The Origin Story of Fractional Jobs

I'm Taylor, the founder of Fractional Jobs.

I started doing fractional work in 2023, as a Fractional Head of Product. The goal, from the start, was to use fractional work in order to bootstrap my next startup.

Fractional Jobs ended up being that next startup. I launched it in February, 2024. Two years later, it crossed $50K / month revenue. Read more about that here.

But before I even started building it, I wrote a one-pager to flesh out the opportunity I thought I saw. I wanted to share it with friends for feedback. And now I am sharing it with you!

The full one-pager is below, in full. Enjoy!

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Written October, 2023

My current professional goal is to bootstrap a project that reaches $5K monthly revenue.

This is a business case for a project that I think might be able to get me there.

Looking forward to your feedback!

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Fractional[X]

‍(editor's note: this was the initial name, until friends reminded me of the Elon association).

The job board for fractional employees

What is “fractional”?

It’s a fancy word for part-time. It implies more executive-level work, and is increasingly used aspirationally. In the same way that every new business is now a "startup", I think every non full-time employee will adopt the term "fractional" over part-time, freelance, etc.

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Opportunity

Today, employees work remote. Average tenure is now under two years. Companies that over-hired when interest rates were zero, are now shrinking teams and managing burn. Leveraging more AI means you can keep teams small. The relationship between company and employee is changing quicker than ever. 

Work is becoming more transactional, and I believe it will also become more fractional. Why assume every job function needs exactly 40 hours? This is a dated constraint. Why not 10? Or 20? Or 12.5?

For these reasons and more, fractional work is on the brink of becoming a massive new employment trend. It offers employees increased flexibility and higher income potential. For companies, it means a more efficient team with the exact skills needed, and lower burn.

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Insight

A great way to build a successful business is to bet on an upcoming trend before others do (and be right). Today, fractionals make up a negligible % of the workforce. The supply is there, but the demand from companies is not (yet). Only 2% of tech jobs on Indeed.com are looking for part-time workers. Most companies don't even realize it's a viable (even optimal) solution.

All that may sound bearish, but here lies the opportunity. If I'm right that fractional work is a growing trend, and clearly it's early days, then betting on the trend in an even basic way has a huge payoff potential.

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The Bet

I want to build a job board for fractional employees. Not a single one exists. A fractional's only source of leads is her network, which is often not large enough to sustain a pipeline.

Job boards are a proven product with a proven business model. Remoteok.io, launched years before Covid and focused on remote workers, now does $600K ARR. Angellist focused on early stage startup hires, 10 years later does $15MM ARR. There's a job board for practically every niche you can think of, but not yet fractionals. FFS ranchwork.com makes approx $10k/month (it does exactly what you think it does.)

If I sell 50 job posts for $100 each per month, I hit my goal of $5K monthly revenue.

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Strategy

Use the first-mover advantage to capture ground quickly and cheaply, before there is a market.

Create unique landing pages for every type of fractional work - with content.

[Engineering, Marketing, Finance, Sales, Product, Ops, People, Design, etc.]

Capture SEO keywords related to fractional job boards. Searches like "Fractional CMO" have doubled in frequency in recent years, and competition scores for those keywords remain very low. I can implement a standard SEO playbook now to rank #1 in the niche as interest grows.

Build auxiliary products for fractional workers that they need, and give it away as lead-gen. Time tracker, invoicing, how-to guides, a community, etc.

Tackle the cold-start problem by importing a feed of relevant jobs from other sources, manual at first and automate later.

Most job boards see employees return every 2 years. Fractionals need a new client every 3 months on average, I can build a recurring relationship via a newsletter, community, referral incentives, and more.

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Risks

As a bootstrapped project, I likely won’t be able to convince companies at scale of the benefits of fractional work on my own, I am dependent on riding the wave (if and when it comes).

I may build a great product and be first mover, but there are few product moats and if someone launches a competitor with bigger built-in distribution, I likely lose. I need to win on distribution.

Eventually, become the job board of record for all tech work that isn’t full-time.

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