A Better Lemonade Stand #318

💛 Sponsor

📧 Beyond BFCM: Your Post-Holiday Playbook

Everyone’s laser-focused on BFCM, and then... wait, there’s life after it?

Many brands miss out by going quiet afterward, even though it’s the perfect time to strategize smartly and take advantage of slowing competition.

Omnisend has prepared the ultimate cheat sheet for owning the post-holiday chaos. Inside, you'll find:

• How to retarget BFCM bargain hunters before they ghost you

• List segmentation that actually works

• Limited-time discounts that don’t feel desperate

• New Year’s promos that feel fresh, not forced

• Sly ways to get reviews and referrals

Instead of slowing down, see how you can push your post-holiday strategy for new wins.

📈 Trends

💼 Reverse Job Boards: From Job Hunting to Being Hunted

Reverse job boards flip the traditional model by showcasing talent first instead of the traditional company-posts-a-job model. Employers are now scrolling to find the perfect hire in pre-curated databases.

This model is crushing it in super niche and techie markets, creating massive potential for startups as companies actively browse and reach out to potential hires.

💰 How Do You Make Money From This Model?

Most reverse job boards use a hybrid model that makes it much more affordable for smaller businesses while ensuring the platform generates significant income from successful matches.

• Subscription Fees: Employers pay $99/month (or more) to browse candidate databases.

• Per-Hire Fees: Some platforms charge 10% of the annual salary per hire (RailsDevs does this). That is much cheaper than 25% of the candidate’s yearly salary that many recruitment agencies charge you.

• Premium Add-Ons: For bonus features like highlighted profiles, advanced search tools, or featured placements.

🚀 What Niche Do I Get Into?

Targeting specific skill sets, like a particular programming language, works well for these types of job boards.

1. They Win in Niches: Platforms like MyPerfectJob (for Product Managers) are generating $4K+ MRR and charging $10K-$20K per hire, and RailDevs, which focuses on Ruby on Rails developers, was making $5-$10K/month. Both concentrate on one specific role and value for job seekers first.

2. Global Talent is Booming: Boards like OnlineJobs.ph tap into remote-ready markets, helping employers find affordable, skilled VA talent worldwide for cheaper than hiring locally. This is earning $1M in monthly revenue.

   Create a regional database similar to this, focusing on skilled workers in markets like Eastern Europe, South Africa, or Latin America.

3. Other Emerging Industries: Tap into Web3 developers, AI specialists, or climate tech professionals. Areas like video production, text-to-video creators, or no-code specialists are also fresh roles for disruption.

💡 Challenges You’ll Face

1. The Cold Start Problem: Reverse job boards are two-sided marketplaces, so building traction on one side without the other is a key challenge.

   You need candidates and employers to start (chicken, meet egg). Invest deeply in the candidate side first.

   A strong community on the non-paying side will be a magnet for paying customers.

2. Niche Focus: Picking the right niche is essential. If the market is too broad, you’ll struggle to differentiate. If it’s too narrow, growth potential may be limited.

   Look for underserved niches with active communities.

   Avoid broad, hyper-competitive markets like general tech hiring or remote work; focus on subfields like offshore developers, freelancers in AI, or specialized creatives.

3. Monetization Hurdles: Churn will be very high, but unlike traditional SaaS businesses, churn isn’t a negative for this project.

   Short-term subscriptions encourage businesses to find the right developer quickly and cheaply. If they sign up, hire someone, and then leave. That’s another success story to display on your site.

🛠️ Want to Build One? Here’s How to Start

1. Pick a Niche: Be specific and focus on a specialized skill, industry, or region (e.g., AI devs from Eastern Europe). Ideally, you already have an audience in this particular niche.

   If you have 1000 pre-vetted developers and no businesses, that’s better than 15 paying businesses with no developers. The developers are your foundation.

2. Build Your Database: Get your first 100-200 candidates via mass DM’ing people on LinkedIn through Dripify, forums, or niche communities. Joe mentioned in the interview that he launched RailsDevs by first curating a simple Google Sheet of available developers within his network on Twitter.

   Within weeks, people landed jobs through this informal system, validating the concept before any platform was built. “The spreadsheet proved there was something here — that this could be a business.” So, a spreadsheet builder like Airtable can go a long way before you invest in fancy tech.

3. Impress Employers: Sell them the time/money they’ll save by using your platform to find specialized talent focusing on authentic conversations between employers and candidates.

   Avoid features like salary filtering, which Joe discovered pushed developers to undervalue themselves when the platform prioritizes meaningful, fair connections.

4. Transparency Wins: Joe’s open startup model has been critical in building trust for his job board. Sharing public revenue numbers to open-source contributions and his journey resonates with the developer community and employers.

📈 The Big Picture

Reverse job boards are reshaping the hiring process, creating lucrative startup opportunities, and offering tailored solutions for employers.

With the right niche and thoughtful monetization, reverse job boards can be profitable, impactful, and fun to build on top of your existing community.

