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In the inaugural episode of Care, Code, and Capital, Adam Lewis joins the conversation to share the unfiltered story behind building a hiring technology company called Apploi — not as a straight success narrative, but as a journey shaped by pivots, market misreads, operational lessons, and moments where the company nearly didn’t survive.
What emerges is not just a founder story, but a masterclass in product-market fit, startup discipline, and the difference between hype and real business traction.
Adam’s earliest venture began in 2009 with an idea to digitize and modernize resumes — transforming static CVs into richer, more expressive candidate profiles.
The concept made intuitive sense. Resumes don’t fully represent people, and hiring teams always want more insight into candidates.
But the market didn’t move.
The core realization came later: building something logical or innovative isn’t the same as solving a problem companies are ready to change their workflows for.
The hiring ecosystem already relied on entrenched applicant tracking systems and established processes. Even a better solution couldn’t gain traction if it didn’t fit how organizations already operated.
That experience shaped a principle Adam emphasizes repeatedly:
Don’t start with the product. Start with the market problem and workflow.
Early revenue and customer wins initially suggested progress. But the customer base was inconsistent — different types of organizations using the product for completely different reasons.
Looking back, Adam describes a simple but powerful benchmark:
True product-market fit means having many nearly identical customers using your product in the same way for the same reason.
Without that consistency, growth becomes unpredictable and scaling becomes nearly impossible.
This distinction between “customers” and a true repeatable market would become one of the defining lessons of the journey.
The company’s next evolution became a hiring marketplace focused on high-volume employers such as retailers and restaurant groups.
The product gained impressive traction. Major brands signed on. Press coverage followed. Investor interest increased.
From the outside, everything looked successful.
Inside, the economics told a different story.
Marketplaces require balanced supply and demand. While employer demand grew quickly, candidate supply lagged behind. To compensate, the company spent heavily on manual candidate acquisition — flying teams to cities, running campus campaigns, and deploying brand ambassadors.
Customer logos grew.
Downloads grew.
Press mentions grew.
But the unit economics didn’t work.
Adam describes this period as a critical warning for founders:
Hype, PR, and big customer names can create the illusion of success while the underlying business model is failing.
Vanity metrics can mask structural problems for far too long.
Another major strategic error was expanding too quickly across multiple regions.
Instead of building deep density in a single local market — where both employers and candidates could reinforce the ecosystem — the company chased revenue opportunities nationwide.
In hindsight, Adam believes the smarter strategy would have been:
Start hyper-local.
Build supply and demand together.
Prove the model works in one concentrated area.
Then scale.
This insight aligns closely with modern startup wisdom: do things that don’t scale first, to eventually build something that does.
By 2016, the company faced its toughest moment.
Layoffs had reduced the team dramatically. Funding was nearly exhausted. Adam stopped taking income and even sold his home to keep the company alive while supporting his family.
At this stage, shutting down felt like a real possibility.
Emotionally and financially, the venture was at its lowest point.
In early 2017, while in Las Vegas, Adam attended a Sabbath prayer gathering where he unexpectedly reconnected with an acquaintance who asked how the company was doing.
After hearing the situation, the contact encouraged him not to shut down yet — and offered something far more valuable than advice:
Office space.
Shared staff resources.
Operational support.
And renewed confidence in the SaaS direction Adam had been considering.
This support gave the company enough runway to attempt one final pivot.
The breakthrough insight was shifting focus away from the hiring marketplace entirely.
Instead of connecting candidates and employers directly, the opportunity was to build software that helped organizations manage hiring internally — specifically an applicant tracking system optimized for high-volume hiring.
Existing enterprise ATS platforms were designed for corporate roles and complex hiring processes. They were cumbersome, slow, and poorly suited for hourly or frontline positions.
By simplifying and modernizing that workflow, the company finally aligned with a clear, repeatable market need.
This pivot ultimately became the foundation for real product-market fit.
Throughout the discussion, several consistent themes emerge from Adam’s experience:
Most importantly:
Success often comes not from the first idea — but from learning fast enough to find the right one.
