How Angularjobs CEO Brian Petro grew Angularjobs to $6.3M revenue and 13K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Brian Petry has been developing software for many years and over the past five years he's been developing a system for curating niche industry content curating newsletters in social media and the angular and react Nisha's enabled angular jobs.com he's now excited about creating SAS enables small businesses to utilize their lists by automatically delivering content Brian are you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right you know how aggressive I am so why the hell'd you agree to come on haha trust me I've been questioned myself since I made the decision no but your name was familiar it sounds like you you you were back with me in a lodge or inheres huh yes way back so I was actually still in college and me and my friend we were on your webcam you were selling amazingly like you do I'm always telling ya so we purchased the joy and you know we took our shot at making some facebook apps that was way back you know things that aren't even around anymore that's crazy well this is nice to reconnect you okay so that's what's angular jobs calm what's to do and how you making money so angular jobs is a little side project I made almost seven years ago now I was you know teaching myself to code and at the time I was just building out projects and this little job board took off and at the time I was reading about the thousand true fans and I'm thinking I'm like oh if I can just get 10,000 social media followers I can turn this into literally anything I want you know whether it starts as a job board or something else you know like I was just ambitious about you know growing or grabbing an audience and today angular Jobs is the largest social media following in the angular niche it is similar in the react neesh and that's kind of what drives me to be able to pursue that service which is the newsletter service which I guess we'll talk more about well yeah so which one are you making money on angular jobs with the newsletter service so that's a great question basically the newsletter is kind of what drives angular jobs so I almost look at angular jobs is like the first customer of my newsletter service but where the money comes in it's actually through like a service business provided by angular jobs which it is similar to what people know of as job postings but because this is such a social media ingrained business you know it's it's almost more of a service than just the you know purchase a job post and put it out there you know because I do a lot more with engagements with the audience you know to get them familiar with these jobs yep yep yeah no okay so first of all I love that you have the distribution channel but you also own the product I think it's really critical in fact I think distribution these days is more important the product so what is the newsletter site so the newsletter site right now is I see why am i dot email so that's like in case you missed it dot email and the vision there is basically for users to come and when I say users I'm talking about owners of businesses maybe coaches weighing on our brains start with and start with a juicy stuff how many people are subscribed so subscribed since the start of the newsletter I've had tens of thousands of subscribers subscribed to various topics and that would primarily be with angular then I brought in the react how many how many are on the angular one specifically so right now I've turned a whole lot of them because I was getting really costly for me so right now we have a thousand subscribers that get the newsletter every single day when and what was our version were weekly and I've had as many as fifteen 20 and even 30 thousand of subscribers to a weekly newsletter and how many total subscribers across all the newsletters under I see why am i dot e mail at the moment it's most of them have been churned out while I kinda am getting ready for this next launch which is less of me managing all the newsletters so if you want hard numbers it's in you know the less than 5,000 total subscribers but these are all so this was a push for daily newsletters which you know I'll save some people some time out there people don't want daily newsletters for the most part but that was great for me figuring out how I could leverage my technology yep yep good to hear so okay walk us through the revenue model angular jobs so angular jobs it's you know your traditional job board is you get traffic to the web page and you sell you know basically advertisements for a fixed cost for being put up on the job board angular jobs is similar except for in addition to the job board we have these large social media networks and channels including the largest angular group on LinkedIn the largest news channel on Twitter for angular and the jobs are also distributed on these channels in a very engaging way yes oh yeah so so but be specific right so over the past call it twelve months how much have you made from angular jobs so in the past month I've made a little over 2000 from the job post specifically and then using some just like zip recruiter where I'm advertising additional jobs that aren't people coming to the job board directly that's between 500 and a thousand a month okay that's great so four hundred thousand so okay um well would you consider angular job to SAS company or no it's a recurring and predictable or no absolutely not unfortunately angular jobs is more of a service company that's heavily reliant on automation you know so a lot of my background is in development you know I've been developing things for myself tools since I was a kid really so you know I'm I'm using tons of software and there's a huge opportunity for SAS and that's where my heart is and that's where what's coming with the newsletter is you know a pure SAS play which I'm really excited about which you know unfortunately you know as you know and you're well aware the best SAS plays actually bring in service you know now so I'm really seeing this new SAS as being even a freemium model with a very high-end service service option to kind of fund it yep that all makes good sense so let's let me dive into some of the economics here so how many you only make money I assume when a job is facilitated through angular jobs right is it a percent like a origination fee kind of so actually right now they're paying basically an advertising fee so you know the companies come and if they want their job on my channels then they're gonna pay upfront okay and and so if someone's listening right now going I want to hire our angular developers what would you charge them but let's say they want to do five or the next year so for one job post is five hundred dollars and that's for 90 days and at this moment you're going to get an amazing deal because I'm putting my own time not just distributing the jobs which I have help from with my assistant but I'm actually reviewing the jobs and giving you know very quality feedback about how I can make the jobs perform better since I've been doing this for seven years I get job post that just to me look horrendous and with the checklist that I've developed over the past you know years I'm able to quickly get these jobs up to speed so and having that's have you funded this stuff with your own capital or have you raised a hundred percent bootstraps yeah I love that and how many folks on the team today so it's just me and my assistant okay so two of you guys yeah and then and then I mean how do you grow this into like you know a million dollar your business great question so what really drove this business where those newsletters we talked about in the beginning and in this time I've really been using the funds to further develop the system where you know some may call it like a reinforcement machine learning type of system basically I've gotten pretty good at curating news and in almost like a tinder like fashion being like this should be in the newsletter