The Business Inquirer #011
In this week's issue I talk about sourcing newsletter deals, a guest post, and what I learned last week.
Every week I highlight interesting online businesses which are for sale adding my own commentary. This newsletter is for those who are interested in business, finance, and entrepreneurship. Subscribe below to receive it directly in your inbox.
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Hello Friends!
I’m continuing to experiment a bit with the format and timing of this newsletter. I feel like every weekly newsletter comes out on a Monday and my inbox gets flooded. I don’t want to be stuck in that traffic jam. I’m going to try sending this newsletter out on different days and see which one does the best. This is the Tuesday experiment.
In this week’s issue:
Sourcing Newsletter Deals
Guest Post - Jobs for Felons
What I Learned Last Week
Sourcing Newsletter Deals - NewsletterSpy
There are many reasons one might want to purchase a newsletter. The obvious one is to simply get a head-start compared to starting from scratch. You might also acquire a newsletter to combine with an existing one or to just acquire a new audience for a product/service you already sell.
I recently came across a tool called Newsletter Spy. It’s a simple dataset of 25k Substack newsletters with their subscriber counts, monetization methods, engagement, post stats, and dates. I think I wrote about this briefly in one of my first newsletters. A few weeks back I paid for and downloaded the data from November to play around with the numbers.
There are currently 66 newsletters in the dataset with >2k subscribers and last post was >180 days ago. Many of these are dormant simply because the authors switched away from Substack but there are many which are abandoned and can be purchased for a few bucks. Purchase, revive, flip is one easy strategy here.
The whole dataset costs about $10 if you use the discount code on the pricing page.
Otherwise, places like Duuce and Letterxchange are newsletter marketplaces to checkout.
Other uses of the newsletter dataset would be for prospecting and spotting trends.
I had a good discussion around this topic in the Facebook Group last week. Join the community.
Guest Post - Jobs for Felons by Jason S.
Jason Spanomanolis is a recent subscriber to The Business Inquirer. Jason owns and operates jslytics which is a growth consultancy operating at the intersection of product, marketing, and analytics. One of Jason’s hobbies is researching industries and uncovering opportunities. Jason recently published a nice high-level overview of the “jobs for ex-felons” industry and graciously agreed to let me share it with my readers. I personally think there are a lot of opportunities in this space either through acquisition or starting new. I hope you you find this guest post insightful.
Presented by Jason Spanomanolis…
Jobs for Felons
"jobs for felons" is searched by around 7.000 people worldwide monthly, primarily in the US (the country with the world's highest prison population at 2.2M, and the highest population rate at 737/100.000).
Looks like the volume was closer to 15k before COVID, and took a heavy hit around March.
However, there are a few other clusters of keywords related to that.
Here's a snapshot of keywords containing "hire felons" (total volume 48.000)
Which players are currently creating and capturing some of the value on this need?
Let's have a look at the two of the most prominent:
Jobs That Hire Felons
key info:
Ahrefs DR: 14
Ahrefs referring domains: 359
Ahrefs monthly traffic value: $23.500
Ahrefs organic traffic: 20.400
"jobs for felons" position: 1
Traffic Started: September 2015
brand traffic: 0
pages indexed: 227
Hirefelons is essentially an SEO blog that has articles around various support related topics like transitional housing, homeless shelters, companies that hire felons.
Although it has a few articles (80-100), it's definitely not actively managed. Latest articles:
8th January 2021 - https://www.hirefelons.org/transitional-housing/
6th January 2021 - https://www.hirefelons.org/homeless-shelters-for-women/
24th December 2020 - https://www.hirefelons.org/food-assistance-programs/
23rd December 2020 - https://www.hirefelons.org/food-assistance-programs/
1st December 2020 - https://www.hirefelons.org/i-need-help-paying-my-rent/
17th March 2020 - https://www.hirefelons.org/how-to-look-for-a-job-during-a-coronavirus-pandemic-guide-for-felons/
7 January 2020 - https://www.hirefelons.org/publix-warehouse-jobs/
So 7 articles in the last year.
By far their most valuable page is the one about jobs for ex felons: https://www.hirefelons.org/best-jobs-for-felons/, which was written in November 2018 (at least this version of the URL).
This URL does not actually provide a list of jobs, but rather a list of URLs for career pages of companies that have a non-discriminatory policy. Some of these URLs actually are not correct, pointing to 404 pages.
Their SEO setup is OK but not great. The page speed score for their top page is 48/100.
There's a few content duplication issues and about 40 404 links from the website content.
Jobs For Felons Hub
key info:
Ahrefs DR: 45
Ahrefs referring domains: 839
Ahrefs monthly traffic value: $20.600
Ahrefs organic traffic: 17.500
"jobs for felons" position: 5
Traffic Started: November 2015
brand volume: 250
pages indexed: 14600
jobsforfelonshub.com is kind of similar to the previous website in that its focused on ex felon job and support recruitment, but its substantially more extensive. A few points:
They have a much bigger range of resources. For example, they have 99 articles on where felons can travel to, 100 articles on if a company hires felons, if a company runs background checks, and a lot more. They've got roughly 750 articles indexed (which is not necessarily a good thing)
They focus a lot more on building email lists - there's a very prominent form on the website and exit intent popup to sign up for a "free guide" (it's a quite extensive 50 page guide which you can check here)
There's a facebook group with 10.000 people
A big difference is that on the "main" page (https://www.jobsforfelonshub.com/jobs-for-felons/), they actually run their own ex felon job sourcing
If only we could know what their actual traffic and revenue numbers are right?
Well.. we do, because jobsforfelonshub is actually currently listed for sale on Flippa.
