3 Things: Job Board Roll-Up, Digital Trophy Case, Vocational Training for Mental Health
We’re back! Thank you all for so many amazingly supportive messages and well wishes 🥰. We are all doing great and I’m learning how to keep a tiny human alive and live on an ungodly small amount of sleep :) A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotions so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Job Board Roll-Up
Digital Trophy Case
Vocational Training for Mental Health
1. Job Board Roll-Up
As the enterprise becomes increasingly unbundled and more people opt to work as freelancers, contractors, gig workers, and businesses of one, specialized platforms, communities and job boards have cropped up to serve each type of worker. There are labor marketplaces like Workrise (FKA RigUp) which originally focused on oil & gas workers and now encompasses construction, solar, and wind, Incredible Health and Trusted Health who place nurses, and Tend which supplies experienced hospitality workers. We’ve seen job boards for niches ranging from remote work opportunities to jobs in the cannabis industry, to roles for seniors 50+. Creating a job board is exceptionally simple. There are tons of WordPress themes/plugins for job boards or solutions like Jobboard.io that will spin one up for you in no time and at very little cost. Monetization is also quite straightforward; you charge companies to list their roles on your site and you bring the demand.
Many of these niche job boards look like they came straight out of the late 1990s but likely have a decent amount of established SEO. Someone with SEO, content marketing, and/or digital marketing experience could start purchasing some of these niche job boards (or creating ones where a new opportunity presents itself) and using their skills and economies of scale to build traffic and drive job seekers. You could scrape the major platforms like LinkedIn/Indeed/AngelList, etc for all companies posting for certain roles and then hire extremely cheap labor to do outbound outreach to those companies as the hiring manager (or at least someone’s email) is often listed in the job listing. On the demand side, most freelancers hate to do business development and also get nervous about lumpy revenue or slow months so generating awareness among groups and communities who focus on a specific area should be relatively easy. More demand begets more supply begets more demand in a lovely flywheel. The operational costs are extremely inexpensive and at some point the job board basically runs itself when you no longer need to do outreach to companies to list their open roles. Each niche operates nearly identically, just with different opportunity posters and seekers, so this becomes a rinse and repeat business once you figure it out.
2. Digital Trophy Case
The vast majority of people had never heard the term NFT prior to this past year but already, over 4 million Americans have purchase NFTs. On top of that, there are ~2.8 billion gamers who spend tens of billions per year on skins, cosmetics, weapons and more in-game goods each year. Gaming skins alone are estimated to be a $40B annual market. We are starting to see emerging platforms like Flawnt and Showtime enabling people to create showcases of their NFTs and hardware manufacturers are selling (VERY pricey) smart frames to display digital art in the physical world. On top of NFTs and gaming artifacts, there are other digital items and collectibles like trading cards, property in online worlds like Decentraland, and more which each live on their own sites.
There are now dozens of platforms to buy and sell NFTs and an equal number of places to buy virtual goods for gaming but there is no place to aggregate, show off, and monetize your digital goods. As the world continues to digitize and more and more of our lives are lived in online worlds and the metaverse, there will continue to be more digital items that we collect and want to show off as part of our status and identity. A company could enable the “digital trophy case” where consumers connect all of the games and platforms where they’ve purchased or earned virtual goods, art, property, etc and create a personalized space to display their items as they choose (imagine some elements of Myspace ;-)). Just as many games have some skins, weapons, and items that are free, the platform could be freemium offering basic layouts for free with certain types of decorations, display cases, specialty labels, and functionality that are paid. There could also be peer-to-peer lending (imagine people curating a digital museum gallery for a short amount of time and borrowing items from multiple people and then automatically returning them after the time period ends), trading, and selling capabilities between users with the platform taking a small fee of each transaction. A natural extension to the platform would be community features to enable like-minded people who have affinities for certain creators or types of items to connect, engage, and transact.
3. Vocational Training for Mental Health
Finally, talking about and paying attention to mental health is “in”. Whether it’s the plethora of celebrities speaking out about their mental health issues or the dozens upon dozens of venture backed companies trying to change access to and delivery of mental healthcare, the space is expanding rapidly. Historically, therapy had been expensive, mostly billed out-of-pocket, and required in-person sessions. Talkspace (founded 2012) and BetterHelp (founded 2013) opened the door for online therapy. Companies like Lyra Health, Ginger, Modern Health, and Spring Health have seen a lot of success over the last few years selling B2B2C through employers. Then, Covid-19 caused a massive shift both in the number of people seeking help and forcing traditional providers to move to telehealth which improved accessibility. Health insurance companies have also started covering significantly more mental health services and mental health startups like Grow and Headway help patients find providers who take their insurance and offer tools for providers to handle insure-pay clients.
There are currently around 100,000 licenced therapists in the US with an extremely uneven distribution across the US. A full caseload is 25-30 patients so that means that if every single therapist was fully maxed out they’d only adress 2.5-3M people (.7%) out of the ~350M people in the US. To become a therapist, psychologist, or counselor, at a minimum you first need a 4-yr college degree in psychology. Most positions also require a Masters degree and even a PhD or PsyD (for psychologists). To become a psychotherapist (the kind most people think of when you say the word “therapist”), you need 1500-3000 supervised clinical hours, depending on state and type of license, to be qualified to take the licensure examination. In order to legally practice, you must be licensed in each state that you see patients, even for telehealth (this was relaxed slightly during the pandemic but for the most part still holds true). For patients with moderate to severe mental and behavioural health problems, you absolutely would want someone who has gone through rigorous education, training, and certification, but for the vast majority of people who need an empathetic listener that can engage in talk therapy, there is probably a less extensive training curriculum that could lower the barrier to entry and create an exponentially larger pool of providers to serve the demand and offer accessible price points. A company can provide vocational training (potentially fully online since mental health doesn’t require physical proximity) similar to nursing schools which offer curricula and certification in 1-2 years. They could then partner with the dozens of startups who serve or employ mental health practitioners to provide a continuous pipeline of vetted labor.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine