You can't also have ice cream as a starter. Just doesn't make sense. Terrible analogy. But, but you get the point I'm trying to make.
[00:14:32] Speaker A: Well, I think, I think my daughter would disagree. But of course, I love that, though. It's, you know, the buffet analogy, that's, that's amazing. And, you know, going back to, I guess, the, you know, the journey for. Ditto, you launched your first iteration. What was the biggest challenge during that phase of your startup?
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Yeah. So that kind of ties into, I just want to say what we spoke about earlier, but the focus was one of the biggest challenges that we faced. We started getting a lot of attention.
We started getting a lot of clients coming on board, and then you kind of, you start getting little sparkles in your eyes and all of a sudden you run to your project management system and you start creating tickets. We want this feature. We want this. We're going to create that.
All of a sudden you realize you find yourself in a position where everything is priority, right? In classic, if everything's a priority, that means nothing is priority.
So it took us quite a while to unlearn that way of doing things. We can't just do things on the fly. This is a live product. If we make major changes, it has major impacts. It has major impact on our clients, and that is something we had to teach ourselves.
Stick to the original plan.
Q one, we work on these features. Q two, these, if something new comes in, great, we'll get to it in Q three, I think for us, especially as we're a bunch of young entrepreneurs, for us, it was very hard to kind of see the bigger picture. So we had to physically teach ourselves to be disciplined in that regard.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: Wow. But that's a very good problem to have. Right? Like, you're almost at the dreamland of what founders would call the PMF. Right. You have a bunch of really passionate users that are making a request, but you as a, especially as a founder, you have to balance between customer facing and also understand that your engineering team has a capacity. And also you have to make sure the features that you put out is something that fits what the majority of the customers.
[00:16:54] Speaker B: Yeah, especially when it comes to burnout. We sold that quite a lot. I remember, oh, this was such a strange thing that I did, but I remember we were working extremely late and everyone is burnt out, everyone is angry. I literally drove home, I changed my socks, and I came back to the office. I still Tuesday, I have no idea what was going through my head, but we were kind of just like in that zone. So it's like very important to make sure that you don't burn the people out because we did lose talented people along the way because we weren't respectful towards the work life balance.
It's really important to, again, stay focused and stick to your original plan. Yeah.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: That is, I think. I'm glad that people sort of realize that.
I think ten years ago, Silicon Valley is about, hey, I work 15 today. I work 16 hours today. But I think people started to slowly realize that that may not be very efficient. Right. You know, if you're well rested, you have a. You know, you exercise, you eat well, you. You might be more efficient than when you're just stuck in the office for 16 hours where five of those, you're just sort of sitting there doing nothing or, you know, just thinking that you.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: Can'T think, yeah, 100%. Look, we. We can see it quite literally every single Monday when the generic teams come in and they're fresh. I mean, it's a different team.
So this whole idea of working 15, 16 hours a day is completely complete madness.
I think that's also part of a reason why we initially wanted to move away from a consulting type of business that essentially sells time. So the more time you log, of course, the more profit you make, which is, it just doesn't work in 2024. In my opinion.
Selling time is completely ancient, so those businesses will always motivate more time, more hours, and we try to stay away from that completely.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: Wow. And, you know, early stage, you know, you face this sort of influx of requests for features. You kind of learn to say no to some customers. Balancing, making sure that your team has a work life balance. You got over a hurdle, and startup starts. The startup journey is filled with sort of the. That was a fucking close call.
Do you have one of those stories to share?
[00:19:30] Speaker B: Ooh, that was a fucking close call. Yes, I do.
Right, so we were traveling in Europe in 2020, right? Started in Germany. Germany closed down. Lockdowns. Like, it's fine. Next up is Belgium. Go to Belgium. They close Belgium down. We're like, okay, let's go to Amsterdam. It's my 30th birthday on it. The day that Amsterdam decides to actually close their borders. And we're sitting there, and I'm watching the entire world go to crap.