that shouldn't be in the newsletter that should the shouldn't and over time I get delivered to me like a quality newsletter before I even ever curate using that tender like apparatus so wait wait I'm sorry what do you mean what do you mean what do mean you get a news hour delivered to you before you curate it yeah so I mentioned I'm big on the automation so I have automation set up and that sends me content every day right now that sends content to my daily newsletter subscribers the future SAS that I've mentioned with the I see why am i died email is going to enable people to come to the website sign up just put in their email upload their brand image and then as simple as that they swipe right swipe left you know for articles that they think being their newsletter and then I spit them out a subscribe page it shows you know hey sign up here for Nathan lakas newsletter to be damned a newsletter yeah and all you have to do is each day you say swipe left swipe right to a few pieces of content and then weekly I'm delivering a newsletter with your brand at the top nathan laka says you should read these things so Brian you are essentially making this easy for like this whole curator world you're basically putting curation on steroids yeah yeah yeah see I think that sure I think what's tricky about this is like so we do daily newsletter and it works extremely well you'd think it wouldn't but it actually does work well by well I mean I want to be specific right so we've got about 10,000 people on that we get on average we like a twenty-five and thirty five percent open rate and we'll drive anywhere between like four hundred and seven hundred clicks per day but it's all hyper focused on b2b SAS and the tricky thing is those daily emails are a combination of unique content that I've collected at the top and then curated stuff below does your model or your tool work where they can still customize it or will they're only build up customize their branding at the top their logo at first I want to make it as easy as possible so people are just gonna upload their brand and they're gonna see that they have a newsletter in five minutes hmm in time that's where the higher-level service comes in and where I see we can make a lot of money with much larger institutions by providing them that extra customization yeah so what is the I'm a little confused and I think maybe there's a story here why you turned out on purpose all the Kuster all these people subscribe together listening that is a brilliant distribution channel we're getting too many spam requests was the IP kind of shut down or degrade over time because it was so aggressive or like what actually happened there you wouldn't just give those emails up yeah so that's a great question you can circle except a hundred thousand other people are listening in so no pressure okay so a year and a half ago me and my partner we were working on angular jobs in addition to another SAS startup which was called link plug basically it was this idea of putting interstitial inside of a link you know like you shorten the link there's an interstitial and you can get you know traffic by sharing other people's content that kind of full circles back to why I was curating things you know cuz I wanted to get these link plugs in things that I was sharing with the world so they would see what we were working on and you know that didn't work out you know me and him we were fresh out of college and we're just like we're gonna go full-time on this thing he was able to secure like maybe three to five months of apartment and you know that just wasn't enough time for us to get things going and we started realizing that towards the end right around the same time my dad was diagnosed with cancer and that was like a rough couple years so you know what ended up happening is you know the mailchimp bill was like four hundred to five hundred dollars a month and that was super stressful a little bit later my dad passed and I was fortunate to get a small amount of money and at that time like I was just so overwhelmed with the you know bills that were coming in from MailChimp and you know like everything was just such a mess I just you know kind of crashed and burned with my friend you know fortunately our relationship survived you know we're super excited about working on something in the future he's getting his medical doctorate right now so like we're super excited about what he can do with that and our entrepreneurship you know so you know it's really lucky to come out in the situation like I said I got a little bit of money and for the past year that enabled me to really dive into the books and like focus on self-development and it's actually like just now that I'm like at the start of getting things back in order you know so like I think angular Jobs is you know now that's almost become like my practice business not just for practicing the SAS but also practicing business myself mm-hmm you know so it's a good that's a great testing ground and I appreciate you sharing that story I know obviously I must been extremely tough but you know the I guess the blessings inside of that is at four you like double down and refocus on what matters and what counts and now you have this beautiful testing ground you're learning in and I'm sure your dad is rooting going alright Brian keep learning keep learning keep learning build build build absolutely yeah very good so do you think angular jobs is what you'll build on over the next five to ten years or are you kind of that's your learning ground and you're kind of marinating some other ideas you might launch here shortly so it's definitely not a five to ten year business unfortunately because of the niche it's in you know these technology niches they come and go and you can't even predict when a new technology is going to come in and disrupt you know the older technology but whether it can sustain itself for five to ten years that's betting on Google you know the ones that are behind this angular technology and so I think that's a good bet as far as my personal time being spent I think that it's not a five to 10-year plan I think it's much much closer to like a one-year plan getting this thing wrapped up so that this SAS this newsletter SAS can really be displayed well working with angular jobs yep very good all right Brian let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book hey let's uh you just broke up a little school what's your favorite business book can you restart the top five favorite business book is for Charlie's Almanac numbered about that number two is their CEO your phone are studying so I just read Eric Schmidt's trillion dollar coach and that was amazing highly recommended number three what is your favorite online tool for building a company anywhere somewhere between Hugin and zapier Hugin is like the open source code version of zapier which I'm sure plenty of people are familiar with number four how many hours of sleep to get every night at least eight last night it was eight and a half and what's your situation married single kids so I've been with my beautiful girlfriend for eleven years now she has reminded me it wasn't ten it was eleven and she's basically kept me going this whole time you know without her I wouldn't get my sleep I wouldn't get my amazing food no kids no kids all right and how are you rent 28 28 okay last question what he was your 20 year old self new so I wish that I knew that I needed to give myself permission to practice business you know instead of jumping in and trying to find that life's work you know that everybody wants guys there you have it angular jobs calm a big email list and job board for hiring highly specific developers from Brian again who's using it really to practice business you know and then obviously takes a cut when he helps people land jobs but he this is a testing ground for his next big SAS idea which is actually working on Brian thank you for taking us to the top Thank You Nathan you're awesome