💡 Insights

 📉 Avoid These Biggest SEO Missteps in SaaS 2024

This analysis of 1,600 SaaS companies revealed significant lessons in SEO, with some companies experiencing staggering organic traffic declines due to penalties and strategic missteps:

• Generic Content: Causal saw a 99.52% drop in traffic after a Google penalty for 1800 low-quality, AI-generated articles.

• Poorly Executed Programmatic SEO: Datanyze had a 95.46% drop in traffic after their /companies and /people subfolders were stuffed with low-quality programmatic landing pages.

AI and programmatic SEO are gaining traction, but the key is balancing automation with a human touch and reasonable limits to maintain quality and avoid penalties.

👉 Take Note and Audit Your SEO Strategy

👨‍💻 The Best AI Coding Tools for Entrepreneurs in 2024

The AI coding space is evolving rapidly, with tools like Bolt, V0, Replit, and Websim.AI transforming app development.

Here’s What You Need to Know:

• Prototyping Made Simple: Bolt and Replit excel at quickly creating mini-apps to automate tasks or address business bottlenecks—perfect for testing ideas and streamlining workflows.

• Enhanced Design and Collaboration: V0 delivers polished UIs, while Replit’s project management features make it great for refining complex projects collaboratively, even for non-developers.

👉 Explore the Full Breakdown

🚀 The Next Wave of Startups Won’t Need Marketing Teams

Greg Isenberg predicts AI agents to run growth 24/7 on their terms. This isn’t a far-off idea—founders are quietly deploying growth AI agents today.

Here’s how the new “agent stack” will reshape growth:

• Acquisition Agents: Running 50 meme accounts, testing thousands of hooks daily to find the best-performing ones.

• Research Agents: Scanning 100K tweets/hour to uncover new unmet needs and opportunities.

• Content Agents: Creating 200 unique hooks daily across X, LinkedIn, and TikTok, optimizing responses.

👉 Explore Greg’s Vision Here

🧰 Apps & Tools

✍️ Blogify: AI content creation tool that you can use to repurpose your videos and podcasts into SEO-optimized blogs.

📊 X AI Analytics: Analytics dashboard that provides insights into your X engagement based on recent posts.

🦊 FetchFox: AI web scraping tool that extracts data from any website using simple prompts.

📈 Playmaker: Data transformation tool that converts unstructured data into tables for various finance, logistics, and legal industries.

🎬 Introhook: Get AI-generated intros that instantly hook your audience and make those first seconds count for increased watch time.

🤖 Product Updates

🎉 AI Video Is Here: What It Does Well and Where It Falls Short

Open AI’s Sora is now public here, letting you create AI-generated videos. Here are some of its main strengths and limitations, according to Marques Brownlee:

Strengths:

• Creative Animation: Great with abstract and cartoon-style visuals.

• Easy Customization: The remix feature and storyboard tool allow you to tweak and sequence videos easily.

• Text Accuracy: Improves in generating text for titles and animations.

Limitations:

• Physics & Realism: Struggles with physics, natural body movements, and photorealistic outputs.

• Contextual Gaps: Misinterprets object positions when working from source images.

So far, it seems best for social media content and artistic animations—not photorealistic projects (yet).

👉 Learn More About Sora Here

🎨 Transform Ideas into Stunning Visuals

Flow State is Leonardo.Ai's cool new feature that produces a constant stream of images based on your prompt and allows you to select the ones you like to drill down on a particular direction or style until you find the one.

How to Use Flow State:

1️⃣ Start Generating: Head to the Image Creation tool, click Flow State, enter your prompt, or choose from the provided examples.

2️⃣ Control the Vibe: Use the left sidebar to adjust Style settings across the Vibe, Lighting, Shot Type, and Color Theme.

3️⃣ Iterate and Refine: Find something you like? Click More Like This to generate stylistic variations.

👉 Start Exploring Flow State Now

👀 Get Your AI Browsing Assistant

Microsoft has released Copilot Vision for select users, an AI feature designed to transform how you navigate the web. Currently, in preview for select Copilot Pro subscribers, Vision integrates directly into Microsoft Edge, acting as a second set of eyes to enhance your online experience.

• AI as a Browsing Companion: Copilot Vision revolutionizes web navigation by providing real-time insights and personalized assistance, from planning activities to simplifying complex information.

• Privacy-First Innovation: The vision is opt-in, session-based, and deletes user data post-session, ensuring security and compliance while enhancing user experience.

👉 Try Copilot Vision Now

🖇️ Everything Else

 💬 Reddit’s AI-Powered Search: Reddit has unveiled Reddit Answers, their AI search tool, to simplify finding valuable content on the platform. (👉 What’s Coming With Reddit Answers)

📝 The AI Writing Tool That’s Got People Talking: Matt McGarry asked what AI tools newsletter writers love, and the comments pointed to one standout: this AI writing platform. (👉 See What Other Tools They Using)