How I'm Going To Solve The Cold Start Problem For My Job Board
I started a job board. Why?
There's hundreds of job boards (I literally have a list of 170+ job boards + Indeed, Monster, Ziprecruiter), but I think that I have a unique spin on it. My audience is mid-level software engineers that are just learning about business. They have plenty of options and are inbounded to daily, even in this market. They want to become rich (5-10 million net worth in 10-20 years). This audience is (and has been underserved for a long time). It could be bc there's no money in serving them. It's not like they have any need for paid interviewing tools or to join marketplaces like Linkedin.
But I want to find out. Because I'm one of them.
Cold Start marketplace problem - how do you jumpstart a marketplace? My plan is to get unique data and aggregate high value, high quality jobs that people already love and bring eyeballs to techstackjobs from the job seeker side. Putting ?ref=techstackjobs on every link too. Tracking the clicks and views. Then eventually the companies will notice.
What does that mean? Hundreds if not thousands of unique integrations with individual company careers pages. Whole lotta hard work. That's how I'm gonna win.
Integrations done so far:
✅ Greenhouse
✅ Ashby
✅ Lever,
✅ Ycombinator
✅ WorkAtAStartup
Integrations TODO:
Remote Job Board RSS feeds
Edit 9/1/2023
You can see all the metrics here - Techstackjobs Metrics
I wish you the best with your project.
I wish the best of luck to your project
Pedro
Thank you!
First, you're link appears to be broken on this post. I figured it out but just wanted to let you know.
To be honest, I'm not sure I fully understand the mechanics of your approach but I think the key is going to be talking to people in your market and really understanding what they want in a job board. If you can provide enough value to the job seeker they might have more reason to use your site than another.
A few months ago I was looking around for a job. For me personally, it was about staying fully remote and working on something more interesting. After a few interviews I gave up and stayed in my current role.
I was spending a lot of time and effort to even figure out if the role was even remotely interesting. Most of them weren't. I decided it was easier to just stay in my current role and focus more on my side projects.
Can you tell me more? Where are you in your career and what constraints did you apply when deciding whether a job was worth your time?
So first, let me give you my background. I'm a software engineer and I've been coding for over 30 years. I've spent the last 12 years at the same company working on, I guess you could say, enterprise business software.
My motivation for considering getting a different job is really just boredom. I'm a bit tired of working on the same stuff every day. More money would be nice but that's not the primary motivation.
So, my main constraint is really just.. is this something I would enjoy doing. I looked, I applied and I got interviews. But nothing really jumped out at me as being much better than what I'm currently doing.
The problem with most job boards is the ads are so freaking generic. Here's a snippet from one in my inbox.
I mean, wtf? It's all just fluff talk. That paragraph could literately be copy pasted onto every ad. There's no differentiation. No way to tell if the job is actually interesting. It's just like every other job.
I would much rather know what they actually do as a business. What problems are they solving. What is the specific products they sell. But they don't usually tell you that stuff until you get to the interview.
Frankly, unless your desperate to find work, it's just a waste of time and I think it actually hurts these companies trying to find real talent.
Sure, boredom makes sense. It's pretty rare to find someone at this day and age who has the patience to be at a company for 12 years!
Lol yeah I got one like this today "genAI for HealthCare @<generic healthcare name>- join us, Hide!"
I'm curious to know more about this. When's the last time that you learned something about a company and had that feeling "damn, I want to know more", so extreme that you applied to roles, emailed or connected with some people online?
link fixed, thanks!
I don't have permission to post links, so you should google "How to kickstart and scale a marketplace business" by Lenny Rachitsky. He talked with the 17 big marketplaces, including Airbnb, DoorDash, Thumbtack, Etsy, Uber and many more, to understand how they grew in the beginning
Here's a summary of the video you mentioned. I'm watching it now.. very interesting.
https://www.summariseyoutube.com/video/NwiIY3dZr1k
thanks guys, I'll check it out!
All of the best to you with this venture!
A good idea might be to think about how you store data for the purpose of analytics, data science and machine learning later. As an example, you could create a data lake in AWS S3, and store data relatively cheaply. Analysis with Athena is simple. In addition, other AWS services can help you build solutions quickly. Of course, Google and Microsoft have similar offerings.
Also architecting an abstraction layer to third-parties might be useful.
I’d start with the smallest solution to test your hypothesis, an MVP, and then gradually build more features and integrations over time. But aim to release quickly and get feedback.
Good luck!
I think I am in your targeted audience, I'd be happy to be a beta user or do any interviews if needed! Looking for something like this now, using a few different tools.
Amazing! How can I reach you?
Email me [email protected]
sent!