In our first episode of the Startup Skills Podcast, Corey Kossack, Founder & CEO of Aspireship, shares his five-year journey of building Aspireship, emphasizing the “survive and advance” principle.
Corey discusses the challenges faced, including the impact of COVID-19 and economic shifts, and how he adapted his business model to ensure survival and growth. He highlights the importance of resilience and adaptability for founders.
The episode also introduces the podcast’s focus on early-stage startups and essential skills in sales, marketing, and customer success, aiming to provide valuable insights for B2B tech company founders and executives.
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Episode Transcript:
Corey Kossack:
One of my favorite startup concepts is the concept of survive and advance. So, if you think about what this means, it’s really about how do you deal with changes as they happen? And how do you prioritize staying alive?
It’s a pretty crazy thing because in startups, you’re building something from nothing. And you have all these assumptions about whether or not any of it’s going to work. And it’s frankly, a miracle that anything works. You get it off the ground. You do it on a shoestring budget Before you run out of money.
And yet. What inevitably happens is it takes you a lot longer and costs you a lot more than you ever thought possible.
So what happens when the world turns upside down your market changes? Something external happens that has nothing to do with what you built and whether or not you made the right decisions. And suddenly you need to do something about it, or the company is going to go out of business.
I’m Corey Kossack. Welcome to the startup skills podcast brought to you by Aspireship.
I’m gonna tell you a personal story. About my experience building Aspireship these last five years. And I can say with certainty that what I’ve experienced in Aspireship specifically in terms of perseverance overcoming really challenging odds and surviving and advancing just blows away any other experience I’ve had doing startups for the last 20 years. So I’m going to tell you the story about how it all unfolded. And I hope that it helps all of you.
We started Aspireship in late 2019. After a few months post-launch we’re doing the things that you always do in the beginning, which is I have a hypothesis I’m trying to prove that it works at a fundamental level and that there’s a way to make money. And so basically we, we launched initially not too different from what we are today, but in the model and how we approach it is quite different.
We launched as a upskilling platform that aimed to teach people how to make a transition into a specific career field. We started with software sales as our first occupation that we’re helping people coming from all walks of life that needed to make a change Who were essentially getting typecast because they hadn’t done software sales before or they hadn’t done sales period. And, nobody would give them a chance, and we thought we could change that paradigm. And so the whole model back then was we make a completely free for the end user to learn through the platform. They could build up the skills. And once they had the right competency. They could demonstrate that competency. then go into a talent network where companies would pay to hire out of that talent pool.
Well come February of 2020. We had proven that it worked. That we could attract people to it. That they could level up their skills, and the companies would actually hire them and pay us a fee. So at that time, I’m thinking, okay. It worked it’s time to go raise the money. I had already raised, a pre-seed round just based off of my track record for my previous startups,
and I thought, okay, like this works let’s, let’s go. Let’s raise a bigger round and go a lot faster and go bring this to the market.
Well, it was February, 2020. And if you remember what happened in February of 2020, that’s when COVID really broke out. And so how the fundraising markets shut down. Everyone said, Hey, this is going to impact the business. What if no one hires for years and so on and so forth. And I said, well, that won’t happen. I mean, I get what everyone’s saying, but like, this’ll be short-lived and companies will realize that they need talent in order to grow. by later this year, they’re going to ramp up hiring again. So we lost, you know, most of 2020, I mean, hardly made any revenue. And we just kept investing in the product experience and trying to help people. A lot of people were displaced. So there’s a lot of energy around this. And we just leaned in to try to help them and make the experience better and so on and so forth.
Come late 2020 it started working. Fortunately I was correct in the assumption that COVID would not derail the business for years. By 2021, it was a hiring frenzy. I mean, it just, there was so much money being poured in and companies were moving as quickly as possible too spend the money they’d raised to keep up with the growth Honestly, we were just, it was exploding. and so the business quadrupled in 21. Obviously not from much, but, it had grown pretty substantially and things were working really well.
Come Q2 of 2022. Now a different warning shot was fired. So back in 2020, the warning shot was, Hey COVID is going to derail the economy. Hiring could come to a halt, spending could come to a halt. We don’t know what’s going to happen. And I largely ignored a lot of that and got to see what it actually did, but this time around it was a different beast. It was all about inflation started picking up. The federal reserves are raising interest rates. And the prominent investors that tend to shoot off these warnings to the venture ecosystem said, Hey, we are very likely in for a sustained downturn. Hunker down. Prepare to make cuts. Shift towards being break, even make sure you don’t run out of money. It may be quite a while before spending, the way that companies did on solutions on whatever Comes around anywhere where it’s been. And so this time looking at things unfold over a number of months.
I decided to listen to the advice. But rather than listen to it in the context of I’m going to slash my whole team and all that kind of stuff that a lot of people were doing. It was more about the future of the business. I thought to myself, Okay, I hadn’t ever paid attention to interest rates, to inflation, to any of these things before. It just never really hit my radar as something that. Would be important to my life in a material way, or certainly important to startups. not just tack evaluations, but how the entire funding ecosystem works, how, companies spend money or don’t like all of those things. This really became a huge part of my existence and focus In the back half of, of 22. And going forward because I saw how much of an impact it made on the market.
