It’s been a while. My consulting business has taken over life, so the blog and the Leanpreneur newsletter went on the back burner for a few weeks.
Apologies out of the way, I have a new episode for you, this time with Lior Neu-ner, the founder of RemoteRocketship.com. He works a 9-5 and runs his candidate-focused job board on evenings and weekends.
He A/B tests his pricing more carefully than anyone I’ve spoken to.
Contributor: Lior Neu-ner
Follow Lior on X
Frustrations when searching
The idea for Remote Rocketship came about when Lior’s wife was searching for a new job.
He spotted that she wouldn’t see job vacancies that he knew were available. This happens when companies choose not to use certain websites or pay for listings.
As he had left his role at Meta as an engineer, he was looking for problems to solve.
So he built something for this one.
The build
The website took around 3 weeks to build, and gathered significant traffic on launch.
His idea was to scrape as many remote jobs as possible, creating a one stop shop for job seekers.
This was November 2022. He shared it on social media and it did very well on Reddit, notching up 150k unique visitors soon after launch.
It found favour with one Reddit community in particular, r/overemployed.
For the uninitiated, overemployed is a term to describe those holding down multiple remote jobs.
The tag line on Reddit is “Work two remote jobs, reach financial freedom.”
The B2B struggle
After trying the usual monetisation routes for a few months, the website was making no money despite the high traffic. Only one company paid $200 for a post.
Lior put this down to market conditions and an abundance of strong competitors.
So, he made the brave move to flip the business model to start monetising on the candidate side, charging job seekers for his curation.
He A/B tested it on 10% of users. Despite his doubts, he made sales in the first 2 weeks, so he rolled it out to everyone.
Experimenting with pricing
After that first success, he put his effort into making the candidate experience as good as he could, and tested every pricing idea before committing to it.
-
Moving the job board behind a paywall. 10 subscribers ($10) after 2 weeks, but traffic dropped 50%.
-
Doubling the price. 66% fewer sign-ups, 35% less revenue.
-
Adding a 2-day trial. No change in sign-ups, and less revenue because people cancelled before the trial ended.
-
Offering half price and bursaries. Sign-ups up 30%, revenue flat.
-
Weekly subscription rather than monthly. Sign-ups held steady and churn went up, but revenue stayed the same.
-
Adding annual subscriptions. Revenue doubled, and lifetime value went from $35 to $45 per user.
Throughout, he used PostHog for his testing and tended to run his tests for 2-3 weeks. If you try this, use an A/B test calculator to work out how long each test needs to run.
Life for Lior
Lior runs Remote Rocketship as a solopreneur.
I had assumed he was a full-time founder, but no, he also has a 9-5.
In fact, he found his 9-5 during the time he was trying to monetise via the B2B route and struggling.
Once the site no longer had to pay his bills, his head cleared. Having less time also made him far more careful about how he used it.
So, he built for overemployed people and then (kind of) followed the very same ethos.
The website runs itself, taking up very little of Lior’s time.
Parting advice
When I asked Lior for advice, he gave two tips.
Be deliberate about effort versus impact. Focus on the actions that give the most impact for the least effort.
And always look for corners you can cut without hurting quality.
Resources
Lior took a good dose of inspiration from Phil McParlane at 4dayweek, who I interviewed earlier this year.
Some of Phil’s tweets about SEO convinced Lior that he should have a go at building in this space.
What Lior did next
Lior turned a free job board into a paid one by testing before committing, spending his limited hours where they counted, and keeping his day job while he did it.
In addition to Remote Rocketship, he has also now launched:
- techjobscalifornia.com
- techjobsnewyorkcity.com
- techjobscanada.app
- techjobsuk.com
He reuses the same approach and tech to test new markets cheaply, which is a smart way to do it.
If you’re building something lean alongside a day job, the Leanpreneur community is a small room of people doing the same.
