Juicebox

One mistake founders make is hiring too many people too early. For a long time, Juicebox was just three people. Then three plus our founding engineer, Minchu Kulkarni. We didn’t make another hire until the beginning of this year. In the early days, adding people slows you down. You’re still changing direction constantly. You’re rewriting assumptions every week. You’re deleting more than you’re shipping. Our philosophy is simple: you hire when adding people makes you faster, not when you have money. We only started scaling the team after revenue was growing consistently, crossed $1M ARR, and felt confident in our product direction. Fast forward ten months later, the engineering team is now seven team members strong, and on a trajectory that we’re very excited about. If you want to join a team where the momentum is compounding quickly, reach out - we’re growing!

We’re excited to welcome Mack Yi to Juicebox as our new Engineering Lead. What stood out immediately was his range of past experiences. He’s spent the last few years at Granica leading engineering for new products and taking ideas from zero to production. Before that he spent five years at Airbnb working on reliability, categorization, and large scale data pipelines across some of their highest traffic surfaces. It’s rare to find someone who’s equally comfortable in the early stage chaos and in environments where every system has to scale to millions of users. Mack’s only been here a short time but he’s already deep in one of our most requested feature areas. The full details are coming soon, but it will help companies put their existing data to work and surface people they should be talking to much faster. He’s going to be a big unlock for what we’re building next, and we’re thrilled he’s a part of the team!

The easiest way for a founder to lose touch with their users is to not dogfood your own product. At Juicebox, I lead all product, design, and engineering hiring. That means I work directly in Juicebox every week - not as someone building recruiting software, but as a hiring manager competing for the same candidates everyone else wants. The Bay Area engineering market is extremely competitive. Pass-through rates are tiny. Great candidates drop off for dozens of reasons, and finding the right people can be brutal and time-consuming. In fact, more than half my time goes into recruiting right now. But that process helps me understand recruiters much more deeply - what they’re up against every day, where the real friction is, and what actually matters in their workflow. You understand a job differently when you have to do it yourself. And for me, it’s become something I genuinely look forward to.

This is what led us to deciding if we wanted Juicebox to be PLG or sales-led. When we looked at our early users, the pattern became obvious fast. Hundreds of people were signing up every day and trying the product without asking anyone for permission. They were running searches, tweaking filters, testing the edges of the platform, and forming their own conclusions within minutes. A single recruiter could evaluate Juicebox on their own and they could tell immediately if it made their workflow faster or cleaner. That energy naturally shaped the first half of our motion. Our users were already trying our product before we formalized self-serve. But as larger teams started showing up, the other half of the story took shape. Their evaluation rhythm was different. They wanted structure, alignment, and a shared view of how Juicebox would fit into their existing systems. What didn’t change was the entry point. They still wanted a real trial and compare their existing workflow with what we were providing Every motion eventually collapsed back into the same center: a trial. Even when the conversation began with a VP or a director, the trial pulled the rest of the team in. Recruiters tested the filters, the autopilot. They saw the differences together. The decision came from experiencing the product. So we built a product that let people choose their path, and both paths converged on the same truth - the product had to be tried to be understood.

The best people for most jobs never even apply. They’re not scrolling job boards or chasing job alerts. They’re out there doing great work, often invisible to the companies that need them most. That’s the paradox of hiring today. Most roles get filled by whoever shows up, not by whoever’s best for the job. Outbound recruiting was meant to fix that. But even now, only a small fraction of roles are actively sourced. For everything else, companies still wait and hope. We built Juicebox because we believe the future of hiring combines human judgment with tools that work quietly in the background to search, sort, and surface the right people. That means recruiters spend less time finding candidates and more time connecting with them. It means every company can actively search for every role. And it means candidates start getting opportunities that actually fit, even for jobs they never would have looked for. When that happens, hiring stops being about luck or timing. It becomes about fit, curiosity, and potential. In fact, many members of our own team were sourced using Juicebox. We use it every day to do what it was built for: to help great people find each other faster.

The most forward-thinking hiring teams all have one thing in common: strong recruiting operations. It’s an overlooked function more people are just starting to understand but inside the companies that take hiring seriously, recruiting ops have been central for years. If sales has sales ops, recruiting has recruiting ops. And the job is almost identical in spirit: → Build the right stack. → Design the right workflows. → Enable the team to operate at its best. In practice, recruiting ops sits at the intersection of tools, process and performance. For us at Juicebox, this role is critical. When we work with a strong recruiting ops team, everything moves faster - adoption, experimentation, agent rollouts, and long-term ROI. They’re the ones pushing for better systems, testing new tools, and rethinking what great recruiting operations can look like in an AI-native world. Some of the most impressive implementations we’ve seen came from recruiting ops leaders who owned it, shaped it, and pushed their teams into the future.

Meet Eric Lee - the kind of hire every founder wants We met Eric through our investor David Cahn. He’d lived that pain - recruiting, managing contractors, building ops-heavy systems at Scale AI, so he’d seen both sides of the problem. We gave him a few case studies as part of the process. One of them: orchestrate go-to-market systems using Clay. He’d never used it before. We gave him 3 hours. Three hours later, he came back with working campaigns - campaigns we literally turned on the following week after he joined. Since then, Eric has: 1) Built our entire outbound GTM system using Unify 2) Built Juicebox’s finance function from scratch - now a critical part of how we scale 3) Started Pizza Mondays and filled the fridge with icecream That’s what I love most about working with Eric - he moves seamlessly between finance, systems, and strategy. He’s a builder in every sense of the word. Welcome to Juicebox, Eric. 🚀