Roman built Career Hound, a job board that scrapes listings directly from company websites, and grew it to $28,000 in monthly revenue (≈$12,000 MRR) with 11.7 million social views in 30 days — all without writing code, by mastering a repeatable content marketing system built on timeless formats and older creators.
The business: Career Hound
Career Hound is a job board that aggregates postings scraped directly from company career pages, targeting U.S.-based job seekers whether employed or unemployed.
Hard paywall with no free tier: $7/week, $20/month, or $50/year.
Over 8,000 total users, 779 active subscriptions, average lifetime value of $50 per user.
Churn runs high at 31% because job search is inherently temporary — users cancel once hired.
Last month total revenue was $28,000; MRR sits at $12,000 (gap comes from mix of weekly, monthly, and annual billing).
Social content generated 11.7 million views in the prior 30 days.
Roman is non-technical; he studied human psychology in university and sold alarm systems door-to-door for five summers, eventually managing sales teams.
He frames the lack of technical skill as a secret advantage: it forced obsession with human psychology and with managing content creators — the actual growth lever.
The idea originated when a friend described a scraper he built to find jobs on company sites; they turned that manual process into a product, initially aiming for just $1,000 each.
Marketing strategy: timeless vs. timely content and “content thrifting”
Roman distinguishes two content types: timely (trend-dependent, short shelf life) and timeless (perennial audience desires). Building distribution on timely content creates a constant grind; timeless formats compound.
His research method — “content thrifting” — involves hours of scrolling video and text across Instagram, Reddit, TikTok in the job-search niche, collecting anything that grabs attention.
The goal: spot non-obvious, consistent patterns that reveal timeless topics (e.g., “companies hiring remotely worldwide”) and convert them into repeatable formats.
Once a format works, he runs it repeatedly; the same “remote/worldwide hiring” list format has been reused for two years.
For job-search advice, credibility signals matter: older creators (50s+, gray hair, wrinkles) subconsciously signal wisdom to the target demographic.
He finds creators by DMing people already posting relevant content for fun — not through agencies — and asks if they want paid work.
Pays roughly $20 per video; keeps cost low by eliminating creator friction: provides a sheet of pre-designed, “stupid simple” formats requiring zero research — just open laptop and record.
This system lets him onboard creators who have never made content before and scale volume without quality loss.
Tech stack: intentionally lean
Short URL for tracking social views, PostHog for marketing experiments, WhatsApp for creator communication, Microsoft Clarity for visitor behavior, Hetzner for hosting, Postmark for email campaigns, Google Workspace for email, Cloudflare for DNS/CDN.
Advice for builders: copy proven models, run daily experiments
Source ideas by browsing creator marketplaces (e.g., SideShift) or Sensor Tower to see which apps/companies pay creators — proof they’re making money.
Pick one you enjoy, build a similar product, and use their content as marketing inspiration; if you can’t get paying users, you know the gap is execution, not product-market fit.
Run marketing experiments daily; treat every failed experiment as progress — “you get closer to your first dollar with every marketing experiment you do,” just like door-to-door sales.
Final advice: faith + consistency over years
Once you make your first dollar online, it becomes obvious it’s possible; the key is maintaining faith during the early grind.
Running daily experiments and extracting insights from each failure makes a profitable business inevitable over a couple of years — “not rocket science, doesn’t take a genius, just consistent work.”
Gus’s reflection: marketing is the differentiator
The episode reinforces a pattern across Starter Story interviews: in proven categories like job boards, the product matters less than distribution.
Roman’s unique edges were analytical “content thrifting” to isolate timeless formats and a deliberate creator demographic match (older creators for credibility in job search).
Proof that a boring, simple product in a proven space can win with the right marketing system.
