🛠️ Startups Update: May 2024
Plateauing, manual tedious work, struggling with automation, new community idea
Hello friends!
I just came back from a work trip in London 🇬🇧. This was my third time in London, the last time was over 10 years ago. After living in Luxembourg for almost 2 years, London felt like home. Everybody speaks English and it does feel very similar to my “previous” life in Canada 🫶
I am skeptical that I can get used to French or German to the same extent, even if I have lived here for the same number of years. Perhaps, if I give it 12 years, I’ll adapt. Time will tell 😉
In this issue:
UX Remotely
Subscribers
Platform updates
Automation struggles
Extra thoughts
Mavericks Tribe Community
🌐 UX Remotely (Link)
Subscribers
Paid: 20
Interesting observation - a few people unsubscribed because they lost hope in finding a job and decided to either take a prolonged break from their job search, or even pursue entrepreneurial endeavours. The UX job market is in pretty bad shape 🤔
Subscription types:
Weekly: 2
Monthly: 16
Quarterly: 2
Metrics:
MRR: 118.91 EUR
Gross volume: 466.11 EUR
Net volume: 364.91 EUR
Avg revenue per user: 5.95 EUR
Subscriber churn rate: 20%
Subscriber lifetime value: 29.75 EUR
Total: 372
Platform updates
Talent List
The List has plateaued and has 321 profiles now. I did a few more DM reachouts to the design managers I am connected with on LinkedIn and still zero interest. I don’t want to give up on this possible revenue stream, as companies pay more than job seekers.
I intend to make more attempts to get the word out on Linkedin.
Locations
Initially, job locations were grouped into key regions, e.g. USA, Canada, UK, Europe, etc. And if there was a particular country in the region, I’d specify this in the Notes section. For example, the Location field would say “Europe” and the Notes field would say “Poland”.
Over time, I realized that there are quite a few jobs where I’d have to call out 1-3 specific countries from the whole region. So, I decided to change it from the region to the country itself. Liking it much more, and it makes more sense.
Automation struggles
This has been my major pain point. I have spent many days with ChatGPT and Google Sheets App Script to set up automation. I’ve made some progress, but the current automation feels like adding manual work instead of removing 🤦♂️
The workflow
Check existing jobs if they are closed: semi-automated.
Remove closed jobs from the job board: manual.
Source new jobs: manual.
Analyze new jobs: manual.
Add new (qualified) jobs to the job board: manual.
Send substack email notification: manual.
Post update on LinkedIn: manual.
The (mini-)win
This month I was focusing on automating sourcing new jobs. I managed to create a script that can scan through a list of companies’ job boards, identify design positions, exclude irrelevant terms/jobs, extract key job attributes, and populate details into a Google Sheet.
I’ve been fighting this script and ChatGPT for several weeks. Eventually, with some help from a friend, I made it work relatively well for 2.5 job board platforms. As a result, I can get the script to scrape ~250 companies’ job boards and output the list of findings. This felt magical. Seeing the script in action without any errors and producing the list of (mostly) relevant jobs - this felt pretty good.
The fail
The problem I uncovered was that from that resulting list of jobs, I had to semi-manually merge it with the list of existing jobs on my Primary list. Then, I had to check each of these new job descriptions to identify the remote location and level and update the table with the correct values, as this info is rarely clearly stated on the job boards.
After doing this whole process, my eyes were more tired than just doing everything manually 🤦♂️ This sucked.
Then, I talked to my developer friend and he suggested that my methods of automation would not work for my context. The suggested alternative - send each job’s description to ChatGPT (or another LLM) and ask it to analyze the text and return the key attributes (e.g. location, level, company, etc.) and insert them into the Google Sheet.
Sounds like there is a hope. This should make it faster for me to extract key data in a structured format, compared to the current manual process.
I already registered my dev account with ChatGPT and started the new fight 🤪 Within the first day, I got blocked by Google for sending too many requests.
Then, I decided to level up on this mechanism and registered my Google Cloud account to be able to write this script as a web application (instead of a limited version of this through the Google Sheet App Script). Google then blocked my account because of some additional document validation. Lost another 4 days while waiting.
Feels like this is an endless fight 🤺
Still, I feel hopeful =) I decided to focus on this task for the next month. If I don’t succeed with automation, I’ll have to reconsider this project as a feasible business idea and potentially pull the plug. Without automation, it’s completely unsustainable and exhausting.
