This week in Production Ready - Issue #2
RemoteOK and job boards, Building in public and Two types of profitability.
Bootstrapped Business Spotlight 🔦
This week our focus is on RemoteOK, one of the largest online job boards for remote workers. The site was started by serial bootstrapper Pieter Levels back in 2015 when the space was already relatively crowded. Their differentiator was pretty clear though — they were the first to aggregate all remote listings into one source of truth. The site has grown and now averages 300k to 500k monthly visitors.
Even more impressive is how straightforward the tech is. As Pieter himself called out recently:
RemoteOK.io is a single PHP file called "index.php" generating $65,651 this month. No frameworks. No libraries (except jQuery). 💖
How did the site make that much in a month?
Well, RemoteOK uses a nice simple business model. They charge companies that want to post jobs on the site between $300 and $1250 for a 30 day listing.
We can see from public metrics posted that the average customer spends nearly $700 per month! Not bad for a text listing.
*Note that the dash below is in Singaporean Dollars which equates to 0.73 US Dollars (so SGD 89,415=USD 65,651).
Based on the success of RemoteOK, Pieter also launched a new site, RemoteWorkers, which flips the model on its head. Instead of candidates applying for roles, remote workers can now upload their profile (for free) and companies then pitch them to apply for roles. It's similar in a way to how Hired changed the game when they focused on putting tech talent front and centre instead of recruiting companies.
The jobs boards space has been referred to as one of the strongest models if you can crack the supply and demand flywheel. In 2012, Fred Wilson of USV famously said that Indeed.com had a business model that:
like Google's, is the best on the Internet
This type of business is a natural evolution from newspaper classifieds. Another highly lucrative source of income for the original media moguls before the internet came along and Craig’s List changed everything.
Job boards don’t always work out though. Plenty of them don't reach the critical mass needed to drive a sustainable business. Here’s an example where the founder is hoping to flip a job board that hasn’t got traction.
Andrew Wilkinson of Tiny Capital owns a number of job boards through his entity Tiny Boards. He's mentioned in interviews that We Work Remotely (a competitor to RemoteOK) is an outlier in his group. The other job boards in his portfolio aren't really performing.
So that's why I was mightily impressed by what Pieter has achieved with RemoteOK and RemoteWorkers. He's ticked some the boxes of a solid bootstrapped offering — certainly one to be emulated.
Simple business ✅ Great unit economics ✅ Solid network effects ✅
Trend 📈
Tied to the above, one of the growing trends I’m seeing is makers building in public. Pieter has also been one of the pioneers in this space. His 100 days of shipping inspired others to also highlight what they've been building and share it with the world.
Indie Hackers has a community dedicated to exactly this. There are also now plenty of folks on Twitter building in public, including:
Mubashar Iqbal - who is experimenting publicly with trying to build a SaaS business by devoting just one hour a day to it (one hour SaaS).
KP - who created a site called buildinpublic.xyz where he shows how makers and founders are building an audience for their products by building in public.
Dan Rowden - founder of ilo.so, cove.chat, gloat.dev and other bootstrapped products.
Joel Gascoigne - who has been building in public for years with his business Buffer.
Max Stoiber and team who streamed for 72 hours straight as thousands of viewers watched them build a product live. They also run feedback.fish and changefeed.app
As flagged, one of the main benefits of building in public is that a maker can start to rally an audience around the offering early on. There's a natural group of testers waiting to try out the product.
Equally as important in my mind, is the behavioural psychology behind building in public. By committing to something in front of others, it's much more likely to get finished. And if you mess up, that vulnerability might also endear you more closely to your audience (aka the Pratfall Effect).
So I think we'll see more and more online builders following this approach. It's certainly counterintuitive in a lot of ways. Stealth startups have typically been the de facto way to operate. The benefits of transparency might be too good to pass up though so expect to see this trend accelerate.
Interesting Reads 👓
Growing a SaaS Company: How We Reached the Magical First 1,000 Customers - Tom Zsomborgi on the Kinsta blog
The 10x Advantage of Starting a Company Right Now - Gigi Levy-Weiss from NFX
A half billion apps are about to be created. We need more software builders, not just users - Howie Liu from Airtable
How much is your online business worth? - Flippa
Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com - Hacker News
Be a turtle, rabbits are overrated - Jamal Mashal
Interesting Podcasts/Videos 🎙📹
What's important for Indie Hackers in 2020 - Courtland Allen on the Indie Bites podcast
Blake Robbins of Ludlow Ventures has some interesting thoughts on the future of media, Twitch, OnlyFans, and creator monetisation. This is his interview with Li Jin and Nathan Baschez.
And from the Twitterverse...
Strictly speaking Calendly did raise $500k so it's not bootstrapped in the purest sense of the word. But as Tyler Tringas called out recently, bootstrapping is a mindset, not a cap table. Any business that can reach $60m in revenue (or a ratio of 120-> annual revenue/funding) deserves a tip of the hat 🎩
Underestimate the power of SEO at your peril as this thread explains ☝️
A fresh perspective on what ramen profitability can mean at different scales 🍜
That’s a wrap for this week folks. Thanks for reading 🤙
Best,
Craig.