Building a Global SaaS Company from Costa Rica with Nick Livingston, CEO of Honeit | Nearshore Cafe

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**Brian:** Welcome everyone to another episode of The Nearshore Cafe podcast. I’m Brian Samson, your host. If you’ve ever been interested in Costa Rica, building a business out of Costa Rica, or moving your family to Costa Rica, this is going to be the episode for you! We have Nick Livingston, CEO of Honeit. Nick, it is great to have you on the show.

**Nick:** Thank you, Brian. I appreciate the invite. Nice to be here.

**Brian:** Nick, right before we get started, I want to thank our sponsor. That’s Plug Technologies, Plug.te — a great way to connect all the talent from Latin America to growing US companies. Well, Nick, let’s go ahead and get started. Super interesting story — I know a little bit about it, our audience doesn’t. How did you end up in Costa Rica?

**Nick:** Quick story: I spent most of my career working in New York City as a technical recruiter and leading recruiting teams at companies like MTV and Viacom. So, I had a fun New York experience working in the entertainment music business there. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to get closer to tech and work at earlier stage companies, helping them build out TA teams and recruiting teams from the ground up. In doing so, we had two daughters while living in California, and then had a third daughter, Fiona. My wife was on paternity leave. I had started Honeit, and she was working out of coffee shops, working for a tech company as well. We thought, “”We could be working out of coffee shops kind of anywhere in the world, right? Why are we paying Bay Area rates?”” So, this was back in Craigslist days where we just posted our house on Craigslist to see if we could maybe sublet it for six months as a furnished rental or whatnot. Sure enough, we got a bunch of interest quickly that night or the next day, and we said, “”Well, I guess we could sublet our place for six months and give it a spin.”” So, this was essentially November 2016 when we posted it, and we moved down here January 2017.

**Brian:** Wow, incredible! Had you been to Costa Rica before? Was that already on your list, or was the world your oyster, and you were trying to trade off between a bunch of other places?

**Nick:** My wife was working in kind of experiential travel technology sales. She was selling software to remote tour operators around the world, and a couple of the customers happened to be in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, working at various dive shops or tourist spots here. She had always enjoyed her conversations with them, and they sounded like a good community. She started doing a little more research, and we basically just packed up and moved down here kind of on a whim. I had almost forgotten though that I had come down here in high school for a Spanish trip when I was in high school for a week, and or stayed with a family in San Jose for a week — Spanish only. Then we spent a week on the beach. But I almost forgot that, and I don’t think it led to my decision, but now it makes total sense that we ended up here.

**Brian:** So now, for those who haven’t been, give us a lay of the land: San Jose, the big city; some might know of the cloud forest or the tropical rainforest. Give us a lay of the land of the country, and then it was Tamarindo that you settled in.

**Nick:** We’re in a little surf town on the west coast. It’s in Guanacaste, which is the region, or the kind of the state, within Costa Rica. Costa Rica is a very small country, and it has coasts on both sides. So, we’ve got the Caribbean coast on the east, and we’ve got where we live on the west. San Jose is kind of in the middle. For a country with only about five million people, I think San Jose, the capital, has like two and a half to three million there, and then the remaining people are spread out all over the rest of the country. So, just for context, it’s not big. It only takes us about four hours with no traffic to drive to San Jose, and when we first moved down here, we would do that to go to the PriceSmart, which was the Costco. We would go there for healthcare and hospitals if we needed to do some sort of operation or more of a procedure, something like that. There are hospitals near the airport, near us, about an hour away in Liberia, Costa Rica, where we have the closest airport. And there’s even a little mini airport right in Tamarindo where you can take a 12-seat plane and zip to San Jose if you need to.

**Brian:** So, were you originally thinking maybe you’d settle in San Jose, or was it always that you wanted to get free of the urban environments?

**Nick:** Yeah, I think after eight years in New York City, living in Manhattan, and then six, seven years living in the San Francisco Bay Area, we kind of wanted a change of pace, honestly. It’s been fun. Tamarindo is a really small town. It’s a very, very tiny surf town, with a small local population and then a bigger tourist population from time to time, especially during high season. But yeah, we’ve really enjoyed living in a small town where you know everybody that works at the restaurants and the bars, and you recognize the people on the street, and people recognize us. It just kind of takes me back. I was born and raised in the Midwest in Kansas, and it’s just like smaller towns — people kind of recognize people, say hi. Nobody’s from here necessarily, at least expats from Canada, the US, or Europe, so people are more open to making friends and creating new relationships and things like that.

