$7k/mo no-code job board -> Huge opportunities in talent marketplaces -> Go beyond hiring

Dear starters,

Pat Walls here, creator of Starter Story. 

I’m hitting your inbox to share with you the best ideas and insights we've published over the last week.

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🚀 Learnt a no-code tool, launched a job board and reached $7K MRR in 4 months

Sasa is the founder of Codemap, the world’s first freelance & agency marketplace for no-code, low-code, and automation. Last summer he spent 12 hours a day learning how to build the product using Bubble.

It was launched in October and its figures are quite impressive, the revenue is already over $7k/mo, served 740+ clients and the value of the projects created is close to $1M.

The pitch: Matching founders, startups, scaleups, and organizations of all sizes with pre-vetted no-code talent, on-demand. 

Why does it work? Founders want to test their ideas fast and cheap. Hiring proven no-code experts to build products, MVPs, and apps up can be up to 10x cheaper and faster than with traditional development.

The future is remote and talent marketplaces will reign

In a world where remote work is growing non-stop and companies are open to hiring talent globally, the digital talent marketplaces are going to play a huge role. Upwork revenue for 2020 was over $365 (26% growth YoY) and Fiverr’s was $190 (77% up from 2019). Huge businesses growing like crazy.

Going niche is always a good strategy and traditional job platforms are going to have a hard time adapting to this new reality. 

In the past, we’ve shared the stories of starters already doing great things in this space. 

Flexiple is an $80k/mo freelancing platform that enables “quality interactions” between companies and freelancers. Something cool they did to get customers? Built a basic WordPress website and shared a curated repository of 100+ remote tools across 24 categories and launched on Product Hunt. They were #2 that day with 1000+ upvotes.

Manuel started Uplink, a $16k/mo network for IT freelancers in Germany. Getting freelancers to join wasn’t difficult, just messaging them on Linkedin and around 20% liked the idea. To gain traction and exposure he did something really cool: finding blog posts or editorial articles like “10 platforms where freelancers can find new jobs” and asking them to include Uplink. Oftentimes, a single email was enough to be included. Great strategy to get quality backlinks!

The $85k/mo invite-only network of the top talent in South America TECLA is Gino’s business, a Peruvian that lives in Seattle. Its purpose is to make it easy for startups to interview and directly hire software developers; with lower salaries but in the same time zones as the U.S.

Go beyond hiring

The world embracing remote work opens the door to a world of possibilities, you can start a remote hiring business, but there’s much more that you can do.

One easy and cheap place to start is a remote work blog. Sireesha makes $13k/mo helping work from home enthusiasts in finding legit online jobs, side hustles and other extra income options. She bet big on content and has over 250k monthly visitors. She also grew her Instagram from 4k to 15k followers in 7 months.

Want to hear something extremely cool? The people at Livit International started an ecosystem for digital nomads, startups and companies working from Bali. They make $50k/mo offering coworking & event spaces, business support services in Bali and curated getaway events and retreats for entrepreneurs and teams.

Bonus

Another cool story about a founder without a tech background. Joel is an athlete that started his own meal planning service that has served thousands of loyal customers. And he built his business using Bubble.io too.

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📺 $360k/year making videos for eCommerce brands

Louise and Edvinas started a business that does one thing and one thing only - produce rockstar video ads for eCommerce brands. With respective backgrounds directing videos and sales, this was meant to work. Their videos are absolutely amazing, you need to see them, but the way they hustled when they were against the ropes is brilliant.

​Their business kicked off with cold email outreaches to eCommerce business owners from every corner of the world (you know where to find a huge database of this, right?). They sent hundreds of cold emails. The trick to getting a response? Doing the research. When it comes to cold B2B emails quality always trumps quantity.

My absolute favourite things about this story? They got the first client thanks to Starter Story! You can’t imagine how happy that makes me. (Btw is this company from Denmark). 

No need to make a big investment to start

Ken started Arizona Filmworks a $12k/mo premier video production and digital marketing company in Phoenix. A great takeaway from his story: “Don’t invest in a studio or expensive equipment. Invest in marketing yourself. You can rent $50,000 cameras or big studios and only have to pay for them for one day. If you own them, you have to pay for them every day.”

Once you’re in, you can create your own products

Kiran spent some time filming videos and particularly trying to figure out how to make one of those Tasty-style recipe videos shot from an overhead angle. Eventually, she figured out how to do it, by cobbling together 3 different pieces. And decided to sell it to other food bloggers. 

To validate the idea, emailed a few food bloggers to see if it was something they’d be interested in. After receiving enough positive interest, she also pre-sold enough products to cover the first shipment costs.

She did so many right things to learn from. That’s why successfully reached $11k/mo in revenue.

🗣️ Quote of the week

“Write down what you want to do, break down the subtasks, put them on the calendar, then hold yourself accountable. It’s pretty simple when you plan it out.”

Matt Griffin, Founder
Combat Flip Flops ($350k/mo)

🔌 The business of building plugins and addons

A great way to dip the toe in the water and test if becoming a starter is something that would fit you is by starting with something small (these can get quite complicated, don’t get me wrong).

One clear advantage? Piggybacking in the success and demand of a platform. No need to build your audience from scratch.

Omari made SuperJack, a Squarespace extension for ecommerce owners that launched just 30 days ago. He knew the platform well, in 2015 he started a business designing themes. Often an overlooked platform, Squarespace is huge. There are over 2M websites built with it.

WordPress plugins

Did you know that 40% of the websites in the world are built with WordPress? Imagine the size of the market you’re accessing the moment you launch something for this platform.

Laura created Client Portal because she needed a lightweight project management tool. She published the plugin and now it makes between $4k and $10k every month. The secret? Focus. Instead of trying to do All The Things for All The People, she focused on doing one thing really well.

Josh created Wheely Sales, a lucky wheel popup. This fun take on exit pop-ups results in much higher opt-in rates (~12%). That made him reach $600/mo in just 4 months.

Targeting eCommerce? Try Shopify

The guys of SuperLemon crushed it. They reviewed almost 3.000 apps from Shopify’s marketplace to see what was missing. The result? A simple and easy-to-use plugin to chat with their customers and also send order-related notifications via WhatsApp. Doing your research pays off, now their business is making $29k/mo.

Don’t forget about Amazon

A while ago Jae shared the story of Gorilla ROI a $12k/mo add-on that connects Amazon Seller Central to Google Sheets. All these platforms often have inconveniences, in this case, manually having to download CSV exports, cleaning them up, and creating pivot tables. If you run a successful Amazon business, you will happily pay for a tool like this.

🛠️ Job opportunities

Stratton Equities looking to grow its team with Loan Officers, Loan Processors and Loan Closers.

Boundless Labs are in major ongoing need of email marketers, email designers, email copywriters, and account managers.

Mini Materials doubled their sales last year and are looking for creatives to help develop new products.

P.S. Huge thank you to Klaviyo - our exclusive sponsor at Starter Story. By using Klaviyo, we've grown our email list to 60K and added thousands of dollars in revenue per month through email marketing. Get Klaviyo today!

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