Is starting a job board a profitable idea anymore?

Don't sell yourself short. You're a person, which means you're a trajectory, not a fixed point. Just because you're not "good" at marketing today doesn't mean you won't be by this time next year. There was a time when you couldn't code, but today you can. Why can't that be true of your ability to do marketing and growth stuff, too?

as someone already mentioned niche job boards are all over the internet now, and the 2-sided marketplace is already a challenging task itself. I think building the product (job board) is the easiest part here, and getting it off the ground is where many boards never go from 0 to 1.

I second Courtland here.

Try do approach it with "learning by doing" attitude.

I'm struggling with an imposter and loser syndrome, when it comes to building out datajob(.)io with my brother. He is a pro data scientist and an introvert and we building a job board for data scientists in Germany.

I'm not a coder by training, so for starters I built everything with no-code tools like Webflow, Zappier and E-mail Octopus. And I'm slowly building it in code now.

Marketing scares the hell out of me, too, especially spending money on marketing, because I'm afraid of losing the money, which was and still is hard earned. Just as with the site building, I'm doing small bets with free and paid marketing channels, carefully studying at the outcomes and adjusting.

Wasting time was troubling me, too. It slowly faded away once I started working on all of the aspects of the project, now I'm just curios where it is going to take me.

All of the above is basically learning by doing. My main goal at this point is not to stop, which thanks to our human psyche is way easier after you start acting. As for the competition in the job board space, I think being a turtle builder and marketer is the way, eventually you out-win competition that starts losing focus on their site or product. Look at Peter Askew @searchbound, he's been doing the slow thing for years, look where it took him.

Hope this is helpful. 👀

D

Not a job board, but my team created a job hunt organizer: Eztrackr.
The Chrome extension saves jobs that you're applying for all over the 100 job boards out there and shows them in a nice, organized platform with some cool statistics on your job hunt.
We want to add a job board within our platform too, but the market is too saturated, and don't think we'll benefit from it as much as already successful job boards, We can show "Recommended" jobs as a job seeker already on the Eztrackr though

I also thought about a job board and did keyword research. It has good search volumes, but the market is too saturated.

Linkedin, Naukri and other big job boards will be ranking. So, It's hard to outrank them in terms of SEO and also the number of jobs.

So, a Job board alone might be tricky, you need to have an ecosystem instead that brings people looking for jobs automatically to your site. So you don't need to depend on jobs seo

For example, if you are building a job board for coding, add interview questions, resume checklists, course listicles etc... that is best suitable for programmers.

Hi @devarshmavani

I absolutely think starting a jobboard is a profitable endeavour. We build jobboards as add-ons for existing businesses (for instance communities and recruitment firms).

If you have an audience, or a niche you yourself are interested in, you can create a jobboard around it.

So If you have an audience, go for it, if you don't have an audience, try and find someone who does have one.. and do a 50/50 split on profits if you build it for them.

If you wanna chat, let me know :)

I guess online job boards require a lot of marketing and sales skills, and the market is already full of niche job boards. Remote job board doesn't sound particularly innovative, that would not seen to be a solid idea (to me).
Just my two cents.

Hey @devarshmavani this is a space that I have been looking to explore as well. I think it can be immensely profitable if you execute right.

For inspiration and guidance, I recommend listening to the following IH podcasts that really sparked my curiosity about this market:

• #264 - Growing a 2-Person Business to $80k/Month with Eric Turner of Japan Dev
• Throwback: How to Build a Life You Love by Quitting Everything Else with Lynne Tye of Key Values

What I find most challenging about the space is solving the chicken and egg problem, which is finding companies willing enough to post on your platform. From there it is about generating enough of a brand identity to drive job seekers to your platform. Job seekers want listings, whereas job posters want attention.

However, one thing to keep in mind is that if you charge job posters to post a listing and you have little to no traction at all, then they foresee the ROI as net zero.

The difficult thing about starting in this market, I believe, is being creative with the business model. Ads could be a great way to get off the ground in terms of financially supporting your endeavor.

Happy to jam out some more ideas with you if you are interested, just let me know!

