Meaningfully Impacting the Economy in The Philippines: John Jonas, CEO of OnlineJobs.ph (Part 2)

John Jonas: I was getting good at SEO. I built this website. A week later, I made $50 in one day. I remember jumping around the house. I had this tiny 2-bedroom house. It was 900 square feet. I was jumping around the house with my wife because we made $50.

I built more of them. I recognized that these weren’t adding value to anybody. These aren’t doing any good. This isn’t going to last forever. I started learning more.

What if we did something other than just put ads on these pages like some other ways of driving traffic? I started to learn a whole bunch of stuff. When this stopped working, I probably owned 60,000 domains and had built websites on every one of them. It was all automated.

Sramana Mitra: Was there any kind of logic in what domains you built these sites in or was it just completely random?

John Jonas: There was logic. It was based on search results. If people were searching for a keyword, we would buy a domain with that keyword in it. We would build a website on it. Even the buying of the domain was automated. It was based on data.

We weren’t adding any value to anybody anywhere except to myself. You have to add value to people, and we were not. In the end, when it crashed, I started adding value to people like building affiliate websites where we taught stuff. I was doing that in addition to the first thing. We did that for a while.

Then I started adding more value to it like, “Here’s something I know stuff about. Let’s sell an info product about this thing.” I learned how to write sales copy. I learned how to sell an ebook. I was just selling information to people that was helpful and stuff that people were willing to pay for. The initial stuff died. I was ranked number one for keywords like car insurance, home-based business, and life insurance.

Sramana Mitra: Those are big categories.

John Jonas: Yes. It’s completely different now. I was working 50 hours a week on these businesses. I quit my job so I didn’t have to work so much. You start your own business only to find out you’re working more than you ever were.

Sramana Mitra: Most entrepreneurs enjoy that.

John Jonas: But part of my driving force was that I wanted freedom. I think that was what I had grown up with. My uncle is rich. He has freedom. He was always around and my dad was always gone. I’ve always felt I wanted time and money freedom.

I started working towards hiring other people to do some of the stuff that I was doing. I tried a whole bunch of stuff, and it just wasn’t working. I hired a bunch of people locally. When they realized what I was doing, the first thing they did was quit. I hired contract workers.

I remember hiring someone to write articles for me. I realized that this huge burden fell on me. I just gave myself more to do. I had to do all the work of distributing these things. I never did anything with any of the 50 articles that were written. I hired people on Elance, which today is Upwork.

I hated the process because I put in all the work to recruit someone. They would do some work and they were gone. That was the whole concept of freelancing. I hated that. I wanted someone to take over a system for me, but I couldn’t afford a full-time employee. I wasn’t making that much money. I had given up.

I ended up getting a good piece of advice from someone who said, “Go to the Philippines with it. It’s a different experience than what you’ve had before.” After a couple of months, I did. I hired someone. In my entrepreneurial journey, this was the single most liberating experience of my life.

Earlier, I felt stuck. I could not figure out how to get other people to help me. People I hired locally quit. I hired this guy full-time in the Philippines. His full-time job was to do anything I asked him to do. I could teach him how to do it and he would do it. He didn’t want to steal my business or idea.

The whole thing was foreign and new to me. I didn’t know this existed. I started going with it. That’s where things started taking off. Before that, I was making somewhat close to what I was making at my job.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Meaningfully Impacting the Economy in The Philippines: John Jonas, CEO of OnlineJobs.ph
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