Japan Dev · B2B · Japan developer job board
Grow the job-seeker side with SEO and an email newsletter
Slow: ~12 months to first revenue; traffic grew steadily over years
What they did
What happened
In their words
$60k/m from a job board
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… 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 actually earning any money yet. Um, so, yeah, I mean, actually getting to the point where it was earning decent revenue took a lot longer. But uh, getting the companies wasn't too bad. And then, yeah, so I would say the other side, actually, the getting candidates was a bit more difficult, um, because that tends to be more of like the the marketing side, it's much like, you know, for me, I mean, the channels I ended up using were like SEO, my email list, things like that, and those all just take time, and they kind of just need to compound, and it's not really like sales, where you can just go and like go hard and get a bunch of companies at once. It's like it just takes months, potentially years, you know. So, that was just kind of a long slog. Of course, I was optimizing the site, and stuff, to try and get, once I had someone in the funnel, trying to improve the com- conversion rate, things like that, as well. But I think that just takes time, though.
Pete CodesYeah, definitely. Um, and, I think, does your uh your partner work on it, as well?
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More from this episode
- List jobs free and charge a fee only when someone gets hiredSales converted pretty well; business at ~$60K/month
- 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
- 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: supply-side, two-sided-marketplace, compounding