Top line info:
Auction Price: $250,000
Around 100.000 visits/month and declining (225.000 in February 2020)
$14.000 net revenue in November 2020 ($15,527 p/mo last 12 months, with a high of $22.000 in Feb 2020)
20k subscriber email list
They make money through:
Ezoic banner ads (made $5700 in November)
Pretty fascinating (they don't mention on the public listing), but they've partnered with jobs2careers.com which provides an API with jobs and then pays JFFH (sorry) per click. You can trigger that flow if you add an input to the blue box saying "SEARCH JOBS FOR FELONS NEAR ME" on the main page. I found the search function pretty bad, but they made $7800 in November 2020 off that
The above two account for most of the revenue. Some smaller but maybe untapped sources:
Private contract with a company to sell expungement leads
Partnership with another company that sells ex felon leads for JFFH
Donations from the job seekers (posting is currently free)
So yeah, this is quite an exciting prospect if someone can put in the work.
A few potential levers:
Site / SEO Revamp
The site has performance / usability issues all around. Won’t go into details now, but there's thin content issues, duplication issues, their page speed is terrible (4/100 for their core ranking pages), the readability of the content is bad, and obviously the branding could be heavily improved.
Overall, there's definitely value to be unlocked by someone coming in, doing VERY solid keyword research, redesigning the website architecture to distribute links properly up and down the hierarchy, and improving the page speed and usability.
Remember, hirefelons (the first website) actually beats JFFH on SEO for the core terms, even with the pretty mediocre setup they have.
Multilingual / Internationalization
Didn't look into this specifically, but I'm sure that there's demand for this terms in other languages and geographies
Vertical (or is it horizontal?) Expansion
Basically, do more things for ex-convicts. Housing, background checks, expungement, education, grants etc. Some things are currently there but feels like there could be more.
Further value capturing from leads and jobs
I'm sure there are legal platforms / agencies that would be willing to pay substantial money to get these qualified leads of ex-convicts looking to clear their records or gain employment.
Additionally, the whole job board thing feels like an untapped opportunity. It feels weird that a third party is willing to pay them $10.000 a month, but they are not charging anything for their internal job board.
Risks:
Traffic / demand is down. Unique visits are down about 30% YoY. I think this is mainly due to decreased search volume due to COVID, and worsened SEO rankings.
Increased niche competition. This is always a risk, and there's no one website that is clearly winning the market at the moment, and there's a few of them. Feels like JFFH is the one that should win though, given the extensiveness of the resources, their backlinks and the audience they've already captured on FB and email (there's probably a strong WOM element)
Big platforms: Is this just a filter away from Indeed or LinkedIn wiping out the niche players? My hunch is that this is a low risk for a well executed niche website.
Is it worth building?
If someone doesn't come in and do a really good job with the existing platforms, then I think yes, you could build a solid brand and website that in 1-2 years can become the dominant player.
Is it worth buying?
Given you consider the above risks, and are willing to build a solid platform, then a price 3-4x their annual net revenue, IMO would make perfect sense.
It is a bit unclear how much that would be though, because A) you'll have to predict if the current decline will be maintained or reversed as the vaccine rolls out, and most importantly B) the current numbers of $10.000-$15.000 do not include any costs, which you will have to carry out to improve and administer the website.
If this is something you'd be interested in, feel free to DM me **@jspanom** or send me an email at jason@jslytics.com - maybe we can cook something up :).
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If you’d like to share a relevant write-up or a guest post, please reach out.
🧐 What I Learned Last Week
How to use Twitter to advance your career
Jay Vasantharajah wrote a great blog post about his experience using Twitter in 2020. He went from 500 followers to 15k and made some life-changing connections. In his blog post he not only shares his experience but also offers tips for others to follow.
Talk about your experiences with transparency
People will find your corner of the world interesting
DM DM DM
Consistency
Don’t overthink tools or automation
Funnel followers into email list
Check-out his blog post.
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Marketplaces had a great 2020
The 2020 Year in Review came out from Marketplace Pulse. It’s full of great data on marketplaces like Etsy, Amazon, eBay, and others.
2020 was the best year for e-commerce marketplaces in over a decade. E-commerce growth had a step change, and marketplaces captured most of it. In aggregate, it was the most successful year for sellers and brands that transact through them, too. The Year in Review looks at the state of marketplaces and describes the most important trends.
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Thrasio raised $500M
I’ve written about Thrasio a few times already because I think it’s worthwhile to keep an eye on this space. Thrasio acquires successful Amazon businesses as well as DTC brands and integrates them into it’s digital consumer goods platform. The company is eyeing international expansion having setup offices in Germany and Japan in the last several weeks. At a time when many are shying away from single-platform dependent businesses, Thrasio is doing the opposite.
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TBD if Clubhouse will be a successful platform
I joined Clubhouse a few weeks back and on Saturday hosted my first room on how to acquire businesses. Join TBI Facebook Group if you’d like to be kept in the loop on future online events.
A few early thoughts/observations on Clubhouse so far…
Very diverse community. And I mean that in the most basic sense - skin color & nationality. It’s really great to see such diversity.
Requires time and commitment. It’s not like Twitter/Facebook/Blog/Podcast where you can skim the platform, read some tidbits, save an article, come back to it later. Clubhouse requires you to enter a room, listen, take notes, be committed. There are no room notes or recordings you can go back to and review. I’ve been thinking that there’s a big opportunity here.
Live speaking brings out authenticity. It’s much easier to get your ideas down on paper, edit them, and then publish rather than doing it all live. This live format really brings forward a more authentic and vulnerable voice. I’ve had the chance to listen to conversations with some amazing writers only to realize that IRL they don’t sound much different than me (I’m a terrible public speaker).
Still a lot of work to do in terms of UX/UI, documentation, and discovery.
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That’s all for this issue of The Business Inquirer!
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