Building a niche job board: 1 year in

It's been a year since I bought the qualified.ie domain and built my (highly targeted) job board for recently qualified accountants in Ireland. Some stats:

• €700 MRR
• 3 customers
• 320 subs to the weekly jobs newsletter
• 1,100 instagram followers (main distribution channel)

Getting the first customer

Once I had built the email list up to about c.150 subs I worked up the guts to email a few companies who had posted jobs relevant to Qualified on other sites.

This did not go well (i.e. zero responses).

So instead I went down a different route and targeted recruitment agencies who were active in the accounting space.

I think this is potentially a better route for some indie job boards.* If you're an internal recruiter in a big corporate who has existing subscriptions to Linkedin/other big job boards, it's a bit of a hassle to post on this new, unproven job board that's solely focused on a very specific niche.

But if you're a recruitment agency who is recruiting for roles in the niche every single day then it's an easier sell.

*Note: this advice does not apply if you are Pieter Levels or Anthony Pompliano and already have a massive audience in your niche. If you are in that rather wonderful situation, you will likely have the ability to drive significant traffic to your site and you should by all means target corporates from day 1.

Talking to recruiters and "launching"

There were about 25-30 agencies in total who I thought might be interested in using Qualified.

After chatting in person/on the phone to c.10 agencies I had lots of interest but no firm committments. So I decided to put together a little launch video that I thought might pique their interest further.

This worked great and led to our first two customers paying €200 per month each.

One thing I learned from all my conversations is that the recruitment agencies would definitely like an alternative to Linkedin. It sure works in terms of getting applications in, but Linkedin is seriously expensive.

I also learned that generating leads in the recruitment space is a good business to be in. The average recently qualified accountant is likely to get a salary of €50,000 - €60,000. The agencies typically get 10-15% of their first year salary for placing them.

So if your job board can help the agencies place even 2 candidates in jobs that they otherwise wouldn't, that's worth €10,000 - €18,000 to them. Makes a €200 monthly subscription seem quite small by comparison!

Future plans

There's a limited market for Qualified. But that's fine - this is really just a fun side project rather than a life-changing business. It takes c.2 hours a week to run and while there's plenty of other stuff I could be doing to improve the site, I've learned from past projects that the most important thing is to just be able to stick with something.

One year anniversary

The launch video worked so well that I decided to get another video done for Qualified's one year anniversary.

No new customers on the back of it yet, but it definitely gave a few people a chuckle based on the replies I got!