The Impact Jobs - 3 Month Review

In the middle of May, I shared about My Next Small Bet as my business partner and I launched The Impact Job. When I first wrote about the business, I described it as a self-serve job board to help match companies and talent in the social impact space.

Well, we’ve been operating the business for three 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. Key Focus Areas for Q4

Current State of the Business

What started as just a job board has grown into two main product lines. We still have the original self-serve job board, and now offer a weekly newsletter that covers the social impact and sustainability space and highlights our new jobs in a fun way. If we don’t make our subscribers laugh each week, we’ve failed miserably. 

A weekly newsletter was always in our plans, but we’re excited that we managed to launch one within our first three months. Instead of just sending out job alerts via email, we now share compelling content around the relevant jobs. This also provides an additional way to monetize the business through newsletter sponsors. 

The business now has a complete website that highlights the newsletter and job board. We had originally been hosting the job board on a pre-built tech platform, but we knew to really grow and scale the business, we needed to have a strong centralized presence. You can find it at www.theimpactjob.com

Let’s Look at the Data

• Current Subscriber Count: 3,757 (Started from Zero)
• Job Board Revenue: $1,150 (Started from Zero)
• Ad-Sales Revenue: $125 (Started from Zero)
• Monthly Costs: $1,500 (Writer, Team Lead, Advertising)
• Business Value: ~$10,000 (This is a conservative estimate for just the newsletter based on subscriber count, open rate, etc) If we were to sell right now, we’d have a 2x on our capital invested. If we were to include our time, it would probably be a negative return! 

What’s Going Well

As I look across the business, there are a number of things that are going well. Thankfully, the things that are going well are the essential drivers of the long-term success of the business. 

1. Found traction in the market: When incubating a business, research suggests that we should have at least some level of success in the venture. However, it’s always a relief when you start finding product market fit in the market during your initial work. Within three months, we’re happy that over 3,700 people care about the jobs we post and the newsletter we write.
2. Newsletter: As I mentioned, we had always planned on launching a newsletter, but we ended up having a successful launch a lot quicker than we anticipated. My partner and I just moved quickly to set up the software and email format, and just as quickly found and hired an incredible writer. I believe businesses are always about bringing the right people together, and we were lucky enough to find a writer with experience in the sustainability space who has a talent for writing quality content driven by humor. She makes us (and our subscribers) laugh each and every week. The results are quite positive as each of our newsletter has 40% or higher open rates. We’re seeing that our subscribers care about the content and jobs we’re sharing with the market. 
3. Team: I’ve already spoken about the importance of the right people in business and I feel lucky that we have a great start to building The Impact Jobs team. As my partner and I own and operate more businesses, it’s important for us to bring teams in that can continue to run, operate and grow the business with minimal day-to-day involvement for us. It’s even harder to do this when we’re investing a small amount in each launch. It forces us to be conscious of our cash flow and find a way to get to cash flow profitability quickly. Apart from our great writer, we’ve brought on someone to focus on growth in APAC. While we originally wanted to focus on North America, we met someone who had a shared vision and we brought her on to help with subscriber and job growth in the APAC region. We also brought on the day-to-day manager who is responsible for keeping the business running and continuing to focus on growth levers. 
4. Platform: Our website and technology stack is structured just how we want it. We ended up making a few technology shifts in the second month, but the time investment has been worthwhile. We’ll continue to make minor shifts as needed, but our platform is well structured for the next year of operations. 

What Needs to Improve

Overall things have gone well in the first three months, but there are countless things that we want to improve over the final quarter of the year. 

1. Growing faster: While we feel good at getting to 3,757 subscribers, we’re wondering what we can do to grow faster. How do we get to 100,000 subscribers over the next 12 months? How do we keep our pace of growth accelerating? How do we use capital and creativity to take this business to new heights? 
2. Capturing more revenue: Candidly, we haven’t spent much time focusing on revenue growth because of our belief in the business’s flywheel. The more subscribers we have, the more job posts we will get. The more job posts we have, the more subscribers will want to stay in the loop. The more subscribers that join, the more our ad slots will be in demand. The more our ad slots are in demand, the more we can spend on acquiring subscribers.

Given the base of followers we have, it’s time for us to start monetizing this appropriately. Our vision is that this business becomes cash flow positive on a monthly basis even accounting for our advertising spend by the end of Q1 2023. If we want to distribute more cash flow from the business, we could reduce ad-spend which may slow our growth. My partner and I are thinking a lot about the tradeoff between monthly cash flow and enterprise value (the value of the business if we were to sell it) growth. We don’t plan to sell the business, but it’s important for us to think about that as it is value creation. 

Next Steps

As we look at our goals for the next quarter, we’re spending our time and resources in three main areas. 

1. Focus on revenue generation: We just started focusing on ad sales two weeks ago and have already made our first placement sale and we’re focused on building longer-term sponsors that have a strong overlap with the beliefs of our audience. Ideally, we’ll sell month long sponsorship packages to help build the consistency of revenue. In addition, we’re building relationships with recruiters to help drive more job board revenue. Finally, as we add more resources on our website, we’re leveraging affiliate relationships to help drive additional revenue. My hope is that when I write my next update at the end of the year, I’ll be able to share how we figured out the revenue engine for this business and built processes around it. 
2. More support and resources for community members: We want to build a deeper base of community members. To do that, we need to offer a broad set of resources focused on getting jobs within the social impact space.
3. Optimize & speed-up growth: We need to better map out our growth channels and double down on what’s working. The key challenge we’re facing is that we don’t have consistent data as our conversion rates and subscriber sources have been fluctuating heavily. As we continue to get cleaner data, we need to optimize our efforts and funnel spending to the right resources.

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.