There are already quite some job boards out there, but competion is always good. Just try to find your niche and be clear about your value proposition.

It could be a profitable business, for sure. But be aware, that you will require marketing skills at some point. Not saying that you can't learn all this stuff. It's just important to be prepared.

Yes it can be profitable but if you're calling it quits on marketing before you even start then do not bother.

Being a business owner is not about coding your way to revenue. It's about getting in front of people and catching their attention, and making them want to try your platform as opposed to continuing with the status-quo

Well, being able to code is a great prerequisite. But be aware of the fact that the essential "function" of a job board is basically marketing and SEO (except you already have a publication/platform with a huge relevant audience where you just plug-in a job board - then it could also be quite profitable...)

As a sidenote: if you want to skip the scraping jobs part, maybe check out https://jobdata.foorilla.com/ ;)

I am curious - how does this make money?

You scrape existing jobs from other sites - they have not asked you too and so they do not pay you.

You need to market in order to get job seekers to look at your board.

Presumably the goal is to build stable traffic and then charge job posters to use your site?

I might have gotten this wrong!

But if you don't like marketing it seems your idea will require you to market heavily and at your own risk to job hunters and then you have to market even more heavily to persuade job posters to pay you. In effect - while the actual job board is passive it requires a marketing machine to make it run.

A job board is a two sided marketplace and that in itself is an extremely difficult thing to get off the ground as you need to reach critical mass of people posting jobs and people wanting jobs to make it worthwhile for either side to visit.

You are doing the right thing by trying to automate one side of it using scraping, but I think you'll have a challenge scraping sites like LinkedIn that put anti scraping measures in place. And you will need to make it better than LinkedIn for people to want to use it over just setting up a LinkedIn job alert.

If you are going to go with this then try to add value that LinkedIn doesn't provide. I'm not sure what that is but get creative. Good luck!

Unlocking the full potential of online job boards demands a blend of marketing prowess and sales finesse. In today's bustling marketplace, with niche job boards abound, the idea of a remote job board might not immediately spark excitement. However, therein lies the opportunity to redefine innovation and create a truly game-changing platform for job seekers and employers alike.

Marketing...do it simple...you will be fine, some fb and google ads, and share your blog links on Reddit etc. The idea of doing remote jobs ...think about more specific niche...target one niche.

HI,

I run a blog devoted to helping people launch and grow their job boards. I publish articles on job board seo, marketing, monetization ideas and strategies. Take a peek at www.jobboardcoach.com

I’m curious to learn why this idea?
You probably heard about idea/founder fit?
If you are just starting out it’s better to pick an idea that has something to do with your unique leverage: access to an audience, unique skill set, insight or at least something you really love!
I didn’t read in your post any personal reasoning behind the choice.
If you want to try yourself in recruitment maybe it’s simpler to start as a recruitment freelancer and see if you can earn on referral commissions for candidates?
At the end of the day jobboard is somewhat an automation for this process. But can you do manually low volume before scaling?

I think if you narrow your focus to a specific niche its going to profitable

Interesting that this popped up today, I've been personally building a platform that is for a very specific niche (and I will be one of the first ones). I believe it is a profitable idea, but you really need to find your target audience and just research/invest a lot of time of what it would take to make a platform like that.

maybe focus on one niche and nail it before going all over the places.

I also plan to start a remote job board once I learn coding(I'm still at beginning of learning js that's how noob I am) I'm sure it will take me more than a year to get good grasp and if something goes wrong during production, I'm not sure how difficult will that be for me so why don't we consider joining hands together and start together. I could help with sales and outreach and also help with customer support, social media management and graphic design related stuff.

Technically simple projects like job boards put all their success into marketing, and unless you find an underserved niche, I doubt it's a good idea. I had like 6 local job boards even before Pieter's RemoteOK huge success and I haven't earn a single crown.
Ranking in SEO will be difficult since the canonical job posting will be at the page you have just scraped. But you can always try.

It's still very possible but the remote jobs niche is way too saturated. Finding the right niche and using some of that budget to get a killer domain name is will go a long way towards running a profitable job board.