# FairplayTech, a website platform for recruitment agencies

> My first professional SaaS, from 2016 to 2019: websites built, hosted and supported for specialist recruitment agencies. It started with recruiters complaining in our co-working space, grew by word of mouth to ten paying clients, and proved that building a SaaS is within reach.

- Client: My own company, privately incorporated in Australia (Recruitment technology)
- Role: Co-founder and engineer, Nicolas Dao
- Status: Closed. Our businesses
- Capabilities: SaaS, Entrepreneurship, Web hosting, Web scraping
- Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/fairplaytech/

## Outcomes

- A SaaS taken from an MVP to ten paying clients, through word of mouth.
- A crawler that moved a recruiter's existing website onto our platform automatically.
- The confidence to build products of our own, which led to HappySkills.

## How it started

We worked in a co-working space full of recruiters, and they all complained about the same thing: their website provider. The sites were poor, the support was slow and the price was high. We thought we could do better, cheaper, with better technology and better support.

## What we built

The MVP was a crawler. Point it at a recruiter's existing website, and it copied the site and re-hosted it on our platform: no migration project, no rebuilding content by hand. Once that worked, we saw the business in it, and built FairplayTech around it: website creation, hosting and support for specialist recruitment agencies.

## How it grew, and why it closed

The product worked, and it grew by word of mouth, to ten clients: good pocket money for a side business. But we were spread across other ventures, and none of us was passionate enough about recruitment websites to make it our main business. So we closed it.

## What it taught me

That building a SaaS isn't that complicated: find a real complaint, build the smallest thing that removes it, and charge for it. And that a business needs a founder who cares about its customers' problem, not just its technology.

I've done it many times since, mostly inside clients' businesses: micro-SaaS, small products that aren't the company's main product but that it sells alongside it, and that add up to real revenue together. And for ourselves, with [HappySkills](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/happyskills/index.md). With AI, the pace has changed completely: a micro-SaaS that used to take months can now ship in a week or less, depending on its size.

## Why it matters to you

If you're building a SaaS, or a few small ones alongside your main business, I've done it repeatedly since 2016, and as an owner: the product, the pricing, the hosting, the support calls and the decision to stop. That's a different perspective from an engineer who has only ever built someone else's.

## Built with

- Web crawler
- Website hosting
- Multi-tenant SaaS

## Related

- [HappySkills, the package manager for AI agent skills](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/happyskills/index.md): a related project
- [Cloudless Labs, the business behind this site](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/cloudless-labs/index.md): a related project
- [neap.co, my first business, consulting for first-time founders](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/neap-co/index.md): a related project
- [A property marketplace for homes that aren't for sale yet](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/property-marketplace/index.md): a related project
- [Every project](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/index.md)
- [How we work](https://cloudlesslabs.com/about/how-we-work/index.md)
- [Map of every Markdown file on cloudlesslabs.com, with what each one answers](https://ask.cloudlesslabs.com)