Scout

Looking for a killer ops person to help out with everything post-sale at Scout. This person will work directly with me on customer strategy, onboarding, and support. They'll be the first dedicated hire on the customer side, so they get to help build the function from scratch. Not looking for a ton of experience. Just looking for someone that's smart, ambitious, and eager to build. If this sounds like you (or someone you know), DM me!

"Moat" is a stupid term. The real question is: what's your competitive advantage, and is it actually hard for someone else to replicate? For a lot of AI companies right now, the honest answer is "not much." The underlying models are commoditizing fast. Everyone has access to the same foundation. Proprietary data moats are overstated because most of that data isn't actually that unique. So what's left? The real competitive advantage is the orchestration of a very specific workflow that requires multiple moving parts, multiple data sources, and deep domain knowledge to get right. And then doing it at a scale where you can do it better and cheaper than any company could justify doing on their own. Let me use Scout as an example. We help recruiting firms advertise their candidates to companies hiring for roles those candidates are a great fit for. Sounds simple. Under the hood, a ton of things have to work together: 1) You need to ingest candidate info and understand their skills, experience, and what they're looking for. 2) You need to continuously scan multiple job data sources in real time for genuine contextual matches, not just keyword matches. 3) You need to identify the right decision-maker at each company for that specific role. 4) You need to pull accurate contact info from multiple sources and cross-reference them. 5) You need to generate outreach personalized to both the candidate and the role, sharing enough to create interest but not enough to give away the candidate's identity. And you need to orchestrate all of this across multiple channels with intelligent sequencing and follow-up logic. Any one of those steps is solvable on its own. But getting all of them to work together reliably, at scale, thousands of times per week, while continuously improving through feedback loops? That's where the advantage actually lives. Every time we run this workflow, we learn. Which candidates generate interest. Which matching criteria predict a response. Which approaches convert. That compounding knowledge makes the system better for every client. A recruiting firm could try to stitch this together themselves. But they'd be starting from zero on every optimization we've already made, and paying full price for each component instead of benefiting from our economies of scale. This pattern applies way beyond recruiting. The next generation of AI companies won't win because they have a better model. They'll win because they've orchestrated a complex, domain-specific workflow so well that it becomes irrational for anyone to replicate it in-house. The advantage isn't the AI. It's the system around it.

Here's a thought exercise for anyone running a recruiting firm: Imagine you hired someone whose only job was to take your best candidates, go research every relevant job opening out there, read through the descriptions, make sure it's actually a good match, find the hiring manager, and send personalized outreach. Hundreds of times a week. Every single week. How much time would that take? A few of our clients have told us it's essentially a full-time job when you do it properly. That's $50-70K a year in salary plus commission, benefits, management overhead, training, and the risk that the person leaves and you start over. But here's the real question: if you DID have someone doing that every single day, how many extra placements do you think you'd make in a year? Two? Five? Ten? Even on the conservative end, the ROI would be massive because the activity itself is so high-value. You're putting vetted candidates directly in front of hiring managers who need them right now. Most firms know this is the highest-leverage BD activity they could be doing. They just can't justify the cost or the time to do it manually, so it doesn't get done consistently. Now imagine AI doing the same thing faster, more consistently, and at a fraction of the cost and responsibility of a full-time hire. That's what we built at Scout. And the ROI math gets pretty ridiculous when you compare it to the alternative.

If I were running a recruiting agency, I'd focus on placing these 8 roles in 2026. I spent weeks digging into BLS data, workforce studies, and hiring reports to find roles where demand is through the roof and supply is genuinely broken. Not just "hard to fill" but structurally unfillable through normal channels. Here's what I found: 1. Cybersecurity professionals. Only 74 qualified workers exist for every 100 openings. That's not a talent shortage, that's a talent crisis. 2. Registered nurses. 194,500 openings per year and over 1 million RNs retiring by 2030. The pipeline literally cannot keep up. 3. AI/ML engineers. Average time to hire is 142 days. Average salary jumped $50K in a single year. Companies are desperate. 4. CPAs and auditors. 300,000+ left the profession since 2020. For every 5 open CPA roles there are only 3 qualified candidates. 5. Nurse practitioners and CRNAs. 40% projected growth and CRNAs earning $212K+ median. The supply constraints here are real. 6. Electricians. Data center electricians are making $240K-$280K in peak markets. The 4-5 year apprenticeship means this shortage isn't going anywhere. 7. DevOps and cloud engineers. Sub-2% unemployment. Median salary hit $177,500. Every company needs them and nobody has enough. 8. Engineers (civil, mechanical, electrical). 184,000 leave the field annually but only 166,000 new grads enter. Do the math. The common thread is that posting a job and waiting for applicants does not work for any of these roles. The people who fill them are already employed and not actively looking. We originally put this research together at Scout because our customers kept asking us "what types of candidates are working best in outbound campaigns?" Turns out the answer maps almost perfectly to supply and demand. When a hiring manager has had a role open for months with no qualified applicants, an outbound message with a real candidate hits different. I packaged the full research into a report that breaks down all 26 roles we analyzed and the specific US metros where demand is highest. If you want it, DM me and I'll send it over. #recruiting #talentacquisition #hiring

