13
16 Comments

We did $250k GMV in 2 months while still in beta. AMA!

I'm the founder of a startup called Pallet. It's now been nearly 2 months since
@Pallet_HQ first launched, in that time we've:

  • grown to over 150,000 users
  • facilitated over 20,000 applicants and hundreds of hires
  • paid creators hundreds of thousands of dollars

We allow anyone to spin up a variety of tools in the recruiting space (currently only publicly launched a job board) and have worked with some awesome creators and communities in the tech space. Happy to answer questions about go to market with creators, building in the recruiting space, or anything else that may be of interest!

  1. 6

    You guys are not even on google besides a Crunchbase profile. Seems kinda fishy tbh. And this revenue in 2 months? Prove it.

    1. 3

      In all honesty, this can be true.

      Let's look at this:
      $250K GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) - this doesn't matter. You can have $1Mil of GMV a month, and costs of running of $2Mil. There is a reason they provide GMV, not revenue, or profit. GMV can be inflated by a business model, where they either estimate this (they include prediction/transactions of their customer's GMV and just use it). So it's just a number. You can sell $2 bills for $1 - that will make your GMV skyrocket quickly!

      150K users - well, if your customer has a blog with 100K readers a month, and he uses your plugin to display annotations, does it mean that YOU have 100K readers? No. But it seems that's the case here. I bet this should read 150K visitors to pages hosted by pallet, or 150K people visit partner websites.

      Paid creators hundreds of thousands of dollars - so, more than $250K GMV? You paid for what? You paid how (with cash, or other forms).

      It looks a bit fishy, but it can be also just a game of words.

      Just thinking out loud.

    2. 3

      this site is just another marketing channel, 90% are fake in terms of revenue ...

    3. 0

      Tough crowd 😅

      We only launched a couple months ago so not super optimized for SEO, but you can check us out mostly on Twitter, https://twitter.com/pallet_HQ

      In terms of how we make money, you can check out any of the launched Pallets on our pinned Twitter thread! One example is here: https://pallet.xyz/list/lennys-jobs/jobs

      In terms of what @BartBoch said, yes GMV is basically the total dollar amount paid out to creators from businesses, I.e if a company wants to list a job to Lenny's audience they pay him anywhere from $500 - $1500. We take a 10% cut of all profits - hope this answers your questions :)

  2. 2

    Congrats Hai and the Pallet team! 👏 We use Pallet for our own board — jobs.makerpad.co and love it. I'm curious — are there any parts of your business (operational and the software) that are built/run without code?

    1. 2

      We use a looot of Airtable, for tracking customers, partners, etc. Signup flows are all plugged into Airtable as well. Thank you for the kind words!

  3. 2

    Congrats! What kinds of growing pains did you experience when you scaled from 0 to 150k users in 2 months, and how did you get through them?

    Also, what's your recipe for surviving/staying sane as a founder?

    1. 1

      Hey @IndieJames! A lot of the main problems are dealing with a relatively high profile product that's still early in development. Most of our features are still in development, and so managing to justify the buzz can get tricky.

      I think surrounding yourself with a great team who you actually like goes a long way to this :)

  4. 1

    Why you do not even have a working link to your product in your post and no product in your IH profile?
    As already mentioned.... Via google and some time you get on a landing page which is nice, but I can hardly belief that this turned in 2 months from 0 to 150000 users and over 20-000 applicants.
    But you say it, as it is a AMA.... How you did this? What is the magic behind this? Not to post the URL in posts and not having a Product Profile on IH? ;-)

    1. 1

      ah, and I signed up.... What I get after that is the same landing page.... nothing else.
      Is this the secret to get to $250k GMV in 2 months?

      1. 1

        Hey @altafino! Our landing page is basically just a way to capture emails, you can check out a list of all of our launched communities here: https://twitter.com/Pallet_HQ/status/1390735389879672837

        Live example of the product can be found at any of the comments in the thread :)

        1. 1

          ever heard about GDPR?
          So you make people signup and this is then just to capture emails?
          And there is not place you can find a price and nothing and you think we are stupid here and believe you did 150k users in 2 months? Capturing Emails?

          1. 1

            Think you might be confused @altafino, the landing page is how we build up our inbound of creators wanting to make a Pallet themselves. Most direct users don't ever interface with our landing page as they're using specific instances (like pallet.xyz/list/thebloomboard).

            Anyways, seems like you're angry about something or another - so will leave this conversation at that. Good luck with future endeavors! Boardengine seems great :)

            1. 1

              No @hankai1998, I'm not confused or angry about something or another.
              But until now you could not explain me and some other here, how you find your paying users and got the 250k in 2 months. If its not through your landing pages, how you got people/companies to pay for instances?

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 47 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 27 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments