Meaningfully Impacting the Economy in The Philippines: John Jonas, CEO of OnlineJobs.ph (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the timeline. How long did it take you to experiment enough to arrive at this stable conclusion that you could get a virtual assistant?

John Jonas: I don’t know if there was a timeline of when I realized it. The whole thing was just a leap of faith. I didn’t know they were going to help me. I worked with other people. It hadn’t worked out.

I hired people on Elance and it made me frustrated. I know there was a number of months in there where I thought, “I just got to do it myself.” Then I got this reference. I waited a couple of months. I was supposed to hire this person full-time.

I was paying them $750 a month. The agency was paying the person $250 a month. I didn’t know that at that time. I just remember this change happening in me where I had a full-time person.

For most entrepreneurs starting out, this will make the biggest difference. Take the leap to hiring a full-time person. If you hire them hourly, you don’t care if they’re not busy. I hired this guy full-time. If he wasn’t busy, it was on me. I’m wasting money and time. I had to do something on my business to give him something to do.

That was when the switch happened for me from being the grunt worker to being the CEO.

Sramana Mitra: Give me the timeline. When did you start the business and when did you make this change?

John Jonas: I started the business in 2004. It was probably early 2005 when I hired him. There’s a year of me just being very frustrated.

Sramana Mitra: What happens, by way of revenues, in 2005?

John Jonas: From what I remember, my income doubled every year for five years. I remember being at $35,000 and then $80,000. Then $150,000. It just kept doubling.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you hit the million-dollar mark?

John Jonas: Around 2009.

Sramana Mitra: By this time, you’re still buying domains, putting content and monetizing through Google?

John Jonas: No, I wasn’t doing that anymore. I had some affiliate businesses where we wrote reviews about products and had all kinds of traffic. 

Sramana Mitra: How did you pick the areas where you went to do affiliate sites? Were those the domains where your original sites were doing the maximum traffic?

John Jonas: No, there were a couple of things it was based on. One was search volume. If there’s high search volume, I knew I could rank. The second is my gauging for profitability. I had built software that would find search volumes of a million different keywords.

I had spent enough time in the industry that I could say, “I know this market is a high-margin market.” That was how I chose the affiliate stuff. Outside of that, I was also running a number of info products. Those were chosen based on where I could find experts.

If I knew there was a market and I could find an expert, I would pay them to write a book. I would create the marketing and the sales. This drove more than half the revenue. I was in the Mastermind group. We would talk every week. I found myself talking about the guys in the Philippines every single week.

After a while, I said, “I just can’t keep talking about this over and over again.” I recorded an audio and put it out there. A couple of them sent the audio to their audiences. It was getting downloaded a ton. They started asking me to teach their audiences. I started selling a course. That took off. That went crazy.

Then in 2008, I realized that the way we find these people is so crappy. You had to go through an agency. We built a marketplace for finding the workers in the Philippines. I ignored it while I was teaching. After a couple of years, the marketplace had gone crazy. We have 10,000 people from the Philippines signing up and hundreds of employers signing up every month.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing an Upwork but just focused on Filipino workers. 

John Jonas: We took a different approach than Upwork. Upwork is based on getting feedback. Everything is based on you do a job and you get feedback. That elevates your status so you can get more feedback.

The other part is, Upwork makes money by you doing work and they take a fee. I don’t like working like that. I wanted to recruit the person. I want to pay them however I want to pay them. I don’t want to pay them markup.

We built a job board. You pay us a fee to access the database. You find the people on your own. It’s based on long-term work. The whole concept is, we want you to have zero churn because Filipinos are exceptionally loyal. That’s how we built the system.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Meaningfully Impacting the Economy in The Philippines: John Jonas, CEO of OnlineJobs.ph
1 2 3 4