Our Job Board Business Passed 8-Figures and 500K Users [Update]
This is a follow up story for OnlineJobs. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 2 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
I’m John Jonas and I run OnlineJobs.ph, the largest job board for finding virtual Filipino workers. Most people call them “Virtual Assistants”. We don’t, because most people on the site are talented and so much more than just a “virtual assistant”. We call them OFS - Online Filipino Specialists. Capable of doing so much more than just data entry or secretarial work.
OnlineJobs.ph is a job board for finding virtual Filipino workers. It’s kind of like indeed.com, but just for the Philippines (because employers have a better experience outsourcing to the Philippines than anywhere else in the world). We have a database of almost 3,000,000 Filipino profiles. We’ve had over 500,000 employers use OnlineJobs.ph to find their VAs or OFS.
We don’t do the work of connecting you with people; we allow you to connect with them on your own. You post a job, the OFS applies to your job. You interview, hire, pay…all on your own outside of us. We don’t take a cut or markup salaries. We don’t force you to work within our platform. We give you the freedom to do what makes the most sense for your company.
I started OnlineJobs.ph in 2009 because I wanted a better way to find virtual workers. I built it for myself. I had no idea so many other people would want to use it too. For a lot of years, OnlineJobs.ph grew by 50% per year. In 2020 (Covid…duh) everyone realized they needed virtual work so we grew by more than 100%. 2021 was pretty good too. 2022 was more like 15% growth. In 2022 we passed the 8-figure annual revenue mark. 2023 was around 20% growth.
Our growth is good. But…it’s not what this story is really about. What this is about are the individuals whose lives are changed because of the work done. Business owners get the help they need at an affordable rate. Workers (people, humans!) in the Philippines who got a job in an economy where, previous to OnlineJobs.ph, their only option was to leave their family and go work overseas for years on end so they could send money home to support their family.
Here are Lougie and Vincent and Arleen and Hergel and…
Everyone in this photo works for us. They’ve told us how having a job working online has changed their life. How they support their sister or their community. How they were without hope of being able to support their family and how now they have a dream life.
There’s a story in the numbers of our growth, but the real story is in the lives of the people. It’s jobs created. Families fed. Businesses growing. Despair is replaced with hope. A family's first washing machine. The first car ever bought by an extended family. A wife coming home to her husband after years of working overseas. A business owner relieves the burden of doing everything themselves for the first time.
So yeah, we’re proud of our dollar growth. But we’re fulfilled because of the human growth because of what we’ve built.
If it’s the wrong product, it doesn’t matter how good the product is, or how good the marketing is. And the reverse is true, the right product requires very little. The product can suck. The marketing can be mediocre. The right product will still sell.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
For marketing, we do everything we know how to do.
- Paid ads
- Blog content
- Email newsletters and autoresponders
- Youtube videos
- Facebook/LinkedIn posts and ads
- Affiliates
We probably don’t do any of them super well…but we do them. And over the years we’ve realized that creating content and publishing it is the key to our growth. Even if the content isn’t the best. Even if we’re not “experts”. We just keep publishing and the business grows. Over 500,000 employers have used OnlineJobs.ph to find their VAs or OFS. We expect this number to increase by nearly 100,000 in 2024.
The most interesting part of our growth is that outside of publishing content, we don’t know what causes growth. We’ve tried all kinds of tracking and have never been able to nail down what works for us.
So we just keep doing everything. I’m pretty sure the email newsletter (which we work hard to make amazing) contributes. I’m pretty sure the YouTube videos are effective. I’m pretty sure the affiliates we work with help us grow. But I couldn’t prove any of it (including the content creation).
So instead of some fancy marketing tactic or strategy, we just hire people in the Philippines who run our ads, create content, create and edit videos, work with affiliates, make social media posts… We do the basics. We do all of them. Getting things done is more effective than doing things perfectly.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
We have 2 challenges we’re facing.
- Old software. We developed OnlineJobs.ph in 2009 and have added to it every day since. It’s big and bloated. It uses a very old architecture. We’re trying to update it, but it’s really hard.
- We would like to facilitate employers sending money to their OFS but haven’t been successful at it. Using Paypal sucks. Wise.com is fine. But we want to do it ourselves to make it easier for our customers. We‘re just not good at stepping into things we don’t understand, and this is one of them.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
The biggest lesson I learned was that my OneVAAway.com training isn’t the right product to fill the market need that I thought it was. It teaches how to find a great VA/OFS every time. I built it to help convert cold traffic to OnlineJobs.ph. I knew it was needed because people ask me “How do I find a great VA?” all the time.
OneVAAway.com answers that. But…what I didn’t realize was that people asking me this are already using OnlineJobs.ph. They’re already sold on the idea of finding someone. They’re not new to the idea of hiring a VA.
Someone new to hiring a VA (cold traffic for us) almost always thinks the only way to find a good virtual assistant is to have someone tell them who to hire. And…telling you who to hire is something we won’t do.
So…no matter how much I try, I haven’t been able to get OneVAAway.com to convert to cold traffic profitably. It’s the wrong product.
And that’s the lesson. If it’s the wrong product, it doesn’t matter how good the product is, or how good the marketing is. And the reverse is true, the right product requires very little. The product can suck. The marketing can be mediocre. The right product will still sell.
Time to try something new.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
No real plans. I’m not good at seeing the future. We just try to provide a great experience to employers hiring virtual workers. It seems to work.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
“The Right It” was great for the first half of the book. It helped me realize that OneVAAway.com wasn’t the right “it”.
Outside of that, I can only handle so much self help and business advice. The best book I’ve read this year is “The Secret Knowledge of Water” about finding water in the desert southwest.
I live in Utah and spend a lot of time in the desert and the mountains. Fascinating how much water there is in the desert if you know where/how to look.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
There are 2 things I always tell people:
1) Add value. Make sure you’re adding real value to people. Not fake value. Not just selling the same cheap Chinese thing trying to get ranked on Amazon. Not just trying to be an affiliate and just sending people on. Not just another insurance agent. Add value to people’s lives.
2) Outsource. Seriously. Hiring an OFS is life changing. I see people do it every day and watch their lives change. Here’s a picture of one of my OFS, Julia, and her husband Jam (he also works for me). She’s worked for me for more than 10 years. Every once in a while I get family pictures from my team and I’ve seen their kids grow. They (my team) get to be full-time parents because of the work they do and it’s just humbling when I see how much their lives have improved.
Every day I get emails from business owners telling me how much they love the people they’ve hired from the Philippines. How their OFS are changing their business and allowing them to do things they never could have without them.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Uhh…no. We walk the talk. We only have people from the Philippines who work for us. Finding talented people is super easy at OnlineJobs.ph. If we need someone, we find and hire them quickly.
Where can we go to learn more?
- The best place to find more is OFSGuide.com
- The next best place is at JohnJonas.com and getting on my newsletter. Every day someone tells me it’s the only newsletter they don’t unsubscribe from.
- I post on social media…but I don’t do it. My team from the Philippines does it. I hate social media.
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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