My AI job site passed $1000 in revenue

Someone pinch me because I just hit a major milestone that felt like a dream when I wrote the first line of code for this project.

How it started?

MoAIJobs actually started as a fun 2-hour challenge on Twitter. On December 29, 2023, I found an SEO potential for AI jobs search. So, I challenged myself publicly on Twitter to build and launch a product in 2 hours. I shared my idea for the product as well - a job board for AI niche.

I was able to complete it successfully as I announced. One of the important thing to note here is that I have built job boards before. One of my job boards was doing 10k traffic when I was doing this challenge. So, I know the technical bits of building a job board.

To seed my job board with data for initial launch, I built a scraper in nodejs that fetches latest jobs from some hand curated AI companies.

My tech stack for MoAIJobs: Nextjs for the app, Shadcn for UI components, TailwindCSS for styling, Postgres (Supabase) for the database, and Lemon Squeezy for payments.

The project quickly got some traction on Twitter. Robert Scoble (AI influencer with 500k followers) shared MoAIJobs on his Twitter account. And then multiple newsletters including Ben's Bites featured MoAIJobs on their issues.

I was able to amass good traffic from this initial virality.

I am hoping the search for AI jobs will only grow big with time. So, I am betting more on it. From the day one, my number one priority has been SEO. I have built some viral tools to gain backlinks and traffic such as:

• Will AI replace me? - a tool to estimate your likelihood of getting replaced by an AI based on your resume
• AI job application reviewer - find out how suitable you are for a role based on your resume and job description
  I found good success with them as I have got featured in multiple press and newsletters. Even Product Hunt shared shared Will AI replace me on its Twitter account.

Similarweb estimates around 65k total traffic to MoAIJobs in April.

However, it took me nearly 1.5 months to make the first dollar with this project.

How I made my first dollar with MoAIJobs?

I saw a founder tweeting about a position for AI software engineer at his company. So, I reached out to him to help him find more candidates for this position. He agreed and connected me with their recruiter to help with the job listing. That went really smooth. They really liked using my site. And they became a repeat customer of mine.

So far, the number one strategy working for me is cold outreaching employers to help them find more candidates. However, I never spam them with automated bulk email sending tools.

I curate all the leads carefully by myself and handwrite all the emails. I actually like it and I hate AI written automated emails.

It took me 5 months to go from $0 to $500. And only 6 days to go from $500 to $1000.

What are my challenges in running MoAIJobs?

Job board is a hard business. I have known it from my experience and also from others' experiences. Pieter Levels, founder of RemoteOK, tried to launch a job board for AI niche but it didn't receive the traction he hoped so he closed it. May be he thought it's not worth for his time to grow this site slowly as he had other successful businesses. For a newbie like me, the SEO potential for this seemed compelling. So, I proceeded to build it anyways. I also had some second options in case if I fail to monetize it on employers side - charging users to access latest jobs or receive email alerts for new postings etc. I embraced it is going to be long game.

The number one challenge for me in running MoAIJob is to gaining backlinks from trustworthy sites so that I can improve my search engine presence.

I run this project at 100% profit margin as I don't have any expenses at the moment for this project. I am really excited to take it further and help more people land opportunities in AI.

I build my products in public on Twitter, so you can follow along if you are interested. Thank you.