**Brian:** Sure. With the expats, are there other expats around, or is it mostly locals?

**Nick:** No. Tamarindo is a good blend of local Ticos from Costa Rica, as well as expats. There are a lot of Canadians that live here. Many come down, fly down for the winter months and get out of the cold, as do many Northern United States states like Washington, Colorado. There are certain states that come down here maybe more than others, but lots of Europeans as well. It’s a really good mix. The reason we settled on Tamarindo is there are really good schools here as well, and we have three young daughters. Our youngest was six weeks old when we moved down here, so she’s basically grown up Tica, but the other two are fluent in Spanish as well. The schools — there are a number of good schools to choose from in this area, depending on if you want a big school, small school, traditional kind of Western school, or if you want something more experiential. There’s all of that here.

**Brian:** Yeah. And have you been there the whole time, like the last seven, eight years straight through, or do you guys go back and forth?

**Nick:** So, one of the things we didn’t realize moving down here is that when you live in a tourist destination, as kind of an anti-vacation, you live here the nine or ten months that it’s not busy. You can actually sublet or rent your house during the high seasons to the tourists, right? So, it’s kind of the best of both worlds. You get to live in that interesting place the low season, and then you can sublet when you’re back for the holidays, visiting family in the States, or for a month or two in the summer when the kids are out of school. What we didn’t realize is we see family — like my dad and our family — maybe more down here than we did when we lived in New York City or California, because we’d only see people a week at a time there. Whereas now, my dad will come down for a month or two, and we’ll go back for a month or two, depending on the schedules. So that was kind of interesting. Oh, you asked if we lived here straight through or popped back.

**Nick:** Yeah, so we were here pre-COVID. COVID happened, kind of changed everything. It was a very small, sleepy town for those couple of years when there wasn’t a lot of tourism. After that, we kind of wanted a reset, so we actually moved back to the US for about a school year and a half, just to go through a storage unit that we had been paying for because we moved down here for six months and just kind of stayed. So, we had a pod somewhere in California that we needed to go through and clear out. It also gave a good chance to give the girls a go at a US public school for a year and kind of see what they’d been feeling like they were missing, perhaps what they see on TV, the movies, or whatnot. So, we did that in Spokane, Washington, and then moved back here. So, this is our second school year since we moved back to Tamarindo.

**Brian:** Wow, incredible! I love the courage and exuberance. I’ve got two small kids, and we did all of our travel pre-kids. It’s awesome what you and your wife have decided to do.

**Nick:** Well, the kids are flexible. I think they probably adjust to things easier than we do, but we want to give them a safe and consistent growing up or whatnot. I think it’s actually strange here; it reminds me of growing up, kind of like the way we grew up, maybe in the ’80s, right? You can walk around, you can do things maybe you can’t do in big cities or super urban environments or whatnot. So, we’ll come back to Costa Rica in a second. But you’re CEO of a software company. Tell us more about what Honeit is, what your vision is, and what you’re trying to build.

**Nick:** Awesome. My background is mostly recruiting in TA. Honeit is a global communication and interview intelligence platform purpose-built for recruiters and talent partners. We’ve got recruiters all around the world using Honeit for their most meaningful conversations with candidates, with clients, or with references. Then they can share insights from those interview conversations with their clients or with hiring teams who might also be spread out around the world. This concept of how do you qualify or interview or screen or evaluate talent when you’re not inviting people into the office to, say, meet six people in one shot? It can become very spread out and slow down the process. So, with Honeit, we’re about empowering recruiters to be able to facilitate really comprehensive interviews on the very first call with a candidate, and then click a button and share interview highlights and insights with the various stakeholders for instant collaboration. What we’re finding is it removes all the ‘he said, she said’ or the misinterpretation from the screening and submission process or the interview process, and it actually cuts down the number of steps it takes to get a good candidate through the process with the company.

**Brian:** Was this a problem that you faced when you were leading talent prior to building Honeit?

**Nick:** I saw it as an external recruiter where we’re submitting candidates and see a slow process that we can’t really control. I saw it at MTV Networks Viacom where you’re working with a big company and navigating multiple stakeholders and helping hire important folks, but taking a long time there. I saw it at early-stage startups. At TubeMogul, we went through an IPO in SF, and that was a crazy run. But in doing so, when you grow from startup to 360 employees, the interview process changes, right? At first, the CEO or founder is that first interview, and then before we know it, Brett was the sixth interview, right? What happens is the company’s best and brightest evaluators of talent usually get pushed to the very end of the process, and by then, you’ve had five or six interview conversations with nothing to show for it and no data. So, the idea is how can we get our best and brightest executives involved much sooner in the process, maybe even after the phone screen, to start closing the best candidates? So yeah, firsthand at TubeMogul, but it’s a common problem across most organizations — how to get people aligned.

