Building a niche job board: 1 month in

A wise man once said to me that if you want to have a successful online business you can either be in a niche or be an aggregator.

This is almost certainly not true. But I think it's a good framework for thinking about project ideas all the same. Job boards are interesting to me because they kinda straddle the two.

Really successful job boards like WeWorkRemotely or Crunchboard have a clearly defined niche...but they also aggregate demand in the sense that they become one of the go to places for people looking for jobs in those areas.

They're are also incredibly capital-light and easy to get off the ground. So after my last marketplace project didn't work out, I thought it would be fun to try to build one.

Deciding on a niche

My last project was a marketplace for music lessons. I can barely strum a guitar and don't know anything about giving music lessons. It quickly became apparent to me that this was a problem and also made my less willing to stick with it when things got tough.

Didn't want to make that mistake again. My background is in finance and a lot of my friends work in accounting/finance too. Perfect. Lets make a job board for accounting/finance professionals in Ireland.

In fact lets go even more niche and build a job board for accounting/finance professionals in Ireland who have recently attained a professional qualification (it's very common for people to look for a new job once they've got that CPA/ACCA/CFA).

One of the joys about building things in smaller countries is that there are plenty of domain names available. I wanted to keep things as simple as possible so after about 2 mins of thinking I registered qualified.ie.

Launching quickly

I spent days agonising over every little detail on my last project. Stupid stupid stupid. I know my way around bubble (nocode fanboy here) and and this time managed to build the first version of my job board site in about 3 days. Not the prettiest job board site of all time but done is better than perfect.

I actually bought this template for $99, but ended up deleting and rebuilding so much that I might as well have started from scratch and saved the money. Oh well.

I manually scraped about 40 listings from LinkedIn/other sites and we had something that maybe somebody somewhere might possibly potentially look at.

Distribution > Product

The end goal of qualified is to get recruiters/companies looking for candidates to advertise on my site. But of course there's not a hope in hell they'll do so unless you can prove that you will actually deliver them a stream of high quality candidates.

So to crack this chicken and egg problem I need to build up demand (i.e. traffic from people looking for jobs) and THEN go to the potential advertisers. The immediate problem to is therefore getting job-seekers to regularly visit the site.

"Build it and they will come".

Except they almost definitely won't. Got sucked into buying google/fb ads on my last project and don't want to go down that road again (at least not at this early stage). So how do you get accounting/finance professionals interested in your little job board?

Focusing on ONE channel

I've been going through Doing Content Right by @stephsmith over the past couple of weeks. She recommends starting off by exploring 1-3 distribution channels. This sounds smart.

But a good question to ask might be: What's the best distribution channel for a finance/accounting job board? I have absolutely no idea.

So I decided to start off with Instagram. No real reason. I put up some accounting memes and started following people who already followed the local accounting society page. I put up instagram stories every day that highlight the latest job listings. And it's kinda slightly working?

Exactly 26 days after qualified.ie went live, the site has had 212 unique visitors. 30 people have also signed up for our email list (I started sending out a weekly newsletter with all the jobs added during previous the week). These aren't earth-shattering numbers. But it's a start.

Next steps

I'm manually scraping 3-5 job listings per day and posting them on qualified. I'll continue to do this and have a think about alternative distribution channels. I'm also building an interactive salary tool estimator (think glassdoor meets ubersuggest) that I hope will build a bit of buzz.

We'll see where this goes.