Building a Job board for a niche non-tech industry but feeling demotivated.
I am building a simple job board / job aggregator for a niche non-tech industry.
My intention is to bring visitors to the site and then later invite them and build a discord community.
I have already purchased a domain and have setup the job-board too.
I initially thought I would just copy jobs from multiple already established big job sites and input them into my board, later automate the process, but while I am actually doing it right now I don't really like the feel of it.
I am not sure if what I am doing is okay, I sense a lack of genuineness in the whole concept, I am basically copy pasting job openings from other sites to mine, only difference is that I am hand-picking relevant jobs for my target audience.
also, almost all the sites from where I am picking up the jobs have disclaimer for web-scraping and backlinking. If I cannot link the job from where I found it, how would my site be actually useful.
But then, there are many other job aggregator sites which do the same thing especially in the tech/IT sector and it seems ok to do this.
I am in a dilemma if I should just proceed with it for a few months and see if I get visitors or just drop the whole idea right now.. kind of feeling demotivated.
Since I have put some efforts into this already, I would like to make this work. Should I continue with what I am doing or are there some other alternative approaches I should try?
thanks!
Hello,
I wrote a few articles recently about the chicken/egg problem, job scraping, getting traffic to a new job board, etc. On my blog : www.jobboardcoach.com
does your job board have an importer that can handle xml/csv/json files?
"I am basically copy pasting job openings from other sites to mine, to nly difference is that I am hand-picking relevant jobs for my target audience"
Think this actually might be bigger than you realize. Also, you should really talk to some people currently looking for jobs in that industry and figure out how big of a problem are you really trying to solve.
Do these bigger job sites have a good filtering feature so your job board is not that needed? Or is it a real hassle having to go through everything there before finding relevant offers?
Are there any good subreddits around this industry? Might be good to ask there or go through some existing threads.
Thanks for your inputs!
Q- Think this actually might be bigger than you realize. Also, you should really talk to some people currently looking for jobs in that industry and figure out how big of a problem are you really trying to solve.
Q- Are there any good subreddits around this industry? Might be good to ask there or go through some existing threads.
A- yes, I have seen people complaining online about the issue, but the market might not be huge.
Yes, there are subreddits for the industry, I have been a lurker for a while, I will now start interacting there. Doing this will also help with your first point!
Q- Do these bigger job sites have a good filtering feature so your job board is not that needed? Or is it a real hassle having to go through everything there before finding relevant offers?
A- The results on the other job boards have a lot of irrelevant results, hence it difficult and time consuming to weed out the right jobs.
This all tells me there's some potential.
Good to see that there are some active subreddits, that's always helpful. Both for research but also acquiring the first users.
On that note, I really recommend setting up some alert tool so you don't miss relevant conversations about keywords in your niche.
Surfkey.io by @JohanCutych is awesome for this.
You should try this. I had an idea to create a directory site, there is very high competitor in the product market it means your directly fighting with product hunt, g2 or other giant but today I see on IndieHacker that someone else has launched a similar project in the market.
What I lost: I had to let go of my idea and my aspirations of starting my own small startup. I even searched for a domain name for my idea, but never purchased it.
Although, if you can automate this process in the future, you should give it a try and hope that over time, you will get results. If you have solid calculations, even if your giant competitor gets 100 clients on a single job list, you can still get 3, 6, 9, 15, 25, or any other number. Your idea can count as a giant project for a new startup person like you.
Talk to some people in the industry you’re building for. If they like your progress - keep going. It’s helpful to build and finish something.
Did you do some keyword research in some tool like Google keyword planner or Ahrefs in order to analyze volume and competition SEO-wise?