🛠️ Startups Update: February 2024

UX Remotely is (slowly) growing...

Mar 22, 2024

🌐 UX Remotely (Link)

Subscribers

Paid: 11

1 person unsubscribed after 1 month - “can’t afford”.
1 person unsubscribed after 1 week - “not enough value, not many new postings for Canada”.
1 person unsubscribed after 1 month - “no longer needed, landed a job”

Subscription types:

Weekly: 0
Monthly: 9
Quarterly: 2

Metrics:

MRR: 60.91 EUR
Gross volume: 165.89 EUR
Net volume: 124.32 EUR
Avg revenue per user: 5.54 EUR
Subscriber churn rate: 31.3%

Total: 282

The Platform

Talent List

I launched the Talent List which has 153 profiles submitted, so far. I used Tally (my favourite survey tool) to gather sign-ups.

After about 120 profiles I got feedback from one of my old colleagues in the Recruitment space that the big missing piece was profile tags/keywords. Added this to the survey and sent a follow-up to the existing profiles to add this missing piece, which resulted in 47 “updates” I have to copy-paste now.

Designed and published the page for hiring managers to learn more about this feature and sign up for full access. The “landing page” has a sample of the list with basic info. the full list (that unlocks for paid profiles) has full info, including resume, portfolio, LinkedIn, and email.

Had to spend quite a lot of time to come up with functions to convert personalized info from the profile submission to make it publishable in the list. Airtable is not as powerful as Google Sheets but hacked pieces together.

As a part, of the profile sign-up form, I am asking if the person would be willing to record a short selfie video to add to the profile. About half of the profiles said “Yes”. I think this will increase the quality of the Talent List. Going to take some action on this in the upcoming weeks.

Set the pricing, let’s see how it goes. Will be reaching out to the design managers in the upcoming weeks.

Free vs Paid

Have been thinking about what else can I add to the paid subscription benefits, some ideas are:

Portfolio/Resume reviews
Webinars
Peer reviews

Profile and other pages

Added several pages and changed the IA a bit, also added Profile info and the ability to update some basic info.

Automation

I spent some time “talking” to ChatGPT about this, mainly how can I set up automatic parsing of companies’ job pages to detect relevant changes and populate a Google sheet with the new information.

Sadly, haven’t found the way yet. It keeps pushing me to a full-on web scraper solution which requires more tech stuff, which is not my strength. But I am getting more serious about the idea of doing this and then sharing the journey with others.

Not much progress here, but I want to check off the box of “reviewing all existing job boards” first. It’s very manual and takes time. Maybe, 4/5th of the list is done. Then, I am going to publish the results of my analysis and share all of them, as my sources.

Eventually, I want to set up a tracking/parsing system to scan the companies’ pages directly and automatically. Avoid the middleman and go straight to the company’s careers page. I think this will be a very impactful update that will help the platform scale. Manual way is very tedious.

Extra Thoughts

Engagement

I keep getting surprised by the low engagement, even from paid subscribers. Every time, I decide to get user feedback from my subscribers, very few people respond. Even simplifying my question to 1 simple single-select format got only 5 answers out of 260 recipients.

Disappointing.

You’d think paid subscribers would be more engaged. Percentage-wise - it’s true. But still, very low engagement. I greet every paid subscriber with a (manually typed) personal message. Only a half have replied.

A mystery.

Also, one of the main reasons I question the viability of launching a community.

Churn

How do I keep subscribers?

After a person unsubscribed, because they found a job and weren’t in the market anymore, I started thinking about this problem -

The success of my job board is to help people get the job they want. If I do my job right, they will unsubscribe because they don’t need it anymore.

Hence, the question - how might we provide new value to the paid subscriber, so that they keep their subscription ON even after they find a job?

Before they find a job, help them find a job.

After they find a job, help them grow in this job until they decide to find a new job.

So, a logical answer is to offer educational resources to advance their career and help them learn how to do their job better. But how is this different from a bunch of other communities with the same value proposition?

I don’t know… Difficult question.

Podcast

I’ve been pondering this since the beginning. I want to interview design team leaders about their ins and outs. Haven’t been able to prioritize time for this. Reached out to a few design managers, and they haven’t been very responsive. This needs more effort and a more focused campaign. Later…

Substack

Using Substack as the newsletter platform with easy-to-use access controls is amazing. But the more I think about the user needs, the more I feel blocked by the Substack’s limitations.

There is no way to automatically and correctly sync paid subscribers who sign up on Substack and who sign up directly through the Stripe link that I have on the UX Remotely website.

Giving access to the full job board on the website requires me to add new users to the Airtable list. Then, it gets synced to the website and access is set up. In this case, the paid subscriber automatically gets paid access on substack, which is easy.

The problem is when the user signs up through the website’s Stripe link. I still have to manually add them to the VIP list, but then I have to manually add them to Substack with a “gift” of paid subscription for a limited time.

First, the time will have to get extended manually each month, assuming the person doesn’t cancel. Second, it creates duplication of effort and makes it harder to track sign-ups across 2 channels.

This feels very stupid and inefficient and it bothers me. I’ve been looking at alternative platforms that would allow me to merge the paid access to the job board and paid newsletters (at least, these two for now). Looking at some community platforms, which look great but cost $100/month which is unreasonable for my situation.

So… the problem is not solved. I’ll keep going with this stupid method for now.

If you read till the end, kudos to you =) I guess you are interested in this kind of stuff and the struggles I am documenting here.

Adios 🤙

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