I'm thinking to myself, okay, Luther, you've got a problem. Businesses use your software to hire people. No one will be hiring people the next couple of months. This thing is. Yeah, it's really not in a good spot. So, quite literally, we took the second airplane, the second last flight out of Amsterdam. We managed to get. I'm sitting on the plane, I open up an excel spreadsheet, I put down everyone's names, I put down their salary and a drop down. Yes, no. And that was kind of, you know, the. Yeah, yeah. Was the scariest day of my life, because quite literally, you have to make a decision whether someone is going to make a living for the next couple of months, because obviously no one's hiring. So I'm sitting there like, oh, crap, am I going to be that guy? Luckily, nothing happened. We were business as usual and we grew 28% in the year of 2020, the year of the big lockdowns. So luckily, we were one of the companies that were just simply not affected whatsoever. But I think that was the closest we ever came to. Yeah. Needing a change of underway for lack of.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: That's really, really. So when you're on a flight, I kind of go back to that moment when you made that decision. Right. So you're deciding whether to let people go or not, and then obviously it's a big decision. Right. This is whether people can put food on their table during a time of unprecedented lockdown. And no one has ever seen this. What made you decide to not let anyone go like that? Must have been such a difficult decision.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Look, it really comes down to, if we don't have those people, we anyway don't have a product. So it wouldn't have made sense even to get rid of a single person.
So we just literally pulled a rabbit out of a hat and last minute secured some emergency funding if it were necessary.
So very happy about that. Luckily, we never used any of that funding because it was the most expensive capital I have seen in my life. So luckily we didn't take it.
But, yeah, so luckily we did have a backup if anything had to go wrong. But I think everyone kind of just realized the world has gone to crap.
We now need to get this thing out in as many people's hands as possible. And, you know, from sales all the way down to support, everyone just pulled up their socks and we managed to grow, especially in a country like South Africa, specifically, where the lockdowns were extremely severe.
We weren't even allowed to buy roast chicken at some point. I kid you nothing. Yeah, go read up on that. There's millions of case studies of how we handled this very poorly, in short. But, yeah, so everyone just kind of pulled together and we managed to pull it off. Discovered new markets, discovered new industries and customers we can serve, and the team pulled it off.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: Yeah, roast chicken. That's a very specific example.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: Kid, you nothing flip flops also banned.
[00:23:28] Speaker A: Wow. Okay, let me. I gotta google that later. That's a sound. It sounds like a good read.
[00:23:34] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:23:34] Speaker A: But I think.
[00:23:35] Speaker B: I wish I was joking.
[00:23:39] Speaker A: Wow. I think, you know, you kind of went over that period of your life and you said it with such an ease. And looking back, it's probably pretty scary. And I think there's something just said about the perseverance through the unknown. Right. Because then no one knows what's going to happen. No one knows if businesses are going to survive.
And I think part of what makes ditto so successful is you, as a founder, persevere through all the difficulties and the unknowns and the stress, the headache. Right.
[00:24:12] Speaker B: You know, there's that old saying. I'm not entirely sure who I am quoting, but you have known knowns. You have known unknowns. You have unknown unknowns. And I think the whole Covid thing was just. We had no idea. We had no idea if businesses would ever return to work. We had no idea. Is this a ten year kind of thing? Is it a one month kind of thing? And I think I'm in no way unique here. Right. I think this is. Every single founder out there was basically sitting there just ripping their hair out. What do we do now? Because we can't just sit at home and jam a ps five. We need to actually get to work and do stuff. So what do we actually do if we don't have customers, if we don't have offices? How do we adapt to this?
So, yeah, I think a lot of companies that didn't adapt well, of course, aren't around anymore.
But the ones that made that kind of period, those number one spell cut is thick. Without any doubt.
[00:25:15] Speaker A: Wow. Just. Just for the show notes, I did play ps five with the boys after work.
[00:25:22] Speaker B: There we go.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: It was one of the. It was one of the best moments.
It was one of the best moments during COVID It was just after work at 09:00 p.m. me and the boys will get online and we'll play Warzone.
[00:25:34] Speaker B: There we go.
Warzone was, like, free or something, right? It was released on all platforms.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. That's March 2020.
[00:25:44] Speaker B: There we go. I remember this.
[00:25:47] Speaker A: That was it. Was it coming through a difficult time?
Yeah. And I guess. How would you summarize your startup journey in one sentence?
[00:26:00] Speaker B: Look, I keep telling people I've got the best job in the world without any doubts.
I'm surrounded by extremely intelligent people who actually get a kick out of solving very complex problems. So also a team that really just embraces our culture so, so extremely well. So look, it's, it's pretty much the most incredible journey through hell you can imagine, but when you're doing it with an exceptional team, it just becomes, you know, absolute bliss. So I think I. The startup journey, everyone will tell you it's got its ups and downs, more downs than ups, always.
But you have to make the best of it. You chose to go down this route.
You could have gone and worked at a bank, but you wanted to have something more exciting. Something more exciting is what you're going to get. It's really just what you make of it.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: It beats corporate life for sure, but it definitely has its downsitive.
