This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Episode 2,042, 2-0-4-2. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday. In this weekly segment, we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them.
Now last week, we heard from the co-founder of Happy Box, a service that offers unique care packages for all occasions. We've had lots of others throughout the year. You can listen to all of those features completely free wherever you get your podcasts or directly on sidehustleschool.com. Just go to the episodes page. Today in our latest feature, we'll hear from John Jonas, founder of onlinejobs.ph.
.ph, that stands for the Philippines or it is the domain based in the Philippines. John's business is really cool. Basically connects employers and entrepreneurs, even some cytoslers with virtual assistants and other professionals in the Philippines where English is widely spoken, but the cost of labor is less. Let's hear a bit more about that from John, including what has worked well and his current challenge. So I'll be back at the end with a quick wrap up.
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My name is John Jonas. I'm from Highland, Utah and my side hustle is onlinejobs.ph. Onlinejobs.ph is a job board for employers around the world looking to hire a virtual worker from the Philippines. It's kind of like indeed.com, but it just focuses on the Philippines so that people have a good experience when they hire a virtual worker. I started it out of necessity for myself in 2008.
I wanted to be able to recruit someone myself. And at the time there were only agencies and they kind of did a crappy job of finding people for you. So I hired a programmer and built this software, this job board, hoping that maybe I'd get a couple hundred profiles so that I could recruit someone myself. Well, we had a couple hundred profiles in the first month. I had no idea how responsive people would be.
And today we're approaching like 2 million Filipino profiles. I never imagined that onlinejobs.ph would grow to what it is today where we've had hundreds of thousands of employers use the site. We've created hundreds of thousands of jobs in the Philippines and hundreds of thousands of employers have succeeded in their businesses better because of the help that they've gotten. Affordable, talented, high quality people out of the Philippines. And it's so fulfilling for me being able to facilitate the connection between the employers and the workers.
The biggest challenge that we're facing is just awareness. People have thought about hiring a virtual assistant but they don't know how, they don't know where, they don't really trust that a virtual assistant could do something good. Most people think that especially overseas, a virtual assistant is just a robot and they aren't capable of doing thought work where the reality is completely the opposite. And educating people on that fact is difficult and it's a challenge that we face. So creating content really is the driver of our business.
It's what creates employers to say, oh yeah, I can do that too. I know this other guy who did it and that's what I want in my business. So that's the biggest thing that has helped us is content creation. The other advice that I would give to someone is that hiring a virtual assistant isn't for everybody. It doesn't always work.
Not everyone can succeed with it but the only way you know is if you take the leap. I've seen hundreds of thousands of people do it and succeed and get some time back in their lives and get some work done in their businesses and it's really amazing I get an email. I get at least an email every single day from an employer that says, oh, I love my OFS or I love my VA. They do this and this and this for me in my business and it's saving me this much time. But that only happens if someone takes the leap and that leap is scary and yet that's, I waited two months before I did it my first time and those were two months of just wasted time that I could have gotten two months back if I had done it sooner and so many people tell me this, I just wish I would have done it sooner.
So the last piece of what we're doing is helping people find a great virtual assistant because most people, the number one question they have, after they ask, can I find someone good, is that a thing, can they do good work? Yes, they can. How do I find that person? So I have answered that by creating a, I call it my one VA away challenge where I feel like most people are one VA away from getting so much done in their business, from changing the way they work on their business and in my one VA away challenge, I have laid out seven simple steps to finding a great person every single time and I've had thousands of people go through it and it's the process that I developed over years and years of finding people myself and it works and it works really, really well and it doesn't have to be a hard process, it can be really easy, it shouldn't take you very much time to find someone good, it shouldn't take you more than two hours of total time including any interviewing you do, including job posting and negotiating and hiring, total of two hours and you should be able to find someone great. [Music]
John, thank you so much for sharing those updates.
That really is a fantastic business he has built and listeners, as you heard, he has created hundreds of thousands of jobs. I just had to kind of take that in, hundreds of thousands of jobs and has more than two million profiles on the platform. So I mean, talk about not just a side hustle or even a full-time business, but a true legacy even. Anyway, well done, I'm a fan. Listeners, let me know what you think, who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than a thousand stories.
If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. As noted, this is episode 2042, 2042. We've got a new episode coming up tomorrow. I hope you'll subscribe, follow, come back then. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
(guitar strum) (guitar strum) From the Onward Project.