For anyone who paid attention during that time, which I’m sure many of you listening to this, did and were impacted in some way. All of a sudden. There was a lot more layoffs happening than hiring in the tech space. Tech was the early mover. It obviously impacts people outside of tech too, but this was really, you know, where things began. So I looked at that and went okay even if hiring resumes, the likelihood that this business model in this way is going to work out for us in the next couple of years at a level that’s going to not only support the business, but actually like, make it worth growing and continue going, is very, very unlikely. So I need to find something different. All the, while we’d been burning quite a bit of money. You know, we didn’t have infinite runway to get through this. I made a pretty swift decision that I was going to plan for the hiring revenue line, the recruiting revenue line that was powering the business. It was like 95% of the revenue. I was going to make a plan for that to go to zero.
In addition to that, I was also going to go from burning money to being profitable. Such a daunting task. you think about, having to make that change in that period of time, call it, you know, a six to 12 month horizon in making that kind of shift. It’s a daunting task, even when you’re not changing your business model and your product. it’s even worse when you have to, to replace all of that revenue and then some with something that doesn’t even exist yet. So I spent the back half of 22, really figuring out what it is I was going to do and how it was going to do it.
The most obvious thing was to transition to a focus on upskilling for companies. So essentially it’s taking the training that had been available to consumers, individuals out there in the market looking to make a career transition and make that available to companies to distribute to their new hires, to people that were up and coming or people that were looking to augment their skills or transition to something new, kind of all of those use cases. That made a ton of sense because people were already asking us for it. We had some kind of beta customers using something similar. that was the first bet was, Hey, let’s sell subscriptions and have people do this like, anything else out there that they would spend on for training and development. And it worked, but only a little bit.
that was mostly because back then, Everyone was just cutting stuff. There wasn’t a lot of new spend going on. And where there was new spend, even though everyone was talking about getting more efficient. Which training and enablement and all that, like definitely helps you do that. Even though that was the case. Training was something that was more on the chopping block for cuts, than something that people were looking to add.
Fast forward to later in 22, it was working okay, but not enough. so I knew that I needed something different. as I was talking to lots of people looking for partnerships and other interesting things that could kind of change the game. I met a founder of a small company that was in the training space, had kind of like a boot camp and online curriculum, you know, sort of thing. he had told me that he found this really interesting program. That was funded by government workforce development dollars. To help people get and keep better jobs. You know, upskilling and reskilling people for, jobs in the technology industry specifically. Providing a framework to bolster the economy By helping companies in. You know, bring on people from different backgrounds, train them up quickly. But also retain their people. And sort of make longevity at companies a thing again. And I said to him, well, This is the crux of everything that we’d been doing. So if there’s a way to do this. And get costs covered in a nontraditional way, that could be incredibly impactful in this moment in the market we really built the relationship. We started looking at this more and, [00:11:00] I made the decision that I was going to bet the future of the company on this working. I had raised money previously. And not tons, but I mean, we raised four million dollars, over a course of a number of different rounds, bunch of different investors. And went to my investors and I told them my plan to essentially bet the company on this experiment.
I would say that, in general, there was a fair amount of skepticism. But they said, okay. Do your thing. Let’s see what happens. so we did, and we worked through lots of hoops to jump through lots of changes to make and things to bet on. It took the first half of 2023 to get it going. And once we launched it. It started working. Right away, but there also was a significant amount of pain. There were process challenges. There was all sorts of stuff. Where you just have these moments of thinking, like, I really hope this works. I don’t, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to do this repeatedly. And all the while, of course, I’m thinking the clock is ticking. I do not have much time. I’ve got to get this moving and quickly. So we went and continued along that journey. I’m slowly sort of talking through how this unfolded. because this was not a short period of time. And in startup years, this is like so long to go through this and live with this and, and think about whether or not the business was going to get to the other side of this. All the while, Key team members either moved on voluntarily, or we had to do some cuts. This combination of both. We had a pretty decent year. We managed to not shrink in 23.
Now, here we are in mid 24. A year after. We got this new initiative off the ground. And the business has tripled, and we’re profitable. It was the absolute hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I Seriously thought more than once that this might all end. Had to sort of think through what that would mean for my life personally, for my family, for everyone that supported this. and it’s not a trivial thing. At all. So. And beyond grateful to have made it to this point. And now that we have, we are diversifying the business more, made an acquisition, we’re doing other things so that we never have to be in this position again. And now there’s a pretty bright and exciting future for what we can accomplish. all the while, if you sort of take a step back and you think about the skill here.
For founders, the skill of survival and being able to be nimble, not just with pivoting product lines but looking at any possible way to get through challenging times. Even when it seems like they’re just is not a path forward. maybe you’re the only one or you and your spouse are the only one. Or a small handful of people that still believe that there’s something here or that you’ll figure out something. You can just power through and figure out how to get to the other side. That’s a skill that will never fail you because if you can do that, and you can take all the blows from the market, from shifting landscapes, from whatever happens that does not go according to plan, and you can still manage to get to the other side. And grow and adapt and put new things forward. you then become a, founder that just eventually can’t lose. And there’s always a way forward. that feeling is unlike anything else. And it’s something that once you’ve done any of that, your ability to influence others to come on the journey with you: “No matter what happens, things are going to be okay.” Just goes through the roof.
That is the story of the first five years of Aspireship in abbreviated form.
As a quick preview for what’s to come on Startup Skills Podcasts, we’ll do some of these sessions where, I’m just sharing my experiences firsthand likely on stuff that is just very founder focused, we’ll also be doing other things like panels and We’re going to focus a lot on early stage startups, and what skills do you develop? How do you develop them? Across sales, marketing, customer success. We’ll bring on great guests. and really focus on this stage of company and less on a lot of what you see out there, which is the huge scale refinements and things like that.
I hope you enjoy and, I’ll look forward to seeing you on the next one. Thanks for tuning in.