Hi, Katt here.
Welcome to the 89 new subscribers this week. 👯
The exit story I’m writing about today is already 2 years old. Still I want to share it because during my research about the founder, Alex Friedman, I found so many golden nuggets. Learn:
🎬 Alex her learnings from previous business adventures
🎯 How a ‘simple’ directory can make $5K MRR
🕺 The importance of Product-Market Fit and Founder-Market Fit
🔏 The exciting and bold acquisition story
Enjoy reading and happy building!
🎈 4 Cool Finds
Small Bets is a cohort course that learns you how to minimize risk with building a portfolio of small businesses. The guest lectures are gold.
Arc browser is apparently the solution if you always have 1000 tabs open (finally installing as we speak).
Twemex is what you need to research people on twitter and see their most popular tweets.
Magic Pages is the ultimate website builder for ambitious content creators. Get lifetime access.
*This section is a mix of paid partnerships (in bold) and cool things I use, discovered or made.
🔥 Maker Story
The fabulous story of an inventor
Alex Friedman her entrepreneurial journey started when she was still in college. Not because she was a business student (she studied psychology). No no, this story is far more interesting. At 19 years old she invented a nail polish product called Polish Pal. Polish Pal was a silicone ring that slid onto your hands to fit any size of nail polish bottle.
It was a wild entrepreneurial journey. Alex filed a patent and closed huge vendor agreements with chains like Forever 21 and Urban Outfitters. Sadly after 4 years of hard work, it all ended when it got replicated by overseas manufacturers. In a matter of 30 days all the buyers backed out.
Alex was devastated. She had a difficult time afterwards because Polish Pal was a huge part of her identity.
Everyone knew who I was because of this product. They were like “Oh, Polish Pal Alex. She has a patent. That's really cool.”
What a waste of money
After a few years of building out brands and products, working for a startup and a startup accelerator (more about that later) she had another very interesting life lesson while she was building her own startup TalkHowdy.
Talk Howdy is a platform used to organize online communities and virtual meet-ups for people with shared interests. Alex build the startup in the classic way, because that was how everyone around her was doing it and it was the only way she knew. She had a team (even a CTO) but to continue they needed to raise funding and she was not eager to follow that route.
I spent way too much money developing TalkHowdy without really knowing if it would become something.
Only later she discovered the magic lean world of bootstrapped founders and no-code. She fell in love with it right away because for her it was all about creating value as fast as possible, failing, learning and trying again.
Founders with problems
So about that accelerator. Alex received an opportunity to work at Techstars Music, a startup accelerator where she could work with thousands of startup founders. She was around founders all day and she understood their problems very intimately.
In september 2021, 3 different founders reached out to her and said:
“I need money but I don’t want to quit my startup, do you know someone who is hiring part-time?”
Alex didn’t. But she solved the problem like any cool human would ;-). She tweeted it out.
And that tweet… it blew up and was full of comments like:
This is a great idea
I also need this
And one other comment from a team member / friend named Ayush “Maybe we should build this”.
And that dear readers… is what they did.
Night work
Alex didn’t want to relive the nightmare of Polish Pal. She decided she needed to go fast. She got to work and by 4AM the first version was ready: Foundergigs was born.
“I built it in a night because I said no one else is building this like I refuse to let anyone else steal this idea from me.”
There were 2 sides to the product:
.The talent marketplace where founders could apply for a part-time position. This + the landing page was made with Airtable and Softr
A job board where you could browse part-time jobs posted by startups. Made with SmartJobBoard.
A lot of fits
If Alex hadn’t spent years working with founders & building an audience of them this story would have gone very differently. But thanks to this founder-market fit, she found product-market fit after … 72 hours.
So after building all night, Alex posted the first version on Twitter. It resulted in around 100 signups. Which is okey but not mind-blowing. A few days later something happened. A big account posted a very vulnerable tweet about needing a part-time job to be able to continue working on his startup. In that tweet Alex and FounderGigs were tagged and mentioned a lot. This led to more then 1000 signups.
The first 2 months the website was totally free to use. Then Alex started to monetize it through a monthly subscription. With a monthly subscription startups could:
post premium job listings on the job board and the newsletter
received access to talent database
In just the first month of implementing this, FounderGigs made $5K MRR.
A bold move
Alex still had a lot of questions and doubts about how to take the business to the next level. So she did something bold. She DM’ed Arlan, the founder of a successful similar startup (HireRunner).
After talking typical business stuff (number of users, revenue, etc.) and what Alex really wanted to be doing Arlan came with 3 options:
Partnership between FounderGigs and HireRunner
Have Arlan as a mentor
HireRunner acquiring FounderGigs
So that 15 minute quick call for some advice ended up being a 2 hour call with an acquisition offer. After the call Alex quickly realized that she didn’t want to be a ‘recruiter’ and she didn’t have the desire to scale FounderGigs to a billion dollar business.
A few months later FounderGigs sealed the deal and they were acquired for 6-figures.
Way to go Alex and Ayush ❤️ You have the maker mindset of a modern day inventor. Creating and solving problems is what we do best. Can’t wait to see what you will build next.
☝️One more thing
Job boards are interesting business ventures as they solve a clear problem companies are willing to pay for. I wrote a playbook on how to start, grow and monetize a niche job board. Read it here