GTM Sauce

Japan Dev · B2B · Japan developer job board

List jobs free and charge a fee only when someone gets hired

Sales converted pretty well; business at ~$60K/month

Workedpricingoutbound-salespositioning-niche

What they did

Companies post jobs for free; Japan Dev charges a placement fee (percentage of salary) only when a hire is made through the site. Positioned against Japanese recruiters who charge 25-35%+ of starting salary ($10-30k per hire), which companies are already used to paying, while Japan Dev's fee is lower. Chosen because a founder with no sales background could close a zero-risk pitch easily, and per-post pricing is less common in Japan.

What happened

'Pretty good conversion rate' on sales; business at ~$60k/month

In their words

$60k/m from a job board

Play from 1:58

Pete Codes… you know, it's a chicken-and-egg problem, and you're asking people to be pay like, you know, $300 or $500 per post or whatev- ever, and I know myself it can be hard to convince companies to pay that, whereas you have this really smart business model where you say to companies basically, "You can post for free, but I'll take commission if you end up hiring someone." So do you want to talk about like what led you into that kind of business model?

Eric Turner… sales process as simple as possible. And what I realized was, if I can kind of make this pitch where I'm like, "Hey, look, we'll post your jobs. You know, we'll handle that for you. It's not going to cost you anything. You know, I'm telling you we're we're going to get you some nice traffic, some good applicants and everything, but even if I'm lying, you've lost nothing. We're still going to help you build out this nice kind of company profile page, you know, in English. I'm a native speaker, I'm going to help help you write it, and all that kind of stuff," which is, you know, kind of useful for Japanese companies who might not have like the best copy um on like the English side of things. So, I kind of made that pitch where it was almost like a no-brainer to like just be like, "Why not do it?" Um, so that was the only way I was really able to get like a pretty good conversion rate, in terms of the sales, um just cuz, you know, I really didn't have that background or really the the skills necessary to do like a per-post kind of model at that point. Uh and also just the fact that I am in Japan, and I think the industry here is a little bit different. Um like the again, like the per-post kind of monetization is not as popular still here, I would say. It's a little bit more common for companies to focus more on like recruiting firms. Um so they are used to paying that like, you know, um u- upon-successful-hire type of fee. And they're also kind of primed to be paying very large amounts, as well, because usually it will be like a percentage, often like 25, 30, 35%, if not more, of someone's starting salary. Um and especially for me, since I'm kind of focused on the the higher end of the market, um that becomes very significant. Um so that was kind of nice as well, because, you know, it's It These companies will not bat an eye to dropping, you know, $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, or whatever for one applicant. Um so, you know, you can kind of um position yourself relative to that. Um, so that's what I was kind of trying to do, as well.

3:58

Pete CodesYeah, that's awesome. That's uh that's great. It's like music to any indie hackers uh ears, kind of hearing those kind of numbers. Um, basically, you've got a really like smart thing on your website where you have like people You have at the top saying like, you know, "Just got hired like get you know, an Amazon voucher." So, people that, you know, you sign up You can sign up to the newsletter, let's say you get hired, uh and it kind of it m- …

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Tags: success-fee, free-listing, two-sided-marketplace, no-risk-offer