From $15M to $1.8M and Back: How Dover Found PMF Twice (George Carollo)

Dover is one of those YC companies that looks “obviously successful” from the outside. But the real story is way messier: they hit PMF with a product called Autopilot, scaled fast, and then the 2022 hiring crash basically deleted their market overnight.

In this episode of Before It Clicked, Sunny Rekhi sits down with George Carollo (cofounder of Dover) to unpack what it actually feels like to lose product-market fit, run experiments inside a ~30-person company, and claw your way back to growth. Today, Dover is a lean, profitable business doing ~ $6M in revenue, supporting ~50 recruiters on its marketplace with a ~10-person core team.

What you’ll learn:

- How Dover grew Autopilot from ~$1M → $3M → $6M → $15M… and what “PMF” looked like in practice

- The moment the market flipped in 2022 (and why churn felt like a “light switch”)

- What happens when you’ve raised $23M, hit ~85 people, and suddenly need to reinvent the company

- Why Dover launched a free ATS (now used by ~1,000 companies) and a bunch of “micro-products”… and why none of it fixed the core issue

- The email that sparked Dover’s second act: the Recruiter Marketplace, and the “why now” behind fractional recruiting in an AI-driven world

- George’s biggest meta-lesson: we only hear the “iterate forever” stories when they work

Chapters

00:00 Cold open — “This might be real… then layoffs”00:39 Intro: Dover found PMF twice03:19 Dover today: ~$6M revenue, (near) profitable, lean team05:13 2019: becoming recruiters to learn the problem07:31 “Saturated market” + the leap of faith08:48 No strong “why now” (and why that’s okay)13:49 Opportunity cost & timeboxing16:47 YC twist: Swap Space → recruiting17:42 Building Autopilot from a service19:20 PMF as a spectrum (referrals as the signal)21:34 The service→product trap: who owns outcomes?24:02 Autopilot growth: $1M → $15M24:34 2022 layoffs: losing PMF overnight29:02 The first layoff + “line in the sand”29:52 Trying to save Autopilot (self-serve, pricing experiments)30:56 Free ATS launch (and why)36:59 The “spray & pray” era (6 micro-products)38:20 The email that sparked the Marketplace42:21 Marketplace “why now”: AI leverage + spiky hiring45:10 Why agencies break (incentives + cost)47:07 Founder-led bet: team-of-one experiment (Apr→Sept)53:38 Killing Autopilot once Marketplace worked57:27 Selling the pivot internally (metrics + deck)01:03:20 Survivorship bias: “we only hear the ones that work”01:07:00 What’s next for Dover01:08:39 Hiring / recruiting partners