2023 Shareholder Letter

And creating a real paid newsletter

We think we’ve come so far when in reality….

I don’t have any financial shareholders. So what is the shareholder letter?

My goal has always been to write more. And one of the easier ways to do so is to follow Gary V’s advice of “document, don’t create.”

One thing I regret when I started Interview Query in the beginning was being too paranoid. It was my first venture so I shied away from reaching out to people in the space. Competition usually doesn’t matter as much as you’d think. As another wiser founder in my space told me early on “There are thousands of ways for us to fail before it’s due to competition.”

My latest experiment is to be accountable to readers and hopefully providing valuable insights on the creation process. So in addition to my regular newsletter where I write a few times a month on finance, business, life, etc…I’ll be publishing:

• Regular monthly updates on companies / projects / new launches

• Business ideas and trends that I’m following

• Quarterly review and reports on IQ and future insights

• Share any templates I use across operations, personal finance, bootstrapping, etc..

I’m still a little paranoid? I mean it’s hard not to be. But again - I want to write more. And I want the accountability.

To start, here is my 2023 non-shareholder shareholder letter first sent out to a couple friends in early April 2024. It’s a review of 2023 for IQ and how I’m thinking about the future of projects / business in 2024.

Introduction

Five years ago I walked into the Chase Bank in San Francisco during my lunch break and transferred $2000 into a newly opened business bank account for a new company called Interview Query, LLC.

Five years later, we’ve onboarded 160K users, supported over 12,000 customers, and placed thousands of data scientists, analysts, and engineers into jobs at various companies across the world. I’m super happy about the success that we’ve gotten through.

In the Spring of 2021 - Interview Query wrote it’s last “board meeting doc” before never writing another one again since (I’ll publish these soon as well). In the time since, IQ and the broader data science job market has rapidly changed with Covid ending, ed-tech getting less popular, and a broader realization that capital allocation into growth was not returning the results we wanted.

The new shareholder letter is tasked with setting accountability for myself on running IQ with reinvigoration, along with continued acknowledgement of the business goals to come for the company and myself.

Interview Query

Review of 2023

Last year in 2023 we saw some crazy developments. At the end of 2022 - we had our worst revenue month since starting Interview Query with a drop of almost 50% in revenue from November of 2022 to December of 2022. While December is usually a slow month for us anyway, this drop was unprecedented as Q4 2022 was already pacing at a 25% drop from Q3. The tech job market layoffs became an extremely slow month for us and consequently a stressful time for yours truly.

Since then we've seen a rebound after July of 2023 in overall conversion rates as the tech market began to recover. It was also partly driven by the launch of IQ coder, a lower tier plan to remain competitive on pricing, which drove an overall increase in the number of new customers. While the average LTV of our customers has fallen, we believe over time it will benefit us from a more competitive standpoint as well.