In 2011, I filled out 600 job applications and heard back from almost none of them.
I remember the math more than the rejection. Six hundred applications, hours of tailoring each one, and a return rate close to zero. At some point I stopped and did something that felt reckless at the time. I decided I’d never apply for a job again. I’d build my own thing instead.
That decision became Data-Mania. And the policy stuck. Fifteen years later, I still don’t apply for jobs… but it’s of no surprise to me that the system that broke me in 2011 never actually got fixed. In fact, it’s even worse now, and makes people feel even more apathetic… because now there’s AI on both sides of the job search market, making the noise louder without making the matching better.
So when I sat down with Eric Bruder, co-founder of Poozle, and he told me about watching 8,000 applicants collapse into a single hire, I heard the exact thing I walked away from in 2011, except Eric walked toward it… and in doing so he quit a stable growth role to fix it.
This feature story is about two-sided marketplace growth, founder-led acquisition, and one bet most founders are too scared to make. It’s also the clearest example I’ve seen lately of a small team beating incumbents by doing the one thing the incumbents can’t.
The moment that started a company
Eric was the head of growth at a previous company. He had four roles to fill, no budget for an external recruiter, and a directive to handle it himself.
He posted the roles and watched 8,000 applications pour in. 2,000 per role. At first he was thrilled.
Then he started filtering. The roles were in-person, so applicants from other continents came out. People without the required experience came out. People who hadn’t graduated yet came out. Layer by layer, 8,000 became 5,000, then 200 who were worth talking to, then 100 who responded, then 80 who showed up, then 40 in the second round.
He hired one person, then he had to repost the other three roles.
This happened in 2024, and despite AI tools being widely available. Eric kept asking himself why hiring still felt impossible from the manager’s side when the technology to fix it already existed.
When he looked deeper, he exposed an underlying structural flaw that served as the root cause of the entire crummy experience.
That root cause: The “knockout question” problem.
On the big platforms, a role can ask, “Are you currently in the US?” If you answer no, the platform still lets you apply, then files you in a not-a-fit tier the employer often never opens.
The applicant burns effort applying to something they’ll never be considered for, while the employer pays for the impression anyway.
Both sides are at a dead end, and the platform collects either way.
Here’s the kicker: Hiring platforms are financially incentivized to keep the hiring process as hard as possible for both sides. Exposing that fact was the moment Eric decided to leave and build Poozle full time.
The two-sided marketplace growth trap nobody warns you about
I’ve driven growth for several two-sided marketplaces, including two job marketplaces, RemoteFront and Dice. So I know the trap Eric was walking into.
A two-sided marketplace has a chicken-and-egg problem baked into its DNA. Job seekers won’t come without good roles. Employers won’t pay without job seekers.
If you launch with four roles, you give the job seeker nothing. If you sell an employer a slot before you have candidates, you give the employer nothing either.
The fact is that, with two-sided marketplaces, most startups try to grow both sides at once and then wonder why both sides are stalled.
Eric’s team broke the problem into an “easy side” and a “hard side”. Then they manufactured a solution to the hard side before accepting users.
Here’s how they did it.
They scraped public job listings directly from company hiring portals, role by role, company by company, and built an auto-applier on top. They loaded roughly 100,000 roles into the app before letting job seekers in. When you swipe right on Poozle, it fills out the application on the company’s real portal and submits it for you.
That move solved their inventory problem, but it didn’t nail the needed results. Eric tested it with his own resume, his brother’s, his wife’s, firing them at companies 150 times each. The interview rates were underwhelming. Real, but not exciting.
The breakthrough came from a second move that was layered on top. They asked: how do we make a non-native job actually valuable?
So they started emailing the hiring manager, founder, or recruiter at each company with a simple message; Something like: “We have a pre-qualified pool of 50 strong-fit applicants we want to send your way. We’re not charging you. We just want eyeballs on these candidates.”
Recruiters were happy to look. They weren’t being asked for money, just attention. And that’s when the interview rates went through the roof.
Steal this: When you’re cold-starting the “hard side” of a marketplace, don’t wait for liquidity to arrive. Manufacture the supply, then manufacture the value on top of the supply, as two separate moves. Most early-stage startups do the first and assume the second will follow. It won’t.
Poozle’s acquisition engine: one channel, run all the way
Once the supply side held, Eric needed job seekers. Here’s where the growth story gets sharp for any founder reading this.
Poozle does no paid advertising, yet. None.
The entire job-seeker acquisition engine is founder-led content on LinkedIn. Eric posts three to five times a week. His brother posts two to four times a week. Between the two accounts, they generate around 125,000 impressions each per week, a quarter million combined, and pull in 150 to 300 DMs a day.
Roughly 90% of those DMs are job seekers asking for a promo code or a download link. About 7% are hiring managers saying they’re struggling to find talent.
Then there’s the B2B side, which is the side with the superior monetization potential. It’s currently fed entirely by inbound leads that are also generated directly from the same founder content.