**Brian:** You use Starlink, which I think kind of mitigates a lot of this, neutralizes it. Can you share more about your own setup and how you’ve built your own infrastructure?

**Nick:** Yeah. We’ve got, what’s kind of ironic here in Costa Rica, is that they only recently paved the road we live on, but we’ve had really good fiber optic internet ever since we’ve lived here. Then we got a Starlink backup system, but I finally used Starlink more as a primary since it just seems to be faster and more reliable. So, it’s pretty straightforward. Most of the restaurants or bars in town would all have Wi-Fi that tourists could jump in and out of as they bounce around. Other than that, you do need like a SIM card, either an eSIM or just a physical SIM, in your cell phone if you want Costa Rica data plans and things like that.

**Brian:** So, we were talking about Honeit. Obviously, you’ve come from startups, you’ve come from larger companies. Did it feel like this was a global talent issue, or something that you saw more with startups, or something that, as a company scaled up, Honeit was an even bigger impact?

**Nick:** Well, I think clear communication is a really important thing, whether you’re an external recruiter, further away from decision-makers, or an internal TA partner in the middle of a hiring team and trying to get everybody on the same page. So, it starts with clear communication after that intake call. How do you get everybody involved, aligned, and on the same page with what a hiring manager may want for this specific role in this specific team? There’s just clear communication from the very first step. Then, as you talk to candidates and you uncover insights that aren’t on a resume, how can recruiters or talent partners share those insights or interview intelligence with other stakeholders for collaboration? Talking to people is an important part of the recruiting process, yet there really hadn’t been a communication platform for recruiters and talent partners. Everyone was using either their telephone, or through COVID, we switched to video calls. But the idea that whether you do a phone call or a video call with someone, what is the data we share? That can vary dramatically depending on the toolkit you use. In many cases, if you end a call and you only have your scribbled notes to show for it, that’s limiting to then try to make a case. Or even with a note-taking bot, if you just have some bullet points or a general summary, is that enough to showcase communication skills, technical knowledge, domain experience — all of these other things that we’re trying to capture and share across the hiring team? So, we think that while note-taking tools are helpful, it’s the power of voice and the human voice that can kind of shine through to candidates to get candidates excited about an opportunity or to get the right candidates through the process faster because hiring managers know it when they hear it. That’s what’s kind of missing with note-taking tools and that type of thing.

**Brian:** So, if I had it right, Nick, you started Honeit in 2014, but then the Costa Rica move was 2017. Can you tell us more about the first couple of years of Honeit, how you got this off the ground, first couple of hires, all that stuff, and then where the company was when you moved to Costa Rica?

**Nick:** Yeah. We’ve essentially self-funded the company. In the early days, I was doing talent advisory and consulting work with clients, helping companies recruit, hire, and scale, as I would have more as a consultant. But obviously, using the technology behind the scenes introduces the technology and helps us refine it as we continue to add features. We went through a couple of pivots early on as we learned from different things and continued to build the platform. Now, it’s been almost 10 years, and we have a fully baked communication platform: everything from scheduling automation to note-taking automation, to call summaries, to write-ups, to feedback — again, purpose-built for recruiters and talent partners. So, it’s taken a little longer, but I think we were ahead of the interview intelligence curve a bit, and now folks are kind of catching on. COVID helped accelerate that in a way, but it also kind of shook things up from a hiring standpoint in general, right? Companies paused hiring. Companies had to figure out what their remote work policies were. I feel like we’re still kind of on the end of all those pauses and companies kind of reinvesting into what the hiring plan is. Where is it going to be? Is it on-site? Is it hybrid? Is it remote? And then now we’ve got AI kind of shaking things up again. It’s like, ‘Do we need to hire employees like we thought we did, or can we replace them with bots or agents in some capacity?’ So, I feel like the hiring and recruiting market has really taken a hit, let’s say, since COVID happened, around hiring freezes, letting internal talent partners go, wrecks drying up from external recruiters. We started to see some of that unpeel. I’m really excited about 2025, where companies, I think, are finally getting back to, ‘Okay, we’ve got a hiring plan in place. Yes, we have an AI strategy, but we need people in these places to drive it,’ and finally getting out from under it.

