It didn’t take long for Bob Gilbreath and Ryan Watson to jump head first into a new startup venture. Only days after cashing their exit checks, following the close of Ahalogy’s $50 million sale to Quotient (NYSE: QUOT) in March 2020, the two were back at a whiteboard brainstorming their next big thing.
Now, after a year of testing and building and talking to customers and hashing out all the details, that next big thing is ready for its official debut. Meet Hearty, a new professional network built on personal recommendations.
In terms of next acts, it’s a fast-moving one. The Greater Cincinnati company is nearing 1,000 users, recently moved into new office space, and has already landed its first round of funding. Hearty closed a $1.1 million pre-seed with participation from Chicago-based Hyde Park Venture Partners and Cleveland’s North Coast Ventures, both previous Ahalogy backers, along with individual angels from their own networks.
The funds will allow Hearty to expand and build its founding team. Besides Gilbreath, Ahalogy’s former CEO, and Watson, a former Ahalogy senior VP, co-founder Ross Lewellyn, Ahalogy’s former CTO, has joined the ranks, and the company added employee No. 4 with Jake Boyles as head of product.
Otherwise, the team plans to keep the budget small.
“For us, we’ve been on that venture treadmill before, where you’re racing the clock trying to achieve a milestone before you run out of money, and it’s this game of chicken,” Watson said. “We didn’t want to do that again so we wanted to give ourselves a ton of breathing room to have fun and figure it out.”
Hearty is based on the team’s passion for building great teams. Unlike LinkedIn, where connections can be extremely weak, Hearty users only recommend people they know and trust. Hearty’s platform includes profiles, for example, but unlike LinkedIn, the page is a snapshot of a person’s reputation, not their resume, based on who recommended a person and for what reasons. Watson called it a “resume 2.0.”
The main attraction is a feature called leaderboards, which are crowdsourced lists of top performers by skill, role or interest. Hearty currently has almost 130 leaderboards available, which, right now, range from “up & coming founders,” “project manager superstars,” “P&G alumni dream team” and more. Gilbreath said it’s a resource for finding jobs, for finding mentors or peers, or just networking in general.
“In the research we’ve done, on average you know only 26% of LinkedIn connections well enough to recommend them,” Gilbreath said. “This is about who’s on your A-list, who’s on your core team and sharing that with other people and helping make meaningful connections that otherwise get lost.”
The platform is styled a bit like Clubhouse, a drop-in audio chat social network, in that members have to invite other members. That keeps the talent level high, Gilbreath said. To date, Hearty has built a community of roughly 1,000 users, from companies like P&G, Kroger, Scripps, Coterie and Rhinegeist. Several hiring matches have already been made.
Gilbreath said the company has not developed a revenue model – the biggest goals for now are driving membership and providing value for both sides of the marketplace, those hiring and those looking for jobs. Growth, whether that happens by geography or by industry, “will depend on the network showing us the direction to go,” he said.
“We’re building something new, so we’re learning a ton, but it’s also a lot about how to keep members engaged,” Gilbreath said. “It’s moving fast, but it feels like we’ve got something that’s ready for prime time.”
Hearty, in addition to celebrating its launch, also has new digs. The company moved into its own office space in Blue Ash after previously calling Over-the-Rhine’s Union Hall home. Pete Blackshaw, CEO of Cintrifuse, a startup catalyst also based in that space – and among one of Hearty’s early adopters – had quite the parting words.
He said he thinks the Hearty team “is onto something huge.”
“Clearly we need new solutions in the talent market,” Blackshaw said. “We love it when successful founders double down.”
