Gleb's learnings from building and growing an acting job board

Meet Gleb Shabanov.

Gleb is the co-founder and CTO of GoodTake.

As a serial entrepreneur, he previously founded two startups in the fintech space, with one achieving a successful exit to a private equity fund. For the past six years, he has been building businesses in Singapore, and he is now based in Los Angeles.

Gleb’s combined experience in business and coding allows him to rapidly iterate on products, develop minimum viable products (MVPs), and drive growth.

GoodTake is Gleb’s full-time occupation. He runs the company with his co-founder Mila Troncoso and their head of marketing.

The story told by Gleb Shabanov

GoodTake is a platform designed to help actors find exciting job opportunities. We collaborate with multiple production houses, enabling them to post projects and manage all aspects of pre-production, including:

• Shortlisting candidates

• Handling paperwork (NDAs, agreements, invoices)

• Scheduling talent

• Managing payments

By providing access to a comprehensive talent database, GoodTake significantly reduces the time production houses spend on candidate selection and payroll management.

The genesis of GoodTake

We began developing GoodTake in July 2024 after my co-founder shared her experiences as an actress working with various production houses.

Recognising a market opportunity, we spent several weeks engaging with potential clients to identify their pain points in talent scouting. This feedback was instrumental in creating our initial MVP, which we launched in early October 2024.

Currently, we are raising a seed round, having secured $60,000 from several angel investors.

Launching

GoodTake was soft-launched in beta on October 11, 2024, with a select group of production houses offering job opportunities on our platform. At the same time, we initiated a waitlist for actors seeking early access, approving candidates in batches.

This waitlist approach has helped us identify and address early-stage issues while gathering valuable feedback on user experience.

Our official launch is scheduled for January 11, 2025, at which point we aim to have over 1,000 users actively engaged with new projects being posted daily.

Early success

We achieved our first 100 waitlisted customers within just four days of our beta launch, with numbers steadily increasing. This success was driven by our personal networks - friends and people from the industry we know.

Currently we are onboarding production houses and releasing actors in various phases to ensure system stability and optimal performance.

Current metrics

Currently, there are over 500 talent applications on our waitlist, with approvals happening in batches. Daily applications continue to grow, demonstrating strong interest in our platform 😍

Below is the visitor stats for goodtake.co.

Challenges in product marketing

One of our primary challenges is gaining traction on social media. As a creative company, we understand the importance of a compelling online presence, but time constraints have made it difficult to consistently produce engaging content.

Below an example of my trying to make some noise on lauch day on LinkedIn:

We also tried to do some cold outreach - which didn’t work at all.

We’ve had most success with referrals. Basically, people refer other people.

Business model

Our business model is simple. We charge a booking fee commission from production houses for every job posted and finished on the platform. Not interested in sharing revenue numbers at the moment though - sorry 🙂

You can find Gleb Shabanov on X.