How Franco grew his sports job board to $300 MRR

Meet Franco Betteo from Argentina.

Franco has been playing sports all his life, especially basketball and as almost everyone in his country, football/soccer.

He has found a way to combine his love of sports with his professional life. Franco is the founder of Sportsjobs, a job board for sports analytics and software positions in the sports industry.

The story told by Franco Betteo

Who am I?

I went for a degree in economics and realized that I wasn’t convinced by pure economics but I liked statistics and applied analysis. I was always close to the tech world but wasn’t a coder.

I began my journey in data science straight out of college, working for different big companies and getting coding skills but really focused on data science and machine learning.

Fast forward a few years, I got a bit bored of data science for areas where I’m not passionate about. I thought that maybe I could look for jobs in sports data science, combining both worlds.

This was around 2020.

I did some small projects on my own but never got a chance to land a role in sports analytics. Also, living in Argentina, I was looking for remote based opportunities since here this is almost non existent.

On and off the 9-5

In 2021 I stopped looking for sports analytics, I quit my job and wanted to take some time off - hated working 9 to 5. I did, but only for a few weeks. I got offered another job with a significantly higher pay. I decided to give it a shot and stayed there for more than two years. I liked the pace of the work and how the organization worked.

Then in 2023 the company shifted a bit, the pace changed. More managing, more stress, pending slacks with urgencies every morning. Back to 2021.

Once gain I started looking for jobs in sports analytics, maybe this time I could find something. At the same time, I was following guys like Pieter Levels, Marc Lou and the whole indie hacking community, daydreaming of my own project, my own income without depending on anyone on a full time basis.

While I wasn’t landing any new convincing role, I started to really think about taking some time off to heal the burnout and find motivation, decide what I wanted to do.

Building and launching Sportsjobs

I was 31 years old.

Maybe it was time to try to do something on my own having time to learn how to create a website at least before it was too late.

So, I decided to do something small that I would use myself. The struggle to find a sports analytics position was real, there wasn’t a single source of truth. I relied on LinkedIn, Indeed, some betting niches, some companies that I found, going to teams careers page.

Ok, maybe there are more people looking for this industry and struggling as myself.

Sportsjobs was born.

Sportsjob is a job board for sports analytics and software positions in the sports industry. Maybe for a team, maybe for a consultancy company, maybe for a betting site that needs to estimate probabilities, etc, whatever was close enough.

I started building after my 9-5 job, whenever I could. I realized that properly learning web dev was going to take me some time relying only on the nights. So I started with a no-code solution using Softr for the frontend, intuitive enough to make this exist and feel that I was moving forward.

And for the roles itself, I started manually putting together an Airtable backend. I used Python for scraping and fetching jobs into Airtable.

I knew nothing about marketing, distribution nor web dev properly done - but here we are. December 2023 - I launched Sportsjobs.

It took me like one month from actually starting to have something deployed. Then improving a bit the next few months and iterating changes.

Sportsjobs didn’t make a dollar for months and in February 2024 I quit my 9-5 burnout. I wanted to rest, work on Sportsjobs and try other projects.

I got the courage to become a solopreneur relying on my savings and my motivation.

Marketing and distribution

At that point I was offering paid job posts for companies, but as no one knew the site, no one was interested.

Cold emailing and DM´s

I started cold emailing and LinkedIn DM’s to the different teams and companies.

I barely got answers and wasn’t even close to landing a customer.

Below an examples of how I would setup a cold email:

Reddit

Job seekers showed inconsistent engagement when I marketed on Reddit, with some interest but no steady traction.

At some point I realized some job boards were charging job seekers to see all the job offerings and decided to try that before resigning on Sportsjobs.

The previous spikes (below) were Reddit posts, which are the main sources for spikes in users but it lasted only a few days.

For instance, this is a Reddit post I made with really good results.

Plenty of Data science jobs in the MLS, NHL, NFL including internships

And I also have a Reddit community where I post all the jobs daily. I’ll keep it for now but if you think about it, you don’t need to be a paid user if you follow the community.

LinkedIn

Another distribution channel is LinkedIn, the land of job seekers. I have a profile and I post on different private groups. It brings a few visitors but the views are much lower than in Reddit although the segment might be good.

Marketing struggles

Clearly my main struggle is to find users or in another sense, that people find me. It’s a niche but not that narrow, but I don’t have a presence.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO was null for me. Like, really, barely got impressions with my no code solution. At some point, I decided to give it a shot to web dev and move SportsJobs from no code to code.

Why? In particular to have a lot more control over things and avoid some manual processes but more importantly to be able to post jobs following Google job schema guidelines that makes them possible to appear on Google search for job seekers.

Also, gaining more control on meta or every page in my site.

Sportsjobs also has a blog section for SEO but it doesn’t get much traffic on its own.

X

On X I first promoted it and I share updates on my journey but I don’t have a large audience and even less in the sports community, is more for the #buildinpublic community.

Bootstrapped

Everything is bootstrapped although I’m thinking of trying some paid ads to see how it goes, also as a learning strategy.

As I’m learning web dev on the fly, I’m learning marketing and distribution, or at least banging my head daily 🙂

My first customer

March 8th 2024 I got the first customer. Motivation came back, my first dollar online.

Current situation

There are about 50+ users now, more than a thousand subscriptions to my newsletter and according to Google Analytics 2500 visitors in the last month.

I’m not exactly sure of my MMR because it's a mix of a few lifetime subscribers, yearly and monthly - but it's approx $300. Accumulated I’m at $2k right now.

I still think that with some work on it I can do better, not too optimistic but there is still room to grow, specially in distribution.

I'm about to run a paid ad for a startup I reached via cold mail, things are moving forward.

Things also changed a bit because I recently accepted a full time job again so I'm really busy. Not ideal in terms of indie hacking but it's better for my economy and peace of mind for a few months 🙂

Get in contact with Franco Betteo online:

• Sportsjobs.online

• X

• LinkedIn

• Email