How I went from 717 to 24k users in 1 month

There were many factors that played into this, but the main things that I learned is that I underestimated the advantages of narrowing my target market and the advantages of having a simple pitch.

I launched Career Vault (www.careervault.io) in September 2020 as a general job board that had filters for most of the major cities in the world. Early users told me that there were many jobs they found on my site that they didn't see on LinkedIn or Indeed, so I thought that there was significant value in keeping all the jobs and filters live. If there was at least someone searching for jobs in each city or sector, why should I remove it?

I thought that traction was okay for a new website, but I was pretty annoyed with how convoluted my sales pitch was to potential users. I tried to emphasize "tons of remote jobs", "filters for your city", and "automated and effortless posting" all at the same time inside a pitch that should have been just a few words.

In the beginning of November, I switched the focus of my site to remote jobs and put the rest of the jobs in an auxiliary tab. Two days later, I advertised it for the first time as just a remote jobs board and got 2.5k visitors within 24 hours.

Explaining why my website that didn't have more jobs than LinkedIn or Indeed was better than them was difficult. Explaining that my website had 10x more remote jobs posted each day than other remote jobs boards was easy and convincing.

If you can win a segment, go win it before trying to win more.