And get this, Eric does zero outbound on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn wasn’t the first channel they tried. Instagram and TikTok with UGC creators flopped instantly. Eric found them unpredictable and hard to convert.
But, LinkedIn worked from day one. His first post drove 500 wait-list sign-ups. He grew from 300 followers to 21,000 over a few months, just by posting consistently and providing value.
Now, I’ll be direct about the downside here, because it’s the same problem I flag for clients.
When you run on one channel this hard, it’s risky.
LinkedIn is driving mad leads now, but what happens when the channel gets shut down for no reason (that happens all the time), or the algorithm changes and you lose all your reach overnight? These are the known risks of using social media channels to drive leads.
Eric is well aware. At his previous role, his job was to find a channel that worked, scale it, then watch the team struggle to diversify away from a single dependency.
He’s living that pattern again with Poozle, and his read is the right one for his stage:
When a channel is working this well, scale it as far as it goes before you spread yourself thin by diversifying.
The plan to diversify exists (UGC creators, user referrals that are already happening organically), but it isn’t the priority while LinkedIn is printing.
That’s a defensible call. It’s fine to run one channel hard. The skill is staying aware that it’s a single point of failure, and Eric has that awareness.
The bet LinkedIn and Indeed can’t make
Here’s the crux of why I wanted to feature this story.
The fact is that both LinkedIn and Indeed have experimented with skills-based matching, and both retreated from it. Why?
Well, Eric’s read is that skills-based actually worked very well for both sides of the hiring equation… but, it interfered with the ways that these platforms make money.
Think about it:
… a platform that gets you hired quickly is a platform you can stop paying quickly.
… a platform where employers fill roles fast is a platform employers don’t need to pay as much in monthly subscription fees.
The incentive runs the wrong direction. And when you have corporate stakeholders to answer to, you can’t trade monetization for quality, even when quality is the better product.
Eric and his brother answer to no one. Two founders, no board, no outside capital. They made quality the north star for their product strategy, and they priced it in a way that proves it.
Job seekers get a capable free version. The paid job-seeker tier is $20/month for more daily applications.
On the employer side, it’s a $5,000 flat fee for a batch of 50 pre-qualified applicants, with a money-back guarantee if the pool misses. Recruiter-quality results at closer to LinkedIn prices.
What does that bet cost them in the short term? Predictability.
LinkedIn locks employers into annual subscriptions and forecasts revenue cleanly. Poozle runs on consumption-based pricing instead.
A company buys one role, then might not come back for eight or nine months. The revenue is just “lumpier”.
What does it buy them long term? Loyalty, and a close rate most companies would envy.
So far not one B2B customer has asked for a refund under the guarantee. When buyers feel like a partner instead of a recurring charge, they come back.
And the data backs the product up. Poozle’s blended interview rate for go-to-market roles is around 8%, against roughly 0.1% for LinkedIn’s Easy Apply.
That’s the power of Poozle in action.
Key takeaway: The constraint a big incumbent structurally can’t escape is the exact opening a bootstrapped founder can own. LinkedIn can’t make quality the core product without breaking its own revenue model, but you can. Find the place where the market leader’s business model forces them to underserve the customer, and build there.
What this means for your own GTM
If you’re running a startup right now, here’s what I’d pull from Eric’s playbook and convert to a diagnostic for your own business. (none of it is specific to job boards). The two-sided marketplace growth lessons here apply to any business with a structural incumbent above it.
Start with the single-channel question, because it’s the one most likely to bite you.
Eric runs one acquisition channel, LinkedIn founder content, and it’s carrying nearly everything. That’s fine, even smart, at his stage.
The real danger is invisible concentration. Sure, you can run one channel hard… as long as you know you’re doing it.
Ask yourself: If your top channel disappeared next month, what percentage of your pipeline goes with it?
… If you don’t know the number, that’s the work.
… If you know the number and it’s terrifying, you at least know what to build next.
Then ask the harder question: What is the biggest constraint that’s preventing your company from turning market demand into predictable revenue growth?
… For some companies, it’s positioning.
… For others, it’s lead generation.
… For others still, it’s activation, conversion, retention, or sales execution.
… Most founders assume they have a traffic problem.
… Many actually have a systems problem.
More traffic rarely fixes a leaky funnel, messaging that doesn’t resonate, or a GTM motion that isn’t aligned.
That second question is a big part of what I do for my clients in my work as a fractional CMO. When you diagnose GTM like a system, you find the constraint that’s actually limiting your growth. If you’re trying to scale and aren’t sure what’s holding growth back, book a free discovery call and we’ll map it together.
Lillian
P.S. I started this story by telling you I quit applying for jobs in 2011 and never went back. When I told Eric I wouldn’t even use a normal job platform because of everything we’d been talking about, he didn’t pitch me.
He just said the free version would probably be enough for someone like me. That’s the whole bet in one sentence. A founder who tells a potential customer she doesn’t need to pay him is a founder that’s obviously building for user satisfaction and loyalty. Check out the free version for yourself here today.
