The Impact Job - 6 Month Review

Intro & Background:

In the middle of May, I shared about My Next Small Bet as my business partner and I launched The Impact Job. At the beginning of October, I wrote about our experience building this for the first 3 months. You can read the 3-month update here. 

Well, we’ve been operating the business for six months, and it’s time to reflect on the good, the bad, and what’s next. Here’s what I’ll cover:

1. The Current State of the Business
2. What’s Going Well
3. What Needs to Improve?
4. Plans for 2023

Current State of the Business

This experiment started off as an automated job board for the social impact space. Over the first three months of the project, we expanded it to a weekly newsletter too. Over the last three months, we’ve doubled down on subscriber growth as we’ve found success in testing various growth tactics. The business doesn’t look much different from the way I described it in September apart from a web-design refresh and more content on the website. We’re currently in the community growth phase and are slowly getting closer to the monetization phase as we look for a way to make this business cash-flow positive. Importantly, my partner and I aren’t running this business day to day so we have much higher costs than you’d expect for a typical business like this.

Let’s Look at the Data

• Current Subscriber Count: 7,196 (Started the quarter at 3,670)
• Job Board Revenue: $3,180 (Started the quarter at $1,150)
• Ad-Sales Revenue: $227 (Started from $125)
• Other Revenue: $150 (Started from $0)
• Monthly Costs: $2,800 (Writer, Team, Advertising) 
• Business Value: ~$22,000 (This is a conservative estimate for just the newsletter based on subscriber count, open rate, etc) 

What’s Going Well

As I look across the business, there are a number of things that are going well. We’re most excited about the fact that these things will make The Impact Job more valuable over the long-term even if we don’t address the things we need to fix. 

Subscriber Growth & Product Market Fit:

We’ve nearly doubled our subscriber count in the last quarter as we’ve grown from 3,670 to 7,196. We spent month 3 and 4 testing various growth levers and we’ve found two specific advertising methods that are bringing in subscribers at a rate we’re satisfied with (less than $1.50). These methods are low lift and we’re able to scale them as we want with less than an hour a week of tinkering. While our open rates are dropping slightly below 40%, we’re quite pleased that with this explosion of growth, we still have a user base of engaged readers and job-seekers. As we talked about, the larger and more engaged our community is, the more we’ll be able to eventually monetize the asset to provide the cash flow we want. We’re still in the investment phase. 

Team & Automation:

‍I’ve already written at length about the amazing team we’ve put together to keep The Impact Job operating and growing. As my partner and I get busier with multiple businesses to run, we strive to have a full team that can run this business without much interaction from us. We’re obviously passionate about the project, but we’re not nearly creative enough to write the newsletters or smart-enough to manage the jobs on the board. While having a strong team like this increases our upfront cost, it’s worth it to build a business that can scale and operate on its own. 

What Needs to Improve

We’re quite pleased with how the first six months have gone and think we’re on the way to building an interesting asset in a valuable niche. However, there’s a lot we want to work on as we look at the first quarter of 2023.

Monetization:

Since the start of this project, we’ve ignored monetization with the belief that the larger the community gets, the easier it will be to monetize the community in a variety of ways. Simply, we wanted to focus on growing our community and providing value to our subscribers. Now that we’ve gotten to over 7,000 subscribers, we think it’s the right time to start shifting some of our focus from subscriber growth to monetization with the goal that we run this business exactly at break-even. Once we cover 100% of our costs with revenue, every incremental dollar will go into marketing and subscriber growth. At any point, we can decide to cash flow the business, but our current view is that it’s more valuable to invest in growth. 

Job Board Revenue:

‍This is the simplest form of revenue for our business. This is when a company pays us to post a job on our website and share in our newsletter. We generated $3,180 in job posts in 2022 and we hope to increase this number to 2,500 per month by the end of 2023. Since our subscriber rate has doubled since we set prices, we’re likely to increase prices and allocate resources to attracting more job posts on the website.

Ad-Sales:

As of now, we send a weekly newsletter that has two potential ad-slots that we can sell. So far, we’ve sold two ads for our newsletter generating a total of $227. We’ve taken a passive approach and just posted on newsletter ad-platforms so far. In addition, we haven’t raised prices since we had 3,000 subscribers. We plan on increasing prices and allocating effort to building more ad relationships through sales and relationship building. If we can sell 50% of our ad slots, we should be generating $1-2k on a monthly basis from advertising. This alone would cover 100% of our current marketing budget.

Other Revenue:

Apart from the standard monetization strategies I talked about above that we’re using, there are a few things we’re in the early stage of testing out to see if it can be an additional revenue driver for the project. 

1. Resume Reviews: We currently offer resume reviews where our team does a complete review of the format and context of an individual’s resume. We’ve heard that we add a ton of value so we’ll keep doing this and will plug it in the newsletter when we don’t have another sponsor. We charge $75 per review. It will never be a huge revenue driver for us.

2. Affiliate: This won’t be a huge revenue driver for us either, but as we get more and more traffic to the website, we should get more traction on our affiliate links. 

3. On-site Advertising: The main driver of The Impact Job is to help people find jobs through a well-designed site. We are hesitant to show ads on The Impact Job Website because it may impact the job searchers experience on the site. This will be something we’ll test only if everything else isn’t working and we’re struggling to find ways to monetize. We don’t have a lot of traffic to the site yet, but when we do, it’s not a bad way to generate revenue. The key is doing it in a way that doesn’t harm the user experience. 

2. Content: We’ve built out a resource section on our website with 15+ articles to help those who are searching for a job. As we look out into the first quarter of 2023, I want to add 5-10 articles a month to keep the fresh content coming. This should not only help provide more value to our users but also help drive SEO opportunities. We’re not SEO geniuses, but good content should attract visitors to our site. 

Conclusion

I’ll continue to write these business updates quarterly to “build in public” and to gather feedback from my community. I’d love to hear from you if you have any relevant ideas or thoughts about the business.