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Launched my job board 3 weeks ago, here is my experience so far

Hey Indiehackers,

I am the founder of Remotextra, which is a remote software developer job board with transparent salaries. I launched 3 weeks ago, and now I am trying to grow the job board. I know the market is pretty crowded, but I am trying to fix the annoyances that I faced when I was looking for a job. So far I have 0$ revenue, I manually enter all the posts I find across the internet. I usually spend an hour every day to find new jobs.

Anyways, just wanted to share my experience with you guys on growing the job board:

What I did so far

  • Created Facebook and Twitter pages.
  • Paid traffic. I spend 10$ a day on facebook ads, this nets me the majority of my traffic, around 80 unique visitors a day. This makes it around 0.1$/visitor which seems like a fair deal to me, but I am not really experienced.
  • Launched on most of the places listed in this post. My reddit posts got around 10-20 upvotes, and my ProductHunt launch was unfortunately a miss. I think this is because it is not really an innovative product, and maybe just doesn't have that wow factor. I would say I get about 10 visitors a day from these sources.
  • Integrated twitter, each job post gets posted on Remotextra Twitter Page, but I get no traffic from twitter. Most likely because I don't have any followers and the hashtags are just not doing it.
  • Created a blog, and wrote my first article. This is mostly for sharing on social media, maybe I will try to boost one of my articles to see if that nets me some extra visitors.
  • Implemented a subscribe-to-receive-new-posts kind of newsletter. So far I have 10 subscribers.

What I plan on doing

  • Lower the price. Right now it costs 99$ to post a new ad, which is below the market average, but it might still be too high for a new site. I have a daily average of 110-120 unique visitors, that adds up to around 3500 a month. I will definitely try to play with the numbers.
  • Gain social media followers. Mostly with writing powerful blog posts and asking people with more followers to share if they like it.
  • Keep on developing new features. I will dynamically create custom og images for each job post so on share they provide more information.
  • Display numbers on the landing page. Currently I get around 10k page views from 3k visitors a month. I will somehow try to display that to show the recruiter the value they get for their money.
  • Keep facebook ads as my primary source of traffic for a while. Currently I can afford 300$ month for marketing purposes and I feel like this is the most value I get for my money. :)

If you got so far, thank you for reading this! I would highly appreciate any kind of feedback or criticism or tips.

Cheers,
Daniel

  1. 3

    Congrats on the launch, Daniel 🔥

    It's a chicken and egg problem, right. You need job hunters (high quality) visiting your website to give value to hiring companies. You need hiring companies posting on your website to give value to job hunters.

    Question, is your business model to just charge companies for posting any ads on your board? If yes, have you considered a model where posting is free but premium ad features (e.g., boosted ads) cost $$$?

    This way you could do something like:

    📮 Manually post jobs that you find on other sites (with hiring companies permissions)
    🤼 Use jobs/content marketing/paid ads to drive in visitors
    💥 Once you have visitor traction and brand recognition get companies to boost posts

    In any case, good luck and keep us posted!

    1. 1

      Hey man, thanks for the feedback, appreciate it!

      Yep, only charging for boosting has already crossed my mind, and might implement in the very-near future. One thing - and this might just be me, but when I see that it is free to post to a job post on a job board, it kind of loses credibility to me, like anybody could just post anything. On the other hand when I see a job post costs 300$ and companies still post, that unconsciously make me feel more serious about that company.

      Not sure if this makes sense, it might just be me. :)

      Thanks a lot again!

      1. 3

        That does make a lot of sense. Playing devil's advocate, this could just be an issue of terminology. Switch out the free for curated or independently assessed and you don't have the issue of credibility loss anymore.

        When I go onto job boards, I personally don't get turned off by how much it costs (if anything) to post, because it's not something that's obviously visible to me as a job seeker or that I go hunting for.

        My biggest turn-off though is the junk jobs where someone has just spammed the board with a low quality post.

        I think one selling point of your board is high quality, credible jobs. But I would ask around to see if job hunters do pay attention to posting costs/how they measure credibility of jobs before settling on your business model for that reason.

  2. 2

    Congratulations @daniel_fulop!
    If you'd like to position your job board for using AI, let's collaborate.
    I noticed on your posting page that you have a WYSIWYG editor to write the job description. This is a pain point to many companies as they don't really know how to communicate their requirements.
    This is what Job Description AI does.

    Let me know if you'd like to collaborate and I am more than happy to schedule a demo.

  3. 2

    Great job! 😆

    Following on from @explorerKas thoughts, can you find unique supply for your marketplace? Offer free listings to selected companies to start differentiating yourself from the pack. Do some of your value props align with the companies you want to list?

    1. 1

      Hey Nick, thanks for your comment!

      Yep, great thoughts. I have a list of remote companies, I was thinking of cold-emailing them with a 50% off coupon code to see if they want to post their open positions on my site, but I might just do full discount, to grow the job board. I am still gathering ideas and experience. :)

      Cheers!

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