Today I have a real treat for y’all. I’m interviewing my friend Kevin Fleming, the man behind Contena.
Many of you reading want to find writing jobs to pitch. And Kevin saw the need for a service that helps freelancers find writing jobs faster – by searching the internet for leads in one fell swoop. So he created Contena to collect all writing jobs in one place, for easier access and less time spent on wild-Google-goose-chases.
(Plus, I’m nosy and think it’s super fun to learn the “behind the scenes” of other successful webpreneurs’ businesses!)
Tell us about yourself, Kevin. Who are you, where are you from and what do you do for fun?
Hi Gina – I’m Kevin, an entrepreneur and the founder of Contena.
Right now, I’m located just outside of Philadelphia. In my free time, I enjoy spending time with my wife and my dogs – traveling and studying coral reefs and marine ecosystems.
What’s the story behind Contena anyway?
Contena actually started as a little side project.
I sold my previous business (a popular financial website) and was helping the new owner ramp up the content and hire more writers. However, I found that many of the writers applying for new jobs had also applied for previous writing positions with us years ago.
From this experience, I discovered that many writers were spending an *insane* amount of time searching for new work.
There were plenty of jobs available, but they were scattered across the internet – on many different job boards and presented in many different formats.
Writers were manually searching through all of this data, each and every day – which was a massive time suck.
“As a freelance writer, you don’t get paid for the time you spend searching. You get paid for writing.”
So I started to think about how to solve this.
Instead of just building another job board, I wanted to build an easy way to search across the many different existing sources.
Contena was born from that idea.
With Contena, we give our members *superhuman* job finding abilities and flip the equation so you spend more time making money, and much less time searching for work.
Who is Contena for?
Anyone who is serious about making more from their writing can benefit from Contena.
We focus exclusively on jobs that are location independent and have both contract and full-time writing jobs across many different categories.
What kind of results are people seeing?
In June, we launched what essentially was our Beta test.
After pouring so much time into this, I was super excited (not to mention nervous) about the feedback we would receive. So I hit the launch button, and it was incredible because within two or three days we started receiving “success story” emails.
That positive feedback is really what keeps us going. It’s an amazing feeling to receive that type of validation.
“Now I receive emails like that almost every day.”
With that said, the most successful freelancers and writers who use Contena realize it’s a tool built to empower you – if you want to see results, you need to be willing to put in the work!
What’s next for Contena?
We will soon be adding the the ability to “follow” individual companies.
It works a lot like following on Twitter or Facebook: if I’m following a company and they post a job almost anywhere on the internet, Contena will notify me in real-time.
We are also continuing to ramp up the number of jobs found by Contena.
Right now, we add more jobs on many weekdays than we were adding in an entire week when we first launched.
How can people get started?
Creating an account literally takes two minutes (probably less). Our basic version is totally free to use. We also have a Pro version that we believe is a no-brainer for anyone who is serious about making more from their writing.
I love the community of writers that you’ve created around your courses, Gina, so I’m offering 10% to your readers. They can simply add “horkey10” at checkout (on the payment page) in the referral code field to receive 10% off of their subscription price. (Thanks so much Kevin, I teach my writers to bootstrap as much as possible, so this is AWESOME!)
We’re also running a holiday discount, so the pricing after that discount is $147 (for 6 months), $99 (for 3 months) and $49 for (1 month – not discounted).
As I mentioned, your readers get an additional discount, so if they add “horkey10” at checkout, they’ll only have to pay $132.30 (for 6 months), $89.10 (for 3 months) or $44.10 (for 1 month). If someone grabs the six month membership, that’s ~$22/month – and really you probably only need a gig or two to pay for the entire membership!
Kevin Fleming is the founder and CEO of Contena, a service that helps freelancers find the best paid gigs. You can connect with Kevin on Twitter or Facebook. Remember that Contena is free to join, so go ahead and just create that account, already.
Have you ever subscribed to a paid job board? Share your experience in the comments!
