In this interview series by Website Planet, I talk to executives from the best digital companies, who share their stories, tips, and perspectives on what it really takes to create a successful website and online business.
A deep dive into decades of hands-on experience and technical expertise to learn untold truths and practical advice that will immediately help you build and grow your website.
Aaron Elder is the CEO and co-founder of Crelate, a flexible talent platform designed for professional recruiting. Elder has over 25 years of experience in product development and technology consulting, including previous experiences working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, one of the largest CRM platforms worldwide. He co-founded his first company, iCommunicate, at the age of 23, and sold it to Microsoft in 2001. He later co-founded Invoke Systems, which got acquired by Avanade in 2010.
In 2012, Mr. Elder got to work on Crelate, an ambitious idea to build a robust “Recruiting CRM”. Coding in stealth mode for almost 2 years, Crelate is a flexible CRM and ATS built specifically for recruiting, staffing, and consulting agencies. “I am passionate about positively aligning the interests of business and people for mutual benefit. Crelate is a way to positively impact the lives of tens of thousands of people that are placed in new or better opportunities each year using the Crelate platform, as well as the lives of thousands of entrepreneurial recruiting and staffing owners.”
What pain point(s) do you solve for your customers? What was the “aha Moment” that led to the idea? Can you share that story with us?
I have owned or worked in consulting and staffing companies for most of my professional life. These businesses sound simple in theory but are incredibly challenging (and rewarding) to build and run: at their center, you have to find stuff for people to do, find people to do it, and then get them to do it on time, budget, scope, etc. Simple, right? Not so.
To make this happen, you have to overcome three problems:
A sales, marketing, and customer relationship problem (that’s your CRM).
A talent engagement and acquisition problem (that’s your ATS)
Finally, you have a delivery management and back office problem (that’s your time, invoicing, and pay systems).
Circling these three key work streams, there’s a wide range of additional challenges and an even wider range of tools to help solve them. It’s all very complex.
I recognized this as a big problem when building a small consulting firm (less than 100 people), but it remained a problem even after we merged with a larger firm (500 people), and it was still a problem when we sold to an even larger firm (100k+). The problem was always the same, and no one had a great solution…
… Let’s build an end-to-end CRM + ATS + Deliver Management solution for talent-centric businesses!
What do you think makes your company stand out? What are you most proud of?
I am most proud of our relentlessly iterative and consultative approach to building software.
You can’t tell customers that you listen, you must prove it. We demonstrate this by building flexible software that allows our consultants and clients to configure the right system to meet their unique challenges.
From your experience, what are the most important things to build a highly successful web-based application and online business? Please explain each in detail.
It sounds cliché but seriously, get your first version out there quickly and iterate from there. Don’t worry about “the floodgates opening” and staying in stealth mode for too long. 99% chance it won’t happen and if it does, you’ll figure it out.
Don’t scale any part of your business too quickly. Stay scrappy, customer-obsessed, and push to the next mountain top.
What’s the one key lesson you’ve learned about building a web-based application and business that you wish you knew when you started? What’s the story behind this realization?
Be mindful of the voices you let drive you. Every new product will have its early adopters, these people are great and immensely valuable. They also, sometimes, whether they intend it or not, can be the death of you.
For example, small and new businesses are often much more open to trying new things. They also can be incredibly demanding and have very unrealistic expectations of the value of your offering. To some, your offering will always be too expensive and never do enough. These voices have a time and a place, the sooner you define this for you, the better.
What are the most common mistakes you have seen people making when building their web-based applications and online business? What can be done to avoid those errors?
I believe the #1 reason startups fail is premature scale. This can be the scale of people, expenditure, and tech. I use the term “great enough” when implementing processes and building software. We are constantly “rebuilding the airplane, while we are in the air” and I believe that is a good thing!
You must find the balance between the Minimally Economically Viable Offering (MEVOs) and bringing $100M solutions to $1M problems. There is a spot in the middle and it requires very smart, and business-minded Product organization.
I have seen and, despite my best efforts, internally paid the cost of building things The Right Way. Developers read stories about hyperscale challenges at big tech or various Top 1% dot com companies. But they don’t (or won’t) understand, if you’re building a business platform, or the other 99% of software out there, you don’t need to handle the Super Bowl Sunday spike in traffic.
Future-proofing is great in theory but rarely pays the dividends expected. It supposes that the developer or designer can predict the future, which is of course hard to do. Instead, I look to create “great enough solutions”, as defined by being the right scope, at the right time, and on the right budget for now and the foreseeable future.
It’s just good enough, it’s great enough because
We are proud of it, it’s something we’d point at and say “I did that! Do you like it?”
It’s robust in design and forward-thinking where it matters, and no over-engineered where it doesn’t.
Based on your experiences, what trends and technologies are currently underestimated or overlooked, but can significantly impact your industry? How are you going to adapt or how are you adapting?
AI of course, but maybe not in the way that most people think about it. I am actually more concerned about the virtual race to the bottom.
Our industry is ultimately made up of market markers, people who find opportunities and align them with talent. Both sides of this market have similar outreach and engagement motions. AI and automation can help with a lot of this for sure, but the earlier movers have already moved and now you have more and more people producing more and more “content”, and the market participants on both sides are getting inundated.
All of this “content” will ultimately be re-ingested into new AI models that will then use this to define what future “content” should be. The more hyper personalized the AI generates the content, the less sincere and authentic it becomes.
I recently got a clear AI-generated email that mentioned a local coffee shop as a “favorite place” of the person supposedly sending the email. I live in a small town, and this person was from the other side of the world, the entire hyper personalized message cheapened the experience. If I call this person back, are they then to perpetuate the lie that the machine had concocted?
The impact here is hard to predict, but I suspect that those who get ahead of this race to the bottom will set themselves apart.
With over 13 years of experience in SEO and managing content websites, he has coordinated over 5000 product reviews and interviews with the biggest names in eCommerce, web hosting, cybersecurity, SaaS, AI, and online marketing, to provide newbies and experts with untapped, actionable insights from the top experts in the industry on how to build and grow websites.
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