$300k as a solo founder with no CS degree or employees

KeyValues is a business ran by one founder, no employees and makes $300,000 a year. Pretty good, huh? This article is a deep-dive into the business model, sales and marketing techniques of KeyValues. It also covers what you can do differently and how to get more traffic with SEO by changing how you build a directory website such as this.

Intro

Lynne Tye learned to code with the help of a friend before briefly attending a bootcamp. She quit the bootcamp after she realised she was picking up the material very quickly on her own.

Soon she was earning $100/hour as a freelance developer working remotely. After getting into the prestigious startup accelerator Y Combinator she decided she didn’t want to actually raise venture capital. Instead she made her own startup, KeyValues, with the money she had saved up as a Software Engineer.

Lynne’s website KeyValues shows you the best companies to work for depending on your values and priorities. People can filter companies by lots of different factors like diversity, work/life balance, management style etc.

How much revenue does KeyValues make?

Lynne has talked in interviews of making revenue of about $300,000 a year with no employees. She is in a position now where she can charge thousands of dollars for companies to be featured but originally she had to list them for free.

Obviously this is the classic chicken and egg marketplace problem. No companies want to pay if there are no developers using the site and no developers want to use the site if there are no company profiles there. After a year or so she was able to start charging new companies.

How much money goes into running Key Values?

You could easily build Key Values with no-code tools like Webflow

Lynne describes her costs as being very low - a few hundred dollars a month. If you still want to code, you can build it using NextJS and Netlify. You just need a static site. As it’s not a job board, you would only add a company once they have paid. So you don’t need a dynamic website for this business.

How much money goes into running Key Values?

Lynne describes her costs as being very low - a few hundred dollars a month. You could easily build Key Values with no-code tools like Webflow (affiliate) like I did. If you still want to code, you can build it using NextJS and Netlify. You just need a static site. As it’s not a job board, you would only add a company once they have paid. So you don’t need a dynamic website for this business.

What is the business model?

Lynne sells profiles on the website to company. Courtland Allen from Indie Hackers says this is one of his favourite business models as there are no ads: “the content is the advert”. You can think of this like a job board. These feature “adverts” e.g. job listings. So having a company pay to place content on Key Values negates the need for adsense or other distracting ads.

Lynne charges on an annual basis which is excellent for cash-flow, especially with companies cutting costs just now due to Covid and the economic problems that come with that. Assuming that a client may churn if you charge monthly, it’s always better to charge annually if you can.

This also means that you can bank the money on day 1 and use it to fund ads, pay your hosting costs or hire freelancers. The fact you may have to give a slight discount for an annual plan doesn’t matter - 10 months of cash upfront is far more valuable than a hypothetical 12 months of cash. They may churn after 1 month, for instance.

Check out this legendary YouTube video from MicroConf where Jason Cohen talks about this:

Does Key Values require many employees?

No, it’s just Lynne. Of course, you could always hire a freelancer to help you source leads for companies, build a social media brand or write a blog to direct traffic to your website with SEO.

Is Key Values hard to build?

No, not especially. You really just need to be able to add companies to a web page and then make filters. You can do this easily with a no-code tool like Webflow, for instance.

Although, of course Lynne emphasises in her IndieHackers interview that “the value is not the code”. Although it’s easy to build, the value is capturing interest from developers to come to the platform and getting companies to pay to have their profile added.

Why doesn’t KeyValues have prices on their sales pages?

Lynne got advice from a sales expert not to have prices on the website. So it’s not a fully automated website. There is a contact form and then she will get on a call with companies and pitch them a listing.

Because what she is offering can be used by all kinds of companies. You wouldn’t want to charge a huge company like Spotify and a 100-person business the same price per month. The big companies will have hundreds of job postings they want added to the site and will get far more value from you than a business with 50 or 100 employees that only has a few vacancies at any one time.

For a site like this you should have a selection of prices depending on the size of the company. When I worked on a similar site to this I was quoted $3,000 as the price that companies are using to paying as a minimum. I’m sure if you were working with a Big Tech company you could demand a lot more. Lynne has charged upwards of $10,000 a year in the case of bigger companies.

Why isn’t KeyValues an open startup?

Although open startups are very popular in the indie hacker space, Lynne chose not to openly share revenue apart from her one interview with Indie Hackers. Firstly, there is the issue of people copying her idea.

Also, in the B2B space it’s not so common for private companies to share revenue as it is when you are selling to makers. Of course, many entrepreneurs want to enjoy a certain level of privacy as well.

What would I change about KeyValues?

One mistake that Lynne made from an SEO perspective was that the filters on her page are in client-side JavaScript so they simple show you a filtered down set of results while staying on the home page.

What you really want to do is to have each filter link to it’s own page! This is excellent for SEO because now the filter page is a link for Google to crawl and index.

Let’s check out an example:

• I want to make a filter for “companies which offer a 4 day week” on a website showing remote companies to work for
• I make a button to filter the companies on my home page and call the button “4 day week”
• I give this button an anchor tag and when a user presses it they are taken to the filtered results on a WHOLE NEW PAGE!
• You then added a meta title and description to this page
• This means you will now have a page that hopefully you can get to rank when people search for “companies which offer a 4 day week”
• Whereas the same button on Lynne’s site doesn’t create a new page and so she doesn’t get that extra traffic that you get
• So add lots of filters to your website and make sure they all link to a new page

What can you learn from how Key Values makes revenue

• Sell to businesses

B2B (business to business) is extremely lucrative. Businesses have cash reserves, enjoy millions in funding from VCs and they have dedicated budgets for areas like marketing and recruiting. You are asking someone to spend the company’s money, not their own money.

Whereas with consumers (B2C) you have to ask them to pay for something by giving up a weekly coffee, perhaps. I think businesses are more likely to take a risk on spending as at the end of the day the person making the decision isn’t losing any of their OWN money.

• Take ‘all you can eat’ approach to subscriptions

Lynne could have pursued a business model where companies paid for each job post. Instead Lynne can offer unlimited job ads in exchange for one BIG payment each year. This is good for her as the cost of adding more job ads is negligible and it’s good for the businesses as they aren’t having to spend $300 for every job listing. ($300 is standard on job boards).

Imagine a company that is hiring 10 positions at any one point. Instead of paying $3,000 each month for 10 job board posts they can spend $3,000 for one YEAR of job board posts. If you can deliver unlimited value to a client then you can charge a large amount.

• Use whatever advantages you have

Lynne is clearly an extrovert so enjoys doing sales and meeting people. She also had a good network to start with having worked for startups in the Bay Area before. So she already had a list of people she could pitch.

However, you don’t have to be an extrovert of course to make this idea work. My friend Phil McPartland runs a 4day week job board partly inspired by Key Values and he is not an extrovert at all.

Conclusion

Making a directory of products, in this case tech companies to work for, is an excellent way to make money.

The technical set-up isn’t complex. You can make it with Webflow or code your own. Just make sure you slugify your filters so they have their own pages.

Of course one thing you could do is make it a part-time thing until it starts paying you. B2B just takes a longer as they are more people required to approve the decision. But then again you can charge a lot more so you have to weight the pros and cons.

Companies are willing to pay to look good. It could be that you could make a similar site for companies that promote women or have diverse teams, for instance. Or companies which work asyncronously or support employees with ADHD.

You could also make Key Values but for a sector outside of tech. Law firms with good work-life balance, or the best charities to work for etc.

My friend Phil is making his 4 day week job website which includes a company directory like Key Values. As long as job seekers are interested in the niche and companies are willing to pay to be associated with the niche, then you have a winner.