非技术创始人靠内容策略月入2.5万美元

Right now, everyone is building apps or chasing the latest AI trend. But what if I told you that I found a dead simple website that is actually crushing it?

I run a job board called Career Hound that made 25k last month.

Well, this is Roman. He built a really simple website that today makes over $25,000 a month.

Initially, our intention was to make just $1,000 each. Since we've started, it has turned into a [music] real business.

But the real story here isn't really about the website. It's all about the marketing. And he does a few things that I think are really unique and I think you're going [music] to love.

What I do as a marketer, I spend a bunch of time trying to understand my audience in depth at their core. What [music] are their fundamental questions and problems? And then I solve for those questions [music] and problems using content.

In this episode, we're going to get into his simple website that makes $25,000 a month, how he gets millions of views on his product with the same content he's been posting for years, and you need is a boring product with the right marketing to win. All right, let's dive in. I'm Gus and this is Starter Story. All right, Roman, welcome to Starter Story. Excited to have you. Can you tell us who you are, what you built, and what's your story?

My name is Roman. I run a job [music] board called Career Hound that made 25k last month. I'm non-technical. I launched it two years ago. [music] I tried everything, but I persisted and eventually made it work.

Awesome, Roman. Well, excited to talk about this boring website that's making $25,000 a month. So, let's get into it. What is Career Hound? Can you show us the landing page, what it is, who your users are, and then pull up your revenue dashboards to show us that this thing is actually legit?

Yeah. So, Career Hound is a job board that scrapes jobs directly from company websites. And the our target users are people that live in US looking jobs either they already have a job or they're unemployed looking for a new one. So, I'm a strong believer in a hard paywall, so no free plans. [music] Our users pay $7 a week, 20 a month, or 50 a year. And right now we have over 8,000 users, 779 active subs, and the lifetime value of each user on average it's $50.

The churn is high because we're selling a job search product that's 31% [music] Last month we did $28,000 in total, and right now our MRR is 12K. And the reason there's a gap between our MRR and our total revenue for the month is because we have a mix of people who pay a yearly fee versus [music] a weekly fee versus like a monthly. And in social views in the last 30 days we did 11.7 million views.

That's honestly amazing, so congrats. Let's go into your background. How do you get here? How do you build a boring website that's last month made over $28,000?

So, I'm non-technical and when I started I thought that was a disadvantage, but in the last 2 years I realized it's actually the secret sauce because I've always been super curious about human psychology, which is what I studied in university. And while I was in college, I actually sold alarm systems door-to-door for five summers. And at some point I even managed teams of sales people, and I feel like this gave me a huge advantage when it comes to managing content creators, which is how I scaled Career Hound.

You're doing these sales, you're not technical. How do you come up with this app idea, this boring job [music] board website?

I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I was talking to a bunch of friends about starting a business. So, I met somebody online, and me and him started brainstorming different ideas. And at some point, when I was looking for a job, my friend told me how he found his, how he built this [music] scraper to find jobs posted directly on company websites. So, we turned his process of how he found his job into a product just to get our skin in the game.

And initially, our intention was to make just a thousand dollars each. But, since we've started, it has turned into a real business.

Okay, what I love about Roman's story so far is how simple his product is. It's just a job board. You've seen this kind of thing a million times. You've probably even used one. And yet, it still makes twenty-five thousand dollars a month. The question I think is, how? Well, in my opinion, I think it's because his website is really simple. It's easy to explain, it's easy to understand, and people get it right away. And you probably know this, but here at Starter Story, we love simple apps and simple websites that make money.

And that's exactly why we put together this free database of over fifty simple apps and one-page websites that are all making over ten thousand dollars a month. Inside this database, you'll find real, proven business ideas with real numbers and data to back it up. So, if you've been looking for a proven, simple idea that actually makes money, this database is for you. Just head to the link in the description and grab it one hundred percent for free.

Right, let's get back to the episode. For someone watching who's thinking, "Oh, this is just another boring website or another job board." What makes Career Hound different or what do you think makes it sort of stand out in a way that, you know, has allowed it to make, [music] you know, this much money?

I think what makes me stand out has nothing to do with a product. It all has to do with my ability to spike people's emotions to make people think things in their heads through my content. This ability can be developed. You just need to do mass research on your niche and then produce [music] content using this information, using the insights that come from this research.

So, I love what you said there because we say this all the time in our Starter Story interviews, which is the product matters to a degree like someone's not going to buy something that's useless. But, you can build almost anything in a proven space like job boards and be successful purely based off the distribution or based off the marketing, which clearly you mastered and cracked. [music] So, yeah, I think that's good advice.

What I'm really interested in learning about is how the heck you grew this to $25,000 a month. What was the marketing secret behind this 25, 28,000 dollar per month business you run?

Yeah, I've been following pretty much the same playbook for the last 2 years, [music] and it's based on this concept that there's two types of content. There's timeless content, there's timely content. A timely piece of content is something that's in trend right now, but a week from now nobody cares about it. And if you build your distribution system on timely content, it's a constant grind chase after trends. So, what you want to do is you want to spend like hours scrolling and watching content in your niche on different platforms like Instagram, Reddit, TikTok. [music] It's got to be video and text.

Like you you don't want to limit yourself to just one format. And I call it content thrifting. Basically, as you scroll and go through all of this content, you're just accumulating a bunch of stuff that grabs your attention. Because if it's grabbing your attention, there's something about it. And in order to have a breakthrough in content, you need to spot something that's not obvious to other people. And to spot that, you need to do more research than others.

Because if you scroll enough, you'll inevitably become aware of things that others aren't aware of in your niche. And those consistent patterns reveal timeless content pieces, timeless topics within your niche. And that's the secret sauce.

Yeah, that's good advice. Yeah, I want to like see some examples. Kind of like a a piece of content. You said you've been doing the same piece of content for 2 years. Just show us one of those examples or a few of those examples. And maybe just break down like for you why it works