ProductiveRecruit

It is two months post launch and things are growing quickly relative to the time I am able to put into working on the product. The $629 MRR is from seven paying customers, And three are paying annually.

There are two types of customers for Productive Recruit - individual athletes and partners. Six of the seven paying accounts are partners who white label the product and pay for access to the partner portal and accounts for their athletes. Partner accounts provide me a more consistent B2B mode with recurring revenue and I can continue to provide value to them as they are businesses with prospective college athletes as their clients.

I am still on my way to solidifying product market fit, but if I’m not there yet, I’m close. Almost everyone I’m targeting understands the need for a product like this and likes the unique approach I took. I’m confident I will slowly start to pull in customers from outdated and more expensive competitors, but it is going to take some time with life being hectic right now, along with being a solo founder.

How will I continue to grow and tap into the market? One approach I’m taking so far is automated cold outreach with gmass for partner sales. I still need to find a predicable and easy way to find athlete clients, but since those are less revenue and harder to find contact info for, I will continue this approach until I probably hit 5K MRR or so (which is a long ways off).

That’s all for now, I will do my best to keep writing and sharing my journey. Please follow along here and in twitter https://twitter.com/cmaaaccc

It is two months post launch and things are growing quickly relative to the time I am able to put into working on the product. The $629 MRR is from seven paying customers, And three are paying annually.

There are two types of customers for Productive Recruit - individual athletes and partners. Six of the seven paying accounts are partners who white label the product and pay for access to the partner portal and accounts for their athletes. Partner accounts provide me a more consistent B2B mode with recurring revenue and I can continue to provide value to them as they are businesses with prospective college athletes as their clients.

I am still on my way to solidifying product market fit, but if I’m not there yet, I’m close. Almost everyone I’m targeting understands the need for a product like this and likes the unique approach I took. I’m confident I will slowly start to pull in customers from outdated and more expensive competitors, but it is going to take some time with life being hectic right now, along with being a solo founder.

How will I continue to grow and tap into the market? One approach I’m taking so far is automated cold outreach with gmass for partner sales. I still need to find a predicable and easy way to find athlete clients, but since those are less revenue and harder to find contact info for, I will continue this approach until I probably hit 5K MRR or so (which is a long ways off).

That’s all for now, I will do my best to keep writing and sharing my journey. Please follow along here and in twitter https://twitter.com/cmaaaccc

This past Monday, I launched Productive Recruit and had a modestly successful launch day. I did not know what to expect but the day started amazing when one of my customers tried to buy before I make the app live! When the day ended, I had 5 new customers and made $625 - not a bad first day!

Due to the times, bigger potential customers are more hesitant on buying right now, but I do have two leads with potential to start in August. These two deals would be at least $2500/year each, which would be huge in building momentum and getting cash in the bank.

Overall I am super satisfied by having 5 people trust me with their money on day one, but know it's a long journey ahead. I have proven there is desire for a product like this, now I just need to get it in front of enough people.

Super excited about the new productiverecruit.com built with statamic and bulma css. I'm super happy with the clean minimalist design and blogging capabilities I now have with Stamic. The v2 of Productive Recruit is coming together nicely and I cannot wait to launch the first half of this year.

This morning I launched the new marketing site for productiverecruit.com after spending a few weeks building a new logo and brand.

I’m the past few months I’ve gone from SoccerCruit -> Productive Recruit to fulfill my mission to help as many athletes as possible with the college recruiting process. I am currently building version 2 of the platform with Ionic (React) and Laravel. I am super excited to build my first mobile/desktop apps while still offering a web version.

The headline “Your guide throughout the college recruiting process” hit me the other day - the hope is that the app will guide you through the process, telling families what they need to do and when so that they can be more confident and less stressed while trying to find a college to play their sport. In addition, I will offer them the tools they need to automate and manage the entire process in one place. The latter was what I had already built in v1 (but now the tools of course will be better). The main difference in v2 is that I will offer “action plans” which will provide steps to complete in the recruiting process. This education tool was the missing piece that brings everything together and adds a sort of automation to the process. Sure, it’s great to be able to research colleges or email a coach from a tool, but being able to know what to do and when is a game changer and after talking to customers and people in the space, I’ve realized this is the pain point that needs to be solved.

What do you guys think? I’m so excited for 2020 🎉🎉🎉

This morning I launched the new marketing site for productiverecruit.com after spending a few weeks building a new logo and brand.

I’m the past few months I’ve gone from SoccerCruit -> Productive Recruit to fulfill my mission to help as many athletes as possible with the college recruiting process. I am currently building version 2 of the platform with Ionic (React) and Laravel. I am super excited to build my first mobile/desktop apps while still offering a web version.

The headline “Your guide throughout the college recruiting process” hit me the other day - the hope is that the app will guide you through the process, telling families what they need to do and when do that they can be more confident and less stressed while trying to find a college to play their sport. In addition, I will offer them the tools they need to automate and manage the entire process in one place. The latter was what I had already built in v1. The main difference in v2 is that I will offer “action plans” which will provide steps to complete in the recruiting process. This education tool was the missing piece that brings everything together. Sure, it’s great to be able to research colleges or email a coach from a tool, but being able to know what to do and when is a game changer and after talking to customers and people in the space, I’ve realized this is the pain point that needs to be solved.

What do you guys think? I’m so excited for 2020 🎉🎉🎉

I am pleased to announce that SoccerCruit has been rebranded into Productive Recruit. The reason behind the change is simple - I wanted to help more athletes manage the college athletic recruiting process. I feel strongly that my vision to dramatically improve the recruiting process applies to athletes of all sports, not just soccer players. I still have the same vision and mission as before and am working tirelessly to improve the platform.

I am hard at work on Productive Recruit v2 which will have many new features and improvements, but for now nothing changes for users except for where they login.

I am super pumped for this journey and feel like this is the proper stair step approach to take and grow the business further. Focusing on just soccer was too niche and I had people asking me if the platform was for other sports as well. The answer was yes, there is nothing about the app that is specific to soccer besides from the prior brand. Here’s to a great first year of Productive Recruit!

I bring this up as I currently have been a little burnt out on my product SoccerCruit (soccercruit.com). I am currently working full time as an engineer in Chicago and am also pursuing my Masters in CS part time. I've been super busy and for a long 6-7 months I was getting up around 4-430 most mornings to work on school or SoccerCruit.

In the last 3-4 weeks, I have pretty much taken a break from SoccerCruit work as far as coding new features and outbound marketing/sales. I still have my personal instagram bot running which keeps garnering leads and a modest amount of traffic to the site, but this task takes little to no effort.

For me, I deal with burnout by focusing my time on the things I enjoy most, like going out to eat with my wife, playing Fortnite with my friends, or just straight up relaxing. I just need a mental break and plan to restart work on SoccerCruit in June when my current quarter of classes ends.

Anyone else dealing with burnout right now? How do you cope with it?

I have ended the beta period and released the first official version of SoccerCruit with automated registration for athletes, consultants, and clubs! There is a two week free trial (cc up front) for all plans. I am super excited for the road ahead and am very happy I did a beta period where I got a lot of awesome feedback from my clients. Learn more at soccercruit.com