Help validate my project/idea? :)
So I decided on a side project which is a niche job board solely focusing on remote software related positions. So software engineering/development, machine learning, ai, data science, etc.
Many current job boards have development as a category but the job board contains other categories like marketing, customer service, etc.
It would be similar to weworkremotely.com, remoteok.io, workingnomads.co, etc but maybe with a little bit of a cleaner interface.
Is this worth doing? Is this niche enough? My mentality going into this is of course I would like to monetize and make decent residual income from it but even if it doesn't take off right away at least I built something cool and fairly complicated (Using the MERN stack) to showcase down the line to potential employers if my entrepreneurial stint doesn't pay off right away.
Current plan is:
- Build the platform and aggregate jobs from other sites so we have some postings to start off
- Create a slick looking landing page
- Market the launch through ad & email campaigns and start developing a social media presence
- Launch
- Cross fingers
Suggestions/criticisms/brutal honesty is welcome. Thank you!
I wouldn't pursue it. Unless you can do something better than your competitors, you're going to struggle to gain market share since they are already well established. They are making money, they have the budget to beat you easily at the ad / social game.
Other than the UI (which is trivial in a lot of ways) how could you be better than those other sites? Perhaps adding a more social layer where people can talk about jobs, or a karma system for people to rate the employers a la Glassdoor? Maybe avoid the remote niche and go wider with non-remote positions? Maybe go deeper into a single niche, like focusing on jobs for single moms looking to get into technology from a single developing country?
In regard to your plan, nearly every step is a bit "cart before the horse". Once you figure out the type of service / site you really want to be, how can you fake it? Maybe a static site that gets updated manually every day? You can build to the moon and back but you won't have any customers on day 1.
If you really can appeal to a specific niche, how can you start building an audience today? Can you blog / guest post to help establish yourself as an authority in the space? If you can build the audience without a product and gain any sort of trust and authority you won't have to cross your fingers nearly as hard as you should be able to market to that audience very easily.
How would you suggest building an audience before having a working product? I'm not an authoritative figure in the space, but I am someone who would find value in a job board specific to remote development work. I'm working on a tagging/filtering system and am exploring ways to make it stand out overall
Really just need to own it. People that write books aren't necessarily the best in the world at what they are doing, they are just the person that put in the time and effort to position themselves as such.
So with remote work, why not start a curated list of links about remote work? Could just use Pocket to pocket interesting links relevant to remote work, use their RSS feed to publish the links out to social media accounts as well as a daily or weekly newsletter.
Easy enough to run ads for that and you're standing on the shoulders of giants by leveraging other people's writing efforts / posts to help position yourself as this person that knows a ton about remote work.
Thank you for the advice. This makes sense and its doable.
Unless you're just looking to gain experience in shipping something into production, I wouldn't pursue it. It's a very crowded niche and there's not much you can do to differentiate yourself.
There are a LOT of remote job boards now.
What are the issues with the current boards?
Have you used one of them to hire, or to get hired?
I would find 10 people who have used one of those boards and then ask them what was easy, what was hard, what did they hate, what did they like etc.
Then decide if you want to go forward with that idea.
This will not be easy per se. Your only offer right now is better interface? I personally like the interface of weworkremotely.com. If you are just making a clone, it's not enough anymore.
Do you know what I would like to see? I would like to see who is the CTO and their experience, how many senior vs junior engineers are on the team, what tools are used to stay in the loop, salary upfront and filter out "US-only" and similar posts, whether they do a coding test and how it looks like...
So your hard work is not on the job board itself imho as it's easy to make. It's about convincing companies to give you this info even if you don't have any traffic.
I'm worried that "maybe" a cleaner interface isn't enough to set you apart from websites that are already established. Is there anything else your website would provide that the others don't?
Telling people your competitors are doing something wrong isn't as effective as telling them you're doing something they aren't.
Some other things I was thinking about were a better tagging and filtering system. From what I've seen, filtering based on tags (such as javascript, python, backend) or time zone is either non-existent or not intuitive to use.
I am not a coder but I have spent some time helping my husband (who is) apply for jobs. I would agree with you that it would be wonderful if jobs could be searched by language or time zone or even employee benefit. Say you really want equity in the company to be part of your package, you can specifically tag the job postings that are offering equity as part of the comp package.
Another frustrating part of job searching in the tech industry is how many places refuse to give even an estimate of salary being offered. I know glassdoor often has a salary range that they can give based on a company's other employee's earnings, so I wonder if you could connect to glassdoor, get that information, and use to to tag each job with a salary estimate? That was my biggest pain point about helping my husband search for a new job recently.
Hope this helps!
Thanks so much for your reply! You've given me a lot to think about. I think the tagging/filtering system is really important and I hadn't thought about including compensation/equity into that which is a great idea.
...compensation/equity...a great idea...
Is it possible that that information isn't listed in other places not because they didn't bother adding that field to a database/UI, but because the companies that post jobs there don't share that info for whatever reason, in which case you wouldn't really be able to make that a point of differentiation?
Another random thought: in the current job market with high demand for software engineering candidates, companies that want to hire are incentivized to broadcast their message as widely as possible, so perhaps there is space in the market for "yet-another-niche-job-board-with-better-ui". On the other hand, this is a double-sided market place, where you have to attract both employers AND candidates, and candidates aren't exactly struggling to find work (again, given the market conditions). This supply/demand imbalance should probably inform your product positioning/pricing/access etc.