Last Updated on November 19, 2020
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About Doane Baber
I grew up in a small farming community in western Iowa called Missouri Valley. Graduated from Drake University in 1985 with a degree in Broadcast Journalism and worked in local television for several years. As always, life starts to happen and you end up making some changes. I left broadcast and went to work for a large agricultural company in a variety of positions for the last 24 years. My current position is in Supply Chain Process management.
About CertifiedNinjas
Our company literally started as a conversation in an airport with a colleague in March of 2019. I was telling my now co-founder the difficulty my son was having finding a job as an electrician. At the time, the construction industry was booming and I was amazed that it was that difficult to find a job that was so needed. After looking at hundreds of job sites, we realized that none of them focused on the needs of certified or licensed employment. Many of these jobs were found through word of mouth or personal reference. We knew there was a huge opportunity to help serve this underserved job market! This was the inspiration for our site, CertifiedNinjas.com.
Contents
How Did You Get Your First Several Customers Or Users? How Many Users Or Customers Do You Have Now?
Our site officially launched May 26th 2020. We used GoogleAds as a means to start our brand awareness as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Our first job seeker signup actual happened within the first 3 hours of being live! Then the hill climb began. It’s much tougher to gain conversions than it is to gain awareness. This has been a great lesson for us so far and we continue to adapt and change our strategies to overcome this obstacle. Today we have 5 employers that are using our site and over 50 job seekers. We are gaining more job seekers weekly!
How Does Your Company Grow And Acquire New Customers?
We continue to use social media as our main paid advertising venues. These have the biggest bang for our buck when it comes to impressions and clicks to our site. Currently, we are looking at redesigning our landing page to help with our call to action and gain more conversions. Think about partnering with other sites. We are actively looking for sites that can benefit from sharing web traffic with us like healthcare and trade oriented bloggers and web pages. Last but not least, we are really working on our SEO so we gain more impressions organically. This takes a lot of work, but the benefits are huge when you can gain those clicks without having to pay for them!
What Actionable Tips And Tricks Do You Have For New Founders Who Are Looking To Get Their First Thousand Users Or Dollars?
Firstly, be conservative on your estimates and give yourself more time to meet those goals. It’s taking us longer than we thought to hit our targets. Develop a game plan using your personal areas of influence. Determine who in your circles are influencers and gain their endorsement. Lastly, don’t give up! There are multiple strategies to get recognized and gain users. Not all of them will work for you and some will work for only a while. You need to constantly look at the performance of your current strategy and be willing to change quickly when they start to drop off. Algorithms change constantly, so you do too.
What Is Something You’ve Learned That Would Not Be Obvious To Somebody Who Hasn’t Worked In Your Space Before?
What Is Something You’ve Learned That Would Not Be Obvious To Somebody Who Hasn’t Worked In Your Space Before?
There is a growing job market right now. We using a very specific job scraping program to populate our site. It looks for only certified and licensed jobs from company sites only. In June we had 740,000 job postings in over 1,400 job categories. Today, we have over 1.2 mm job postings! There is a lot of work out there for certified and licensed!
What’s The Craziest Thing That’s Happened To You (Good Or Bad) On Your Founder Journey?
I think one of the craziest parts of our journey was the development of the site. We used off shore developers in India to build the main backbone of the system. Obviously the language barrier was always a challenge, but having conference calls at 3 am was not what we had planned on!
What Are Your Favorite Books?
I have always been a huge fan of Tolkien. I think I’ve read the Trilogy at least 5 times.
Anything You’d Like To Plug?
One of our partner sites is AllNurses.com . This is a great site for nurses to get current industry trends and information!
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- From A Small Farm Village In China To Successful Entrepreneur With Jing He
- How To Carve Out A Niche With Evian Gutman
- Building 6 Million Dollar Companies With Stephen Halasnik
Book summaries, notes, interviews, and more!
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