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Two Niche Job Boards Making Millions

Craig Ruckus

TLDR

Niche job boards are easy mode for business: 

  • We Work Remotely was earning $400k per year a decade ago when it was bought, had two employees and now makes $4 million in EBITDA

  • Onlinejobs.ph was started with $5k and hit $10 million million in revenue

Offshore recruiting firms are growing fast:

  • Support Shepherd hit $4 million in annual profit after two years

  • Growth Assistant reached $12 million in ARR after 34 months

Niche job boards peaked my interest during a recent My First Million podcast with Andrew Wilkinson, co-founder of Tiny. 

In a brief exchange (starting at 9:40) he mentioned they had bought a remote work job board - We Work Remotely - for around 3-4x earnings when it was earning $400,000 at the time 10 years ago (so a $1.2-1.6 million acquisition). It was run by two employees and 1-2 part time consultants. 

They then immediately raised the price from $199 to $299 for a listing, which was what the other job boards were charging, hired an SEO consultant and started doing email marketing. That business today is doing $4 million in EBITDA. 

Andrew made the point that there’s easy and hard mode businesses and the job board was an easy one. “The entire team could go pens down for six months and it would still keep printing cash.”

Discussion on We Work Remotely Job Board starts at 9:40

I thought maybe this was a one off so I did a quick search and found another niche job board printing money. Onlinejobs.ph.

How much does Onlinejobs.ph Make?

Onlinejobs.ph is a job board dedicated to people in the Philippines. It recently passed $10 million in annual revenue and the founder works 17 hours a week on the company.

The job board was founded by John Jonas who graduated in computer science in 2004. Once he got into his first job he realized he needed to get out of the corporate world. He didn’t like that no matter how hard he worked his compensation was the same. 

John Jonas

So after 8 months of work he left and started working online. He started an affiliate marketing business and did consulting to pay the bills. He hired people in the U.S. and India, but they never worked out. Then someone said he should hire from the Philippines. 

So he contacted an agency and asked for a content creator. They only had programmers and webmasters. The process wasn’t great. But he was impressed with the Filipino culture. 

He found they were loyal, westernized, spoke American English and would often try and fill in the gaps in a process if they could. 

He thought a job board dedicated to hiring Filipino workers for remote work could be an interesting business. His partner and him hired one programmer (at $750 per month) and onlinejobs.ph was born. 

The first month in 2009 the job board had a few hundred profiles of people looking for work. From there it just kept growing. John estimates they put maybe $5,000 into the business. 

In a recent interview, John recalls that his first customer felt like success. Then their first $500 day when everything was automated was beyond amazing. He danced around the house with his wife. 

John focused on working on the business and content creation. They now have 40 full time remote employees and he outsources as much as he can. An employee even writes the newsletter that goes out to 100,000 people.

They never thought the business would grow to $10 million a year in revenue. But I find the most impressive feat is that he’s only worked on the business for 17 hours a week since he started. 

Today the site has 2 million worker profiles and nearly half a million employers have used it. 

The site charges a monthly fee ($69-99/month) or an annual fee ($299-349), but they do have a lot of clients sign up for one month and then cancel. That’s an interesting piece of friction that could be solved with a flat fee. 

The strength of the business I think is its focus on content marketing and SEO. They’ve produced countless articles and over 300 podcast episodes. 

So how could you create a job board? Here’s an interesting thread detailing the approach to start a niche job board. 

Interesting Stat: Global job board market was $22.3 billion in 2020 and expected to reach $31.5 billion by 2026.

Offshore recruiting agencies are another opportunity

A recruiting agency is a higher service level than a job board and requires more staff, but the tailwind of companies hiring international talent is here to stay. Saving 80% of someone's salary is an easy sell as proven by these two firms. 

Support Shepherd takes ~35% commission on the hires first year of salary (around $3-6k). Earlier this year they had reached $4 million in profit per year after only two years in business. The business is part owned by Nick Huber, Codie Sanchez and Shaan Puri who have led to higher exposure and revenue in recent months. 

Growth Assistants charges an ongoing fee for offshore talent, typically around $3k/month. They recently reported that they had reached $12 million in annual recurring revenue after only 34 months in business. 

From job boards to offshoring recruiting agencies, the opportunity to save companies money by hiring talent across the globe is a giant tailwind. 

Sources:

Grow a Small Business Interview with John Jonas

John Jonas Started Onlinejobs.ph with $5,000

MFM pod

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