**Brian:** Would you consider Honeit a SaaS company?

**Nick:** Yeah, it’s a SaaS platform. It’s just a login that any recruiter, talent partner, or interviewer can use, and they basically sync their Honeit with their Google or Outlook calendar, and then we can automate everything from scheduling to the submissions or candidate presentations.

**Brian:** Tell us more about the internal team that you built and how you built it from Costa Rica.

**Nick:** Yeah. I was lucky to meet two technical co-founders, James and Kim, who were just as excited as I was about re-engineering the interview process. Both are San Francisco-based engineers and architects. They’ve done a lot of interviewing as a candidate, or on the other side, as a hiring stakeholder, and both were equally frustrated with different steps of the process. You have to have the communication skills to get past the phone screen, you’ve got to have the technical chops and the whiteboard skills to be able to think on the spot and code an elegant solution. Those are all very different things for one engineer to be good at, especially if you’re extroverted or introverted. So, these two were seasoned engineers and architects. We hit it off. I was trying to solve this from the internal recruiting lens, and they were trying to fix it from this side. So, I was lucky in that these two and other folks have been able to build the whole platform internally, without having to work with external resources and things like that. Since then, we’ve been able to bring on other remote workers. We’re 100% remote. They’re still based in SF, but we can grow as a team. We’ve got our daily standups, we use collaboration tools like Slack to stay in the loop. We do all of our demos and things like that, and our success in onboarding and training can all happen virtually with our customers around the world as well.

**Brian:** Have you hired anybody in Latin America?

**Nick:** Not full-time. We don’t have an entity down here to be able to hire someone full-time, and it’s never been easier, though. The new tools and ways to do deals, et cetera, to be able to manage remote workers or hire those, it’s possible. During COVID, some of our friends in the community were out of work because the tourism industry was in trouble. Like one of our friends who’s a musician here, Max — they wouldn’t let musicians play music during COVID, right? So, we were like, “”Come in,”” and I tried to catch him up on the world of recruiting, and he was helping us do a little sales and stuff like that. But again, as a small community, you try to just stick together and kind of leverage what you can. I’ll say we are seeing a lot more customers of Honeit, meaning recruiting firms that were either based in LatAm — Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico — either helping US-based companies find talent in the US. But more so, we’re now starting to also see a shift where LatAm-based recruiting firms are helping US-based companies hire folks in LatAm. San Jose here has wonderful tech workers, lots of great universities in San Jose. You go there and there’s a Beverly Hills of San Jose. You look through, there are Maseratis, there’s a lot of money, there’s a lot of tech. Many of the big US companies — pharmaceutical, tech companies — have Latin America headquarters here because they recognize it’s a bed for talent, and bilingual or trilingual employees that are also very technical. So, I would love to. We’re not in a place where we need it right this second, but I would very much think about looking to Costa Rica or other Latin America talent pools for hiring.

**Brian:** Yeah. Talent arbitrage is a key factor, I think, in nearshoring. Can you tell us about your own personal life arbitrage, like cost of living differences for you and your family versus the Bay Area?

**Nick:** Yeah, interesting. So, when we moved down here seven years ago or so, it was a little different. The cost of living was lower. Groceries were less expensive, rents and houses were less expensive. Help was less expensive down here. I’d say over the last seven, eight years, there have been some shifts. Mexico tourism has been impacted, a lot of that has come down here. More development, more houses have been built over the last few years. Even things like the BPM festivals and some of that stuff have transitioned from, say, Mexico to Costa Rica, and we see new pockets of tourism, which leads to more income. But yeah, I think the prices have gone up. There’s been a lot of building here in terms of homes and apartments and things like that. But if you zoom out, I mean, people think Tamarindo is getting busy, but then as soon as you go on that little plane and you fly around, you’re like, “”Oh, there’s tons of green,”” and it feels busier, but there’s still so much room and land in Costa Rica that you don’t notice it when you get out of the city. But yeah, I’d say prices have gone up. But at the same time, again, if you can go back to the States for a couple of months a year and sublet and make money, that’s another way to subsidize your income here during the months that you live here.

**Brian:** If you were to try to enjoy the same lifestyle you have today in the Bay Area, would it be about 50% less, more, less?