[00:27:07] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: And where's ditto today? Because last time we talked, you guys are doing a new launch.
Tell me about that.
[00:27:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So new launch basically kicking off. Well, it was supposed to be this Thursday, but I'm guessing that will only now be on Monday. But yeah, we have something really incredible in the pipeline at the moment that we're going to start working on as of next week. Can't give away about that too much, but it's got nothing to do with recruitment and everything to do with professional networks. So let's just.
[00:27:42] Speaker A: Okay.
Okay. And where do audience find more information about that? Is there a website?
[00:27:49] Speaker B: Both? No, no, no, no. Definitely not. That's. Yeah, that's gonna take a while before we actually make a bit of noise about that.
[00:27:57] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. Keep me posted. Keep me posted.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:28:00] Speaker A: Well, and one last question for the founders listening. What is the one piece of advice you would give them to other early stage founders or even just someone thinking about pursuing this journey?
[00:28:14] Speaker B: Actually, a couple of points on that point. Number one, your spreadsheets are 100% lying to you when it comes to your revenue and your sales. Don't believe anything you put on that spreadsheet. It's not going to play out that way. So sales aren't made on spreadsheets, unfortunately. I wish that was the case. Our early days would have been very much different than it is right now. But, yeah, look, just get out there when it comes to sales, get your numbers in four, six months and then start benchmarking.
But unfortunately, there is no guarantee that you're going to make a drop of revenue. That's just the nature of our business.
So when it comes to that, be positive, but also absolutely plan for the worst, because that is also a possibility. Raoul, also think when it comes to, and this is something where I think I made a massive mistake, it's not that it would have sunk our business or anything like that. But it's part of the business administration aspect that a lot of founders miss. And that is getting your, your processes and your policies and things like that in place from day one. So think HR, policies, accounting, get everything. Make sure everything is rock solid.
You're only going to thank yourself two years down the line when the IR's kicks down your door. Then at least you have data to show them and show them that you're not really in trouble.
So get those things tight from day one. Get yourself quickbooks, get yourself bamboo, HR, whatever the case may be, get those products, pay for it, make sure everything is tight.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: Gotcha.
That's a very valuable advice. You don't hear that a lot about coming from startup founders.
[00:30:07] Speaker B: Yeah, people tend to miss it until there's a dispute two years down the line and then all of a sudden you have to go through 20,000 slack messages.
You're only doing yourself a favor by covering your tracks with all that stuff. And I think it's also understand what type of founder you want to be.
There are essentially two types of founders.
One that's on stage trying to get Elon Musk to retweet him or something like that, and I don't know. Whereas the other founder is at work solving a problem.
Always be the guy that solves a problem.
There is no fame and this thing where not all Sam Altman and Paul Graham and all of that. Some people are just epic businessmen, so rather be the founder of that works and solves problems. Youll damn nearly by default make money if you just actually get down and do the dirty work.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: All right, that's valuable.
It's also about solving a problem, a problem that you personally face. Right. That makes the work a lot easier.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: Of course, of course. And if it's a problem that you understand, we also see founders all the time, especially with the web three craze, so many you can't be the Uber of blockchain.
That even means we're not entirely sure.
Always make sure there's actually a problem that you're solving.
[00:31:46] Speaker A: That's, that's gold right there. Making sure there is actually a problem that's worth solving that. Yep.
I mean, like, you see it too, right? With the, you know, with the chat GPT AI craze.
You have a lot of people that is applying AI to problems or product unnecessarily. It's like you don't need AI to solve any of this. You're slapping it on just because.
[00:32:09] Speaker B: Exactly. Look, we've seen this a million times for so many companies, it's basically just a wrap around on top of GPT.
Can GPT solve that problem? The answer is very likely, yes. So where is your fit in the market? We're not entirely sure.
So always find a proper problem to solve. And it doesn't have to be AI, it doesn't have to be an NFT, it can just be a very simple thing that can be solved with good software. So it's not always necessary to kind of overcomplicate things.
[00:32:48] Speaker A: Up until you said NFT, I don't think I've heard those three english letters set together in a long, long time, and I'm very glad for it.
[00:32:57] Speaker B: I had to think about it. I was like, what was that called again? Oh, nfTs. Right.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: All right, Luther, it was such a pleasure talking to you. I learned I had so much fun talking with you again.
[00:33:11] Speaker B: Yeah, brilliant. Danny, of course. Happy to be here and looking forward to the next episode. Of course.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: Yes, sir.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: Hopefully next time we hear a bit more about your business.
[00:33:19] Speaker A: Will do, will do.
