Post jobs free and write each company's English profile and job ads

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 TurnerYeah. You know, part of it was just kind of through necessity, because, you know, I'm a software developer originally, and I had no experience with sales or even marketing, really any of that kind of stuff. So, the the main thing I think for me was actually just to make the 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 …

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- …

Pete CodesYeah, that's awesome. Um, yeah, I didn't really realize that there would be such a difference in yeah, in like coding stacks, um, but, yeah, that that's a cool point. Um, I think like, maybe last question from me before we get on to like the high-signal members' questions, but um, how did you first get people onto the program? Were you just kind of like cold emailing people? Um.

Eric Turner… with them and basically convincing them. Since I already knew the HR people and everything, so, yeah, that is one one good way to kind of get literally your first company if it is a B2B service. Uh, and that worked well for me, and they're, luckily, a pretty well-known company. So then, from there, I was able to get like this kind of second and third companies relatively easy by, you know, pointing to them, be like, "Hey, Mercari is on the site already. You know, they're legit. You know them." Um. And, you know, that combined with what I mentioned earlier about how there really wasn't any downside, you know, I I would say basically there's no upfront costs, totally free. Um, you know, worst-case scenario, you get some free publicity when I'm going to be sharing it with my social media and all that kind of stuff, and I'll create the the pro- profile that's going to kind of show you in a positive light, all that kind of stuff. Um, so, the combination of those things were enough to get the first few companies. And then, yeah, once I had like a handful, it got a lot easier. Um, cuz, again, they were like some relatively well-known companies. Uh, and then, really, you know, ideally, you would want some testimonials and stuff, too, especially ones that say we, you know, we hired x number of people or whatever. Eventually, I was able to get those, but there was a little bit of uh time lag between, you know, when I did have some jobs up already, some contracts, but wasn't …

Pete CodesYeah, definitely. Um, and, I think, does your uh your partner work on it, as well?