We built a profitable knife sharpening service with over 50 customers in 3 months on 5 hours a week.

In one line, what do you do and what is your most significant achievement?

We built a profitable knife sharpening service in Singapore that's grown to over 50 customers and $1k / month in just 3 months on 5 hours a week.

Who are you and what business did you start?

We are the Jobless Club, a trio of curious individuals learning to build and run cool businesses. Our latest venture is Knife Sharpening SG, a professional knife sharpening service in Singapore. Our mission is to help home cooks, professional chefs, and businesses maintain razor-sharp knives through expert sharpening, ensuring better performance and safety in the kitchen.

Dull knives are inefficient, dangerous, and often lead to unnecessary waste, as many people choose to replace their knives instead of maintaining them. We solve this by providing a convenient, high-quality sharpening service that extends the life of knives, making them sharper than new while helping our customers save money in the long run.

What's your backstory?

The idea for this business came from our own frustration with the lack of reliable, high-quality knife sharpening services in Singapore. We noticed that most sharpening options were either low-quality or inconvenient—people either struggled with DIY sharpening at home, had to visit a physical store, or simply kept using dull knives.

We realized that sharpening was a problem many people faced, yet it was overlooked as a service. Restaurants, caterers, and home cooks all need sharp knives, but they didn't have a simple, reliable solution. This gap in the market inspired us to start Knife Sharpening SG, aiming to provide a seamless, high-quality sharpening experience.

What should be the first steps to take to enter your industry?

Master the Craft – Knife sharpening requires skill and precision, and is an art and a science. As a technical skill, it's essential that we know the ins and outs to answer customers' questions, even if we aren't the ones doing the actual sharpening.

Validate Demand – Speak to potential customers (chefs, home cooks, restaurants) and identify their pain points. Understanding whether they care more about convenience, price, or turnaround time will shape your business model.

Build an Online Presence Early – Invest in SEO and Google Ads from the start. A strong website optimized for search engines will be a key driver of traffic. Use Google Ads to understand the initial market viability, and SEO as a long-term cost-effective strategy.

How did you spend your First 100 Days of launching your business?

The first 100 days were all about building the foundation, acquiring our first customers, and optimizing our service.

Customer Acquisition: We launched a simple website and immediately started running Google Ads, which became our primary driver of early traffic. Within the first few weeks, we saw our first paying customers through this channel.

SEO Strategy: While Google Ads provided short-term traffic, we knew SEO would be the long-term play. We optimized our website for high-intent keywords and built blog content around knife care and sharpening. In just two months, we reached the first page of Google for a major keyword, bringing in organic traffic.

Operational Workflow: We're still figuring things out here, and are only now in the process of optimisation. The first 100 days was mostly finding our initial customers to understand the viability of the business.

What has taken you from 0 to 100?

Our biggest breakthrough came from leveraging digital marketing effectively. By combining Google Ads for immediate traction and SEO for long-term organic traffic, we built a sustainable and predictable flow of customers.

Additionally, in this space, customer service is crucial as customers want to know that their knives will be safe with us, and handled with care. Our team goes a step further to ensure constant communication with our customers, informing them about the entire process from a day before collecting the knives to handing it over after sharpening.

Both of the above allowed us to get a foot into the industry, built a happy customer base, and get a strong flow of reviews that will eventually help us build a reputation as the number one knife sharpening service in Singapore.

What was one failure you had to go through that others in your industry should look out for?

One of our biggest early mistakes was spending money on ineffective marketing strategies. We printed and distributed 500 flyers across multiple locations, expecting to get at least a few conversions—but we didn't get a single one.

Not only was it difficult for us as we were introverts, but also we learnt about timing and customer intent. We figured that we were marketing to the wrong target audience, despite thinking it made sense at a theoretical level.

Lesson learned: Track your marketing efforts and double down on what works. Just because something has worked in the past (flyers used to be effective) doesn't mean it works today.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Our website is custom-built using NextJs, but apart from that, we also use the following tools

SEO: SemRush

Ads: Google

CRM & Operations: Notion (customer management, blog writing, and task planning)

Marketing: Instagram, Google My Business

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We're in a strong position, having built a scalable customer acquisition system and gradually optimising the process. However, acquiring new customers is expensive, so we're now focused on turning one-time customers into long-term subscribers.

Our goal is to improve our customer to subscriber conversion rate through a combination of well-timed reminders and meaningful packaging.