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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Leverage AI to tackle traditional problems:
Matt emphasized that AI, combined with established techniques like spectroscopy, can significantly improve outdated processes. Founders should explore how AI can unlock new efficiencies or solve long-standing challenges in their own industries.
Focus on a beachhead market first:
While HyperSpectral’s technology has numerous use cases across industries, the company targeted food safety as its initial market due to fewer regulatory hurdles. Prioritize markets that offer quicker wins, then expand into more complex sectors as you gain traction.
Being an outsider can be an advantage:
As an outsider to the pathogen detection field, Matt’s team brought fresh perspectives, asking questions that industry veterans might overlook. Founders entering new markets should see their lack of experience as an opportunity to innovate and challenge norms.
The value is in the software, not the hardware:
HyperSpectral’s technology is hardware-agnostic, focusing on the software's ability to process spectral data and deliver insights. Similarly, founders should consider whether the long-term value of their solution lies in software, which is often more scalable and adaptable.
Grind to find the real problem:
Identifying a viable market problem took extensive customer outreach and validation. Matt’s team spoke with everyone from farmers to grocers to confirm the need for a fast pathogen detection solution. Founders should invest time in deep customer discovery to ensure their product solves a real pain point before scaling.
Conversation
Highlights
How a Sales Hiring Platform Scaled from $0 to $3.5M ARR in 18 Months
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Matt Theurer, CEO and Co-founder of HyperSpectral, shared how his team built a sales hiring platform that’s transforming how companies screen candidates at scale. What started as a solution to a personal pain point has evolved into a category-defining product that’s processed over 4 million interviews.
The Origin Story: When Your Own Problem Becomes Your Product
Matt’s journey into building HyperSpectral wasn’t planned. He was running a staffing agency when he encountered a problem that would eventually become his company’s foundation. “We were having a hard time getting candidates on the phone,” Matt explains. “We would send out a Calendly link. Nobody would book a time.” The team tried everything—calling, texting, emailing—but couldn’t get enough candidates to complete phone screens to satisfy their clients’ hiring needs.
The breakthrough came from an unexpected place. Matt’s co-founder suggested recording interview questions and having candidates respond via phone. “We had like an 85% response rate,” Matt recalls. “So instead of getting one out of ten people on a scheduled call, we were getting eight and a half out of ten people leaving us a message that we could then listen to.” This simple insight—that candidates would engage asynchronously when they wouldn’t schedule calls—became the core of HyperSpectral’s value proposition.
Building the Product Without Building It
What’s remarkable about HyperSpectral’s early days is how little actual product existed before they found product-market fit. For the first year, the team operated with minimal technology. “We didn’t have a login. We didn’t have a product that logged you in for a year,” Matt shares. Instead, they manually managed everything—sending links via text, forwarding responses to clients, and handling the entire process by hand.
This approach wasn’t just about bootstrapping on a budget. It was strategic validation. “We kept it super manual for a really long time because we wanted to make sure that there was a real problem,” Matt explains. By keeping the operation lean and manual, they could iterate quickly based on customer feedback without being locked into premature technical decisions.
The turning point came when they realized the market opportunity extended far beyond staffing agencies. Matt describes the moment: “We realized that what we had built could be really useful for a lot more than just staffing companies.” They saw that any company hiring at volume—whether for sales roles, customer service positions, or hourly workers—faced the same fundamental challenge of screening large numbers of candidates efficiently.
The Go-to-Market Evolution: From Manual to Scalable
HyperSpectral’s GTM strategy evolved in three distinct phases, each building on lessons from the previous stage. Initially, they relied entirely on manual outbound prospecting. Matt and his team would identify potential customers, reach out directly, and close deals through personal relationships. This hands-on approach worked for getting the first customers, but it wasn’t scalable.
The second phase involved ramping up paid advertising, particularly on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. “We did a lot of paid advertising, especially on Facebook, and we still do some of that,” Matt notes. However, they quickly learned that paid channels alone weren’t enough to build a sustainable growth engine.
The third and current phase focuses on what Matt calls “trust-based marketing.” This shift was influenced heavily by the content strategies he observed from successful B2B companies. “I’ve learned so much about content in general from Chris Walker at Refine Labs,” Matt says. The realization was simple but powerful: instead of constantly asking for something from prospects, why not give them value first?
Building a Media Company Inside a Software Company
HyperSpectral’s approach to content is more ambitious than typical B2B marketing. They’re essentially building a media company. “We actually think of ourselves as a media company,” Matt explains. “We have a podcast, a YouTube channel, a newsletter. We’re creating content five days a week.” This isn’t just repurposed blog posts—it’s original, video-first content designed to build trust and authority.
The content strategy serves multiple purposes. First, it positions HyperSpectral as thought leaders in the recruiting and sales hiring space. Second, it creates multiple touchpoints with potential customers before they’re ready to buy. “People might listen to one of our podcasts or read an article or see a piece of content, and then six months later they have a need,” Matt notes. “They already know who we are.”
The team produces diverse content formats: podcast episodes featuring recruiting leaders, YouTube videos with tactical hiring advice, newsletter deep-dives on industry trends, and LinkedIn posts that spark conversations. Matt himself has become increasingly active on LinkedIn, using the platform to share insights and build relationships with potential customers.
The Sales Model: When to Do What Doesn’t Scale
One of Matt’s key insights is knowing when to embrace inefficient processes for the sake of learning and customer success. Even as HyperSpectral has grown, they’ve maintained a high-touch sales approach for certain customer segments. “We still do a lot of white glove service,” Matt says. “We’ll set up the account for them, help them write their questions, train their team.”
This isn’t scalable in the traditional sense, but it serves critical functions. It helps customers succeed faster, reducing churn. It provides the team with continuous feedback about what customers actually need. And it builds the kind of relationships that lead to referrals and case studies.
However, Matt is pragmatic about when to scale back this approach. “As we move more up market and work with larger companies, they don’t need as much hand-holding,” he acknowledges. The key is matching the level of service to the customer’s needs and willingness to pay.
The Path to $3.5M ARR: What Actually Moved the Needle
HyperSpectral’s growth from zero to $3.5 million in ARR over 18 months wasn’t the result of a single breakthrough. Instead, it came from compounding small wins across multiple channels. “It’s been a combination of things,” Matt reflects. “Some paid advertising, a lot of outbound, increasing our prices, building trust through content, getting referrals from happy customers.”
The lesson here is important for early-stage founders: don’t expect one channel to solve all your growth challenges. Matt’s advice is to “try a bunch of different things and see what works.” Some experiments will fail, but the ones that succeed can be doubled down on and optimized.
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