Made it $1,000 MRR after pivoting business models to B2C! 🎉

Hey Indie Hackers! I wanted to share my journey so far with Remote Rocketship, the site I've been working on that hit $1,000 in MRR after making the switch to a B2C business model. Hopefully, you'll find something relatable or helpful in my story.

Remote Rocketship is a job board for remote jobs. It scrapes various sources on the internet to find job openings and compiles them on the site. I currently get between 50k-100k visitors per month, which is a pretty solid number, but monetizing the site hasn’t been a straightforward process.

Initially, I tried monetizing using a B2B business model where businesses could pay to claim their profile or promote their own listings. Unfortunately, it wasn't working for two reasons:

1. The market is flooded with candidates at the moment, so demand is lower.
2. To make it worth it for businesses, the site either needs to be niche (to provide niche candidates) or have a massive user base (which I don’t have yet).

After many cold reach-outs to recruiters on LinkedIn, I only made one sale for $199 (who was already an acquaintance of mine). I knew I needed a change, so I decided to try a B2C business model. The new model required users to pay $10 per month to access the site, although they can still see the first 10 job openings for free.

Not wanting to kill the site by turning on monetization, I ran it first as an experiment where only 10% of users would need to pay. After making nine sales, I felt confident enough to open it up to everyone, and I've now reached 100 sales!

How did I drive growth?

As for growth, I started out by sharing Remote Rocketship on Reddit. It did surprisingly well there, bringing in around 200k visitors during the first month. I think the key was being genuine and not pushy. Check out the posts here: Post 1 and Post 2.

A few people also made TikToks about Remote Rocketship which was super awesome to see! It drove around 50k visitors to the site (tweet on the breakdown)
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However, Reddit and TikTok aren't sustainable sources of growth, so I've been working on SEO. Currently, I'm getting around 17k clicks per month. I've shared my SEO tactics in this Indie Hackers post: Starting to See Results from SEO: 4 Things I'm Trying.

Making the switch to B2C has paid off so far and encouraged me to invest more into the project.. If there's one thing I've learned, it's to keep experimenting and not to be afraid to change direction when something isn't working.