Building a niche job board: 2 months in

In my last update, I described launching a niche job board for finance/accounting professionals in Ireland in 3 days and some early efforts at getting people to use the site. I had planned on spending the vast majority of this month solely on distribution… but I just wasn’t happy with the design of qualified.ie. So in terms of time spent, the split was probably more like 40% on design/product and 60% on distribution.

Imitation is the greatest form of flattery

This probably wasn’t optimal from an idea validation point of view - given I had an MVP I probably should have focused on just getting users. But I’m committed to doing this for at least the next few months, so I figured I might as well have a semi-nice looking site. Plus I just like learning about design stuff.

So what did I actually do design-wise? Paid a freelance designer on UpWork to do the logo/branding and gave it a bit of a fresher look. For any eagle-eyed digital nomads reading this, yes it does look awfully like WeWorkRemotely. I tried to copy their lovely site as much as possible. I’m using bubble, so obviously it won’t be possible to match their aesthetic exactly, but I’m relatively happy with how it turned out.

Spot the difference

Distribution

I’ve been going through Traction over the past few weeks (h/t @pdffy for the recommendation). They suggest 19 different strategies to build traction for your startup. Not all are applicable to growing a job board, but a lot of them certainly are. I figure focusing on 1-3 channels at a time is probably the best I can do, so using my own thoroughly unscientific method I ranked the 19 methods in terms of their potential for my site.

1. Social

I’ve put most effort into instagram channel over the past month. The current strategy is:

• Post 3 stories every weekday of new job listings
• Occasionally ask followers to sign up to newsletter on site
• Post 1 accounting meme every day
• Follow as many potential users as possible

Following people individually is obviously incredibly unscalable, but it does work. Pretty much all traffic/email sign ups so far has come via this channel. Probably have another 2 weeks of work on this channel before it's completely tapped out.

2. SEM

People search for jobs. If my site shows up they might click on it. Then they might sign up for my weekly jobs newsletter.

No brilliant insight here.

Don't have a lot of time to explore this myself, so have just hired someone to do PPC for me. Not convinced I'll be able to acquire subscribers economically, but we'll see.

3. Engineering as Marketing

Probably the most interesting strategy on the list. My first attempt at using this idea was to create a Salary Estimator Tool. It's essentially a quick way for accounting/finance professionals to see what salary they could earn in various jobs.

The underlying data was from publicly available sources and I got word out via instagram/email. You'll see from the graph below that I had 2 major spikes in traffic over the past month. The first one was from my first Indie Hackers post (so not really relevant in terms of the health of the job board) and the second was on the day I released the salary estimator.

That said it didn't really result in any significant email sign ups. But I do think there is potential to build this out a bit further, and perhaps do some SEO work to get it showing up when people search for "accounting salaries Ireland".

If anyone has any ideas on this please do let me know in the comments.

Stats for the month

• Newsletter subscribers increased to from 30 to 67
• Unique page views increased from 853 to 1,650 (note: probably more like 1,200 unique page views this month ex-Indie Hackers traffic)

So slow progress but headed in the right direction. The next month will be solely focussed on the 3 distribution channels I mentioned above.

Once I get to c.150 email list subscribers I'll start approaching companies about paying for featured job postings.