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
What they did
What happened
In their words
$60k/m from a job board
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.
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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More from this episode
- Give job seekers a ¥3,000 gift card for reporting their hireCatches unreported hires at a 'pretty good hit rate'
- Collect applicants' name and email before sending them to the company's job page
- Add a growing monthly fee to the contract for hires companies don't reportFounder believes cheating is rare; no numbers
- Sign your own employer first, then use its name to sign othersNext two companies came relatively easily
- Post jobs free and write each company's English profile and job adsEnough to land the first few companies
- Grow the job-seeker side with SEO and an email newsletterSlow: ~12 months to first revenue; traffic grew steadily over years
- List only ~100 good companies and turn down most who ask to joinFounder credits curation for making the model work; no numbers
- Pivot to a job board after visitors kept looking for an apply buttonLed to the first paying clients
- Have companies report hires within ~5 days; refund only part in month one
Tags: success-fee, free-listing, two-sided-marketplace, no-risk-offer