Pallet is the first wave of enhanced recruitment — for audiences, companies, and creators alike.
Sahil Bloom first heard about Pallet through his friend, Greg Isenberg, who told him how Lenny Rachitsky had made tens of thousands of dollars from his job board.
That got his attention.
Sahil looked Lenny up on Twitter, checked out his newsletter, and gauged his audience size. He was struck by how intuitive it seemed — including germane job posts among his content offerings. He immediately felt he could do the same with his own newsletter, The Curiosity Chronicle. The Chronicle has a devoted, young readership with a couple of key traits in common:
Given the makeup of Sahil’s content and audience, if there was anyone well-positioned to serve as a conduit between companies and passionate young professionals, it was him — not some random recruiter on LinkedIn. Sahil told us that no one he knows uses LinkedIn to find their next role. His friends, he imagines, would recoil at the prospect of sifting through millions of posts on mega-platforms.
Pallet democratizes the job search process. It moves away from the feeding frenzy of giant job boards and towards a more boutique feel through targeting, meaningful offerings. This logical ethos (alongside its potential as a great new revenue stream) made it a no-brainer for Sahil.
Moreover, he’s invested in 30-odd companies. They all have resources, and they all need to hire great people. Pallet looked to Sahil like a pillar of support for these companies, and gave him a logical reason to talk about them publicly.
He decided to take the plunge. Two months and $50,000 later, he couldn’t be happier that he did.
Before partnering with Pallet, Sahil had never even considered using his platform to highlight jobs. He was, as he says, totally green. So, we gave him an enormous level of support, including guidelines on how to think about and plan his job board release.
We presented strategies including:
We also made sure he knew that his role would be active — that he would populate, manage, and promote the board.
So, Sahil got to work. He decided on a pricing structure — $500 for one type of post, $1,000 for another — and reached out to 15-20 companies. Some were through friends; others were cold DMs to companies he knew had just raised a bunch of money. The hit rate for starting a conversation was 50–70%.
Like Sahil, people were intrigued. They didn’t necessarily know what to make of Pallet — which sparked curiosity in some and wariness in others. Sahil was interested to see how that broke out: Newer companies hot off successful fundraising rounds saw the potential. Old world companies didn’t get it.
Everyone he spoke to sensed that Pallet was the first wave of something. Unsurprisingly, startups with similar ethos sympathized the most. He offered discounts to everyone who agreed — which the most enthusiastic companies declined, opting to pay in full.
Sahil soft launched one weekend by posting a thread about the hiring process in general. He followed that up on Monday with an actual launch. By that point, people knew Sahil was thinking about the future of recruitment, and he’d generated some enthusiasm around the concept. The launch got a lot of traction.
It was never an autopilot market — as we’d indicated in the beginning, Sahil played an active role in promoting and managing the job board (The Bloomboard). He based his promotional cadence on what had worked for Lenny, and it worked for him too. He did a lot of experimentation: included jobs in his newsletter, Twitter threads, and individual tweets.
Venture capital firm 776 posted an analyst role and received 300 applications in a week. The posts generated natural enthusiasm, as Sahil’s audience saw what he did in Pallet: “…it’s curated & crafted like any other great piece of content from a creator” (direct quote from Alexis Ohanian).
The proof was in the pudding. After two months, the board had generated $50,000.
Although managing the board was and is an active role, Sahil enjoyed it, and he found the platform intuitive enough that he didn’t have to spend an enormous amount of time managing. In fact, he only spent a handful of hours creating, releasing, and promoting those first posts — making the effective hourly rate incredibly high.
Sahil told us he thinks Pallet “seems to be the most unique and ecosystem-positive-sum way of making money in a creator’s toolkit right now.” Its essence is kin to any sponsorship a creator might accept, except that it comes with the added benefit of connecting audiences with life-changing roles at select companies.
Sahil is contemplating hiring someone to handle the more active components of managing the board. He estimates it’d be a 10-15 hour per week job. They could split the revenue 50/50, he says, and they’d still both make a killing.
Pallet is about to release new recruitment tools to complement the job board offering. We’re moving down-funnel with pay-for-hire fees, meaning creators will get a percentage of first-year salary when their Pallets produce a hire. This will work through talent boards, where individual audience members can post professional profiles for companies to peruse. Sahil plans to utilize these offerings as well.
Because Pallet is new, there’s still a lot to test out — but that excites Sahil. Pallet is the first wave of enhanced recruitment, a better experience for companies and job seekers alike. Optimizing that process is going to take a heavy dose of experimentation, iteration, trial, and error.
As Sahil agrees — bring it on.
If you'd like to run your own pallet, apply here.