**Nick:** I don’t know if the cost is that much less. I think the demand for stuff is less, right? So, our girls don’t watch television with commercials on it necessarily. They don’t see what they’re missing. Everybody wears flip-flops and shorts here, so you’re not sizing yourself up to anybody. Everybody looks like a beach bum, right? I think there aren’t nice cars here necessarily; everybody’s driving a 10-year-old version of the car they would drive in the States for the most cases. I don’t know if that answers your question in terms of cost of living. Some things are less expensive, like having a nanny or something like that to help with a young child is still much more affordable than a rate for a babysitter, say, in SF, which could be 20 bucks an hour or something like that now, right? So, there’s that. You can get a lot of great produce, fruits, and vegetables since Costa Rica grows a lot of that at a local market, or you can go to the more expensive approximation of a Safeway or something like that if you want. So, there are choices on what you spend, but I think the demand for buying things is less. The kids want a surfboard and a bike, and it’s just kind of simpler living.

**Brian:** I think that’s great. When you think about your situation of building a company from Costa Rica, what do you think are the trades you’re making? Where do you think it’s better building from Costa Rica than SF, and where do you think it’s worse?

**Nick:** I really enjoyed living in New York City, to be able to go to the occasional tech meetup, random happy hour, networking events, Meetup.com, you know what I mean? Same thing in SF. It was a little harder to get to in the Bay Area versus New York City, but there was still a lot of networking and things like that. So, I do miss that. I really do miss that. I still try to go to some conferences here and there, and we have an airport an hour away that has direct flights to a number of US airports and things like that to get wherever. But I do miss some of the in-person interaction. I mean, Zoom demos and Zoom meetings and Zoom trainings and some of that stuff — you do want to meet your customers, so we do make a point of doing that. Then, in-person events or conferences and things like that, whether or not you’re sponsoring, but still just attending, we’ve seen a lot of value in some of this in-person, and that seems to be picking up again. So, I’m excited to do more of that in person in 2025. But it’s funny, I was just thinking back on flying to London for a conference and having to carry my suitcase and roll up my pants and cross a river to catch the plane to be able to get there. So, there’s this kind of funny added complexity around doing things like that that you do from down here, that you might not if you’re catching an Uber to go to the airport.

**Brian:** Love it. I think that’s great. Last question for you, Nick: what do you think are the common misperceptions, or maybe even reframed as advice? If someone is listening to this and they’re interested in following your footsteps, what sort of advice would you have, or what are some things that they probably have the wrong preconceived notions in their head, and you could shed some light there?

**Nick:** Oh, I don’t know. I think anything you can try for six months, right? I think maybe if you just frame things a little less extreme. We just put our stuff in our garage, we put some stuff in the attic, and we locked it, and then we just tried it. We could have always come back if it wasn’t quite right. We learned quickly there was obviously a learning ramp in an environment like this. I told you that we moved into the middle of the jungle when we first got down here with three young kids. We were like, “”Whoa, whoa, whoa, that was a little too far out of the population.”” So, we changed three weeks, moved closer to town, and then we moved into an elevator building because we were like, “”Okay, let’s learn and quickly iterate,”” just like you would in tech or business, right? You’re just iterating and not locking yourself into anything. But I’d say, give it a shot. I think now there seems to be more flexibility, or there has been a lot more flexibility, for workers to be able to work virtually or remotely or hybrid and do some travel. We met a group down here where, even before COVID, we had planned to travel with a teacher or two with four families and go to Europe and spend a year in Europe, going in and out of the Schengen for six weeks, six weeks, six weeks, and traveling with two teachers and giving our kids that experience. You do that when you maybe meet a group of like-minded folks that are willing to flex or can be flexible in lifestyle. That’s where communities like this, where you meet new types of folks, things like that can happen. But I think once you do this, you realize, “”Oh, if you have a way to be productive and maybe make money no matter where you’re at, you can change your location,”” and that’s probably easier than it’s ever been.

**Brian:** Yeah, love it. This conversation takes me back to years ago when I built my business out of Buenos Aires, but like I said, I didn’t do it with kids, just me and my wife. Love your story, Nick. I really appreciate you coming here and sharing your perspective.

**Nick:** Well, thank you, Brian. Fun to hear that you’re living in a fun place too, and you’re experiencing some of the issues like power outages that we do experience as well. Thanks, Brian. It’s not just a Costa Rica thing.

**Brian:** Well, anyway, thanks again, Nick, for telling us about Costa Rica. You’re listening to The Nearshore Cafe Podcast, sponsored by Plug Technologies, Plug.te — a great way to connect talent from all over Latin America to US companies. Thanks again, everyone, and we’ll see you next time. Thanks, Brian. Cheers.
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