I think recruiting firms are about to become more valuable than they've ever been, and here's why. There's a lot of fear in the industry right now about AI replacing recruiters, but I think it's the opposite. Robert Half just published that 67% of HR leaders say AI-generated applications are actively slowing down their hiring process. 84% of HR teams say their workloads have gone up. 65% say verifying skills has gotten significantly harder. Companies are drowning in AI-generated noise from candidates who mass-apply with inflated resumes and fabricated experience. And the result is that hiring managers are more overwhelmed, more skeptical, and more desperate for help than ever before. That's where recruiters come in. No AI tool can replace a recruiter who actually picks up the phone, meets a candidate face to face, understands their strengths, and puts their reputation on the line by recommending them. That relationship and trust is something AI fundamentally cannot replicate, and the demand for it is only going up. The firms that lean into this moment and position themselves as the ones who cut through the noise with real, vetted, proven talent are going to have the best years they've ever had. AI isn't coming for recruiters. It's coming for the noise. And the more noise there is, the more valuable the people who can filter it become. If you're a recruiter, be optimistic. The world needs you now more than ever.

Three reasons I've been loving working with recruiting firms: 1. The people. Everyone I meet in the space is so kind, ambitious, and easy to work with. It makes sense because you can't be a successful recruiter without those traits. 2. I love helping small and mid-sized businesses, which is the majority of our customer base. Running a small business is HARD, and there's no better feeling than helping them grow profitably. 3. The ROI is clear. Most of our customers operate on a contingent model, so they get paid when someone gets hired. That makes it really easy to measure success and align incentives. Here's the part that still blows my mind: if our customers get even ONE extra placement over a full YEAR of working with us, the service pays for itself (and more). With the results we're seeing after only a few months of launch (placements happening in under 60 days), one extra placement in a year feels like shooting fish in a barrel. If you're a recruiting firm looking to crush it in 2026, happy to share more about what we're doing at Scout. Just DM me.

One of our clients has a recruiter who built a massive book of business over 13 years using a strategy that a lot of firms completely overlook. Every time she ran a search, she would take the candidates she sourced but didn't place and go advertise them to other companies hiring for similar roles. While most recruiters see unplaced candidates as a sunk cost, she saw dollar signs. Every great candidate that didn't get the job was a new opportunity waiting to happen. And it worked over and over again because it gets around the two objections that kill most recruiting outreach. Companies either say "we don't work with outside recruiters" or "we already work with five recruiters." Both of those are dead ends if all you're offering is availability. But when you lead with a real candidate who fits a role they're actively trying to fill, the conversation changes completely. The firm that says "we don't use recruiters" starts thinking maybe they'd make an exception. The one that already works with five firms thinks maybe a sixth is worth it if they're bringing someone none of the others have surfaced. You're not pitching a service anymore. You're solving a problem they have right now. The challenge is that doing this manually is brutal. Finding the right roles, matching the candidate, tracking down the hiring manager, writing something personalized about the candidate, following up. That's hours per candidate, which is exactly why most firms default back to "let me know when you need help" even though they know it doesn't convert. That's the problem we built Scout to solve. We automated the entire workflow so recruiting firms can do this at scale without the manual grind. But even if you never use us, the insight still applies. If your BD strategy is built around telling companies you're available, you're leaving money on the table. Lead with your best candidates. That's the foot in the door.

Three years ago we raised venture capital to build Scout. Now, we're pivoting (kind-of). Scout started as a self-serve outreach platform. Find contact info, build campaigns, send personalized outreach, the whole nine yards. Anyone could use it. We had (and still have) real users, real revenue, and a product that "works." But we were one of a hundred tools doing some version of the same thing, and when you're one of a hundred, growth is painful. So we stopped trying to build a better version of what already existed and started asking a completely different question: "Who has a specific, high-value outreach problem that nobody is solving well?" I spent months talking to different types of companies about how they do outreach, what works, what doesn't, and what's a total waste of time. And I kept landing on the same vertical: recruiting. I kept hearing that the best way to land a new client is to lead with the perfect candidate. Not "hey, let me know when you're hiring," because that gets ignored. But "I have a strong candidate who's a great fit for the role you just posted." The problem is doing this at scale is a nightmare. You're monitoring job boards, matching candidates to roles, tracking down the right hiring manager, writing personalized outreach, and following up across channels. It's impossible to keep up. So we built the whole thing end to end. You send us a candidate, our AI matches them to relevant open roles, identifies the right contacts, and sends personalized outreach. All running while you sleep. We went from selling software to delivering an outcome. Our clients are booking meetings in week one and making placements within 60 days, with reply rates running 10-15%, which if you know anything about cold outreach today, is kind of insane. I'm sharing this because there's a bigger shift happening that every founder should be paying attention to. The era of horizontal software that anyone can use is fading, and the next wave of companies are the ones that pick a specific industry, go deep, and use AI to deliver the entire outcome. Let's take the whole "AI SDR" space as an example. They don't work because they're trying to be everything to everyone and don't understand any specific industry's sales motion well enough to get results. That's the trap most horizontal AI tools will keep falling into. Recruiting is our starting point, not our ceiling. Long term, we're building fully agentic, done-for-you outreach workflows for other verticals, niche by niche. Pick an industry, learn how they sell, build the AI around that workflow, and deliver the outcome. That's our new playbook. The future of this company is going deep, not wide. And I'm really excited about where we're headed :) P.S. - check out the new website at www.tryscout.ai