#253 - Lars van Wieren, CEO Starred - on the secrets to dominating a niche

This podcast interview focuses on the fact candidates will remember how you made them feel - and why we should make it an experience that matters. My guest is Lars van Wieren, Founder and CEO of Starred. Lars is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. He started his career at Google, and in 2013 he founded Starred - made tons of mistakes, chased shiny objects - and then restarted the same company in 2019.  His mission: to shake up an area of recruitment that was broken. He found out that candidate experience feedback can be super impactful for candidates of all walks of life to share their voices, as well as helping to combat issues with diversity and inclusion bias in the hiring process. As such, Starred want to give people a voice to improve their candidate experience, creating a happier workforce in the long term. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Lars to my podcast. We explore how the recruitment experience is broken and what consequences this has on companies. Lars shares some the biggest mistakes he made in taking Starred where it is today. He explains what made him decide to restart the company and say goodbye to 80%-90% of the revenue. He then elaborates on how he used the momentum of the fresh start as the mechanism to dominate the right segments of the market.  Here's one of his quotes It's a lot of fun when you start to start saying no. So, in the beginning, we went after every opportunity. I often compare it to Philippine dynamite fishing. Just throw some dynamite in the water, and some fish will come up, but you don't know which fish.  What we're doing today is looking at our most successful clients and finding similar companies in the market. Once you know your target audience, it's much more fun to target those companies because you can spend more money to make it far more personal to reach out to them. During this interview, you will learn four things: The signals to pay attention to understand you're positioned too broadly Why you should consider opting for stable slow-growth markets over extreme high-growth markets to grow fast That defensible differentiation is not about having most features and functions What metrics to hit before going into the next market For more information about the guest from this week: Lars van Wieren Website Starred Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Get my free, 2 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices