I built a simple directory of job boards 4 years ago. It just passed $100K 💵

Four years ago I started JobBoardSearch 🔎 with a static HTML file containing a dozen niche job boards.

I honestly had no idea what it would become.

Today:

• 800+ niche job boards submitted organically by their founders
• $100K+ lifetime revenue
• 26K members in the subreddit
• 6K+ members in the Telegram community
• Multiple revenue streams
• Still mostly just me running everything

One thing I'm particularly proud of is that I never scraped the job boards to build the directory.

The job board founders submit their boards themselves. Many of them provide an API, XML or RSS feed, which I fetch and use in several different ways.

Each board gets its own page on JobBoardSearch, where I display jobs from its feed. I call this the "meta" part of the site.

Those same feeds also power:

• The main job search
• A Reddit bot that posts jobs every hour
• A free Telegram bot with personalized job alerts based on keywords, locations, industries, cadence, etc.
• SEO pages
• Increasingly, AI citations

So one piece of infrastructure ended up powering several acquisition and distribution channels.

Over the years I've also added multiple revenue streams:

• Featured listings
• Advertising
• Affiliates
• Directory Submission Service
• Marketplace for buying/selling job boards
• SEO audits

I've also built several free tools for job board founders and job seekers. They're useful products by themselves, but they also create more organic traffic and bring new people into the ecosystem.

And the funny thing is... the website itself is not exactly beautiful 😂

It's still built with PHP, raw CSS and vanilla JavaScript. I started it partly inspired by levelsio's philosophy of keeping things simple.

I've been tempted MANY times to rewrite the whole thing and make it much more polished.

But I kept asking myself:

"Would this actually make the business better?"

Usually the answer was no.

The moat isn't the design or the tech.

It's the accumulated traffic, SEO authority, data, community and relationships with hundreds of job board founders.

Some job boards have been sponsoring continuously for 10+ months. Others have been buying recurring featured listings since the early days.

That's probably one of the biggest lessons I've learned from this project:

Don't confuse improving the product with improving the business.

Sometimes the ugly thing that's already working is exactly what you should keep building on.

I've also been building JobBoardSearch in public on X/Twitter (@rrmdp) for years, so pretty much the entire journey is documented there.

My wife also helps me with the newsletter, so technically I'm not doing 100% of it alone 😄

Happy to answer anything about SEO, monetization, getting founders to submit their job boards, the technical side, or what I'd do differently if I started today.