the whole market has been telling this story wrong.
you already proved it. let me help you tell it.
hey brett. i've been chewing on our call. here's what i see, where i think you're sitting on a bigger story than you're telling, and why i think i'm the person to help you tell it.
what you already proved
for 18 months you sold a hiring solution. you got nods of recognition and not enough urgency. you sounded like every other ai vendor to a head of ta who couldn't tell the difference between inference and evaluation in the first place.
then you stopped selling hiring and started selling data quality across the employee lifecycle. and the deals exploded.
4 logos
microsoft. servicenow. hitachi. amplitude. all on the data positioning. none of them showed up for the hiring pitch.
bigger ACVs
the contracts you fight for now are an order of magnitude larger than anything in the hiring-tool category.
$300B+
the L&D market you now play into. plus the certification market. plus everything that touches workforce planning. hiring is suddenly a downstream feature, not the headline.
that isn't a marketing tweak. that's the market telling you which problem they're actually trying to solve. and you're the only one with the demonstrated proficiency layer to serve it.
the story that needs to be told
the category isn't ai hiring. the category is skills data infrastructure. every talent decision in a company runs on bad data: self-attested or inferred from broken credentials. you have the only real source of demonstrated capability underneath it.
the timing is loud. board-level mandate is do more with less, maximize productivity of the workforce you already have. that maps to your repositioning perfectly. hiring is now a secondary concern in those rooms.
the staffing and bpo wedge is the carve-out where the hiring story still wins. and the data points you have there are ridiculous: 90% fewer false positives, 50% faster cycle time, 70 to 75% lower cost to hire. that's an ops-leader story, not an hr-tech story.
someone has to tell both of these stories. clearly, loudly, and in language each buyer actually uses. the companies that hear them first will move first.
why i'm the person to tell it
i lived the market that got this wrong.
i sold inside the hiring-solution-first generation of ai vendors. i hit the exact wall you described: heads of ta who couldn't differentiate technologies, emotional pitch that never converted to urgency, deals stuck on relatability instead of roi. i know why the old story doesn't close. that's the most useful experience i can bring you.
i've been writing this thesis publicly for a year.
selling with ai is built on one premise: ai gets sold wrong in skeptical markets, and positioning beats product. the audience is gtm leaders, sales enablement, customer success heads. the exact buyer your data platform now serves. a series of posts on “why ai hiring is the wrong category” reaches them cold, and they'll take a meeting on the back of it.
i know the network you said is your highest-leverage channel.
you told me the staffing and bpo market is tech-skeptical from being oversold, and warm intros through trusted networks are the way in. that's me. those people will take my call because of who i am, not what i'm selling. that's the hardest thing to manufacture at your stage. i bring it standing up.
first 90 days
nail the story. open the network.
- ·lock the category claim. skills data infrastructure. write the version of it the market hasn't heard yet.
- ·map the heymilo and staffing network. surface the 10-15 highest-leverage warm intros across staffing and bpo.
- ·run the first 5 conversations personally.
- ·ship the playbook for the vertical: objection handling, demo flow, roi calculator, pilot structure.
make the market hear it.
- ·launch a swai content series on the wrong-category thesis. inbound interest plus a credibility asset for the team.
- ·first pilots signed. early case study material flowing.
- ·stand up the partner and referral program.
turn it into series a fuel.
- ·pilot data in hand. logos and metrics landing.
- ·feed the series a narrative: category story, customer story, traction.
- ·open the next vertical.
one more thing.
you said on the call you want demonstrated capability over credentials. so here's what i built 48 hours after we talked.
this is the work. not the pitch.
the ask
let's spend 30 minutes seeing if this maps to what you actually need.
lfgrow.
let's fucking grow.