Extra Thoughts
Community
I abandoned the idea of organizing a community around UX folks working remotely. Launching a running a community is a huge effort, and I haven’t seen a lot of interest in this from the audience.
And again, long-term, I am leaning towards the path of helping people become independent, and not helping people find another job.
Vacation Travelling problem
In the last issue, I described the problem of vacationing - the fact that my process is mostly manual, and I have to find time to work on the job board updates, which is very distracting and adds unwanted pressure.
Another story to add to this challenge -
Earlier this month, I went on a work trip to London. 3 full days of workshops, brainstorming, discussions, facilitating and team-building activities. At the end of each day, my brain was fried. I was coming back to the hotel after 9 pm with the only desire - to fall asleep.
However, following my job updates schedule (every 3-4 days), at the end of one of the days, I had to force myself to send out the next job board update. This was not enjoyable, at all.
Time effort
My rough estimate of just running job board updates (not counting any extra hours fighting automation) - is 2 hours per update. If I send updates every 3 days, this adds up to 20 hours per month of manual labour.
Let’s look at the cost of my labour for this project - with ~20 subscribers with $6/month, I get ~ $120/month. 120/20 = 6. If you deduct expenses on hosting, domain, Airtable, fees, taxes, etc. realistically my pay is $3/hour 🥜 🤦♂️
This is not a good business.
The only hope is to figure out automation. I’m guessing, that if I can set up all the automation I am looking into, I can reduce the time by 10x. If I can do this, nothing I’d be able to expand into other related UX fields, e.g. UX Researchers, Content Designers, etc.
Though I am skeptical there would be a major increase in the number of paying subscribers. I’d guess it can double, at best. Say 50 monthly paid subscribers x $6 = $300/month revenue 🤔 A problem when you go too niche.
Makes me wonder…
Existential question
Recently, I’ve noticed negative thoughts about the future of this project. Quite a few times. Main reasons:
Lots of manual tedious work.
Extremely low ROI.
Not very aligned with my big dream.
Feels like a chore almost every time.
Growth stopped.
The potential market (all UX) is small.
Requires effort every 3-4 days.
The UX job market is tough.
More companies are going back to hybrid or in-office.
I am seriously considering giving automation another push and reevaluating the whole ROI and its prospects in a month. I may decide to shut it down if I can’t find a solution to this problem. Here is that…
The Mavericks Tribe
I used to call this idea “The Designpreneurship”, but decided to change the name to something easier to pronounce and spell.
After spending many hours pondering my thoughts and aspirations, I realized how prominent this dream is, and I am going to pursue this as the main topic.
The Challenge
Now, the major blocking problem I’ve been facing is the imposter syndrome.
I’ve always felt skepticism and disrespect lack of trust towards people who teach others how to make money when they haven’t done this themselves. The only way they make money is by selling courses, coaching, etc. promising to teach how to be successful at X, without a legit proof they have been successful in this.
I think this is a philosophical decision each person makes for themselves. A good example (or is this an exception? 🤔) - sports coaches. There are examples when people who hadn’t been successful in the sport became great coaches.
As for me, after more than 20 side projects of different sizes/efforts, I can’t say that I truly know the secret of becoming a successful entrepreneur. How can I teach somebody something I’m still trying to figure out myself?
However, I do know how the process, frameworks, mechanisms, and tools that an aspiring entrepreneur can learn to launch a new side project or a startup.
So, I am considering organizing a cohort-based course where I’ll be guiding people through the process of ideating, validating, testing, and launching digital products. Still trying to clarify the plan here. Stay tuned…
The Pilot
I thought of organizing a paid community for aspiring and practicing entrepreneurs like me. Created a membership application form which showed a quite low level of interest - 17 people submitted their profile, and only half indicated they’d be willing to pay for the membership. But for this to be valuable, there have to be more members.
Also, building this and kickstarting it from zero would be a very significant effort and time commitment. And I don’t want to sacrifice my startup track to focus on this community. As I said, I want to find success first, before switching focus.
So… maybe I’ll come back to this community idea later. For now, though, I often feel like I want to chat with a like-minded close group of people and just run some ideas by them, and get some advice. It does feel lonely on this path…
Adios!
If you read to the end - WOW =)
Sending you some positive vibes and energy my friend. Entrepreneurship is a long, tedious and sometimes a lonely path. I’ll got your invite and will schedule a call soon once I return from my travel. 🙌