My plan for growing my niche job board (just launched)

Hi all,

I'm a long-time lurker who's tried (and failed) to start a few indie projects in the past and learned a few things along the way.

My current project (which has just gone live) is a niche job board focussed on Community Manager roles in Web3: https://communitymanagerjobs.io/

Keen to share my plan on how I'm going to try and grow it in case some of you find it useful. I'm also very keen for challenges and feedback - tear me apart, I promise I won't cry!

Step 1: Launch quick and validate

One of the mistakes I've made previously (and repeatedly) is perhaps the most common rookie error in the book - spending weeks building out an MVP only to find out I can't validate the idea and that no one wants it.

This time, speed to launch was my mantra. I have no idea if this niche unbundling of larger job boards will get any traction, but by getting it live ASAP I have a chance to see if there is any viability before sinking any significant cost into it.

I built the entirety of the board in about 4 hours last Saturday using an out-of-the-box job board tool (jboard.io) and had it live the same day.

As with any user-driven sites, I'm currently faced with the cold start problem - who's going to post a job on a job board which has no jobs already posted?

So, in order to get around this I am currently scraping publicly available job postings from across the web and aggregating them on the site. This is just an initial crutch to allow me to drive traffic to the site and see if I can validating the idea by selling any job postings.

I also have an email subscription field on the site to try and capture job seekers' contact details and generate a base of candidates who can provide genuine value to any customers who post a job ad by serving as a willing audience / potential leads.

Step 2: Drive traffic through (hopefully) helpful content

As I said above, my current challenge is driving traffic to my site. The first step I am taking to try and achieve this is to write a series of 5 - 10 blog articles (all of which will be hyperlinked to each other and the main page to help Google crawl/index the site) which will provide educational content about how to hire a Community Manager, what the value in hiring a Community Manager is, how to get a job as a Community Manager etc.

I will also being doing a series of profiles about Community Managers in Web3 and beyond who I admire and who I think are doing great work. I will share these on Twitter and hope that some of those Community Manager's audiences are interested in visiting the site.

As mentioned above - the goal of all of this is to try and validate if I am building something which anyone wants. If I have not sold a job ad after getting 5000 page views then I will seriously consider major pivots, and if I have not made a sale after 3-5 iterations then I will consider this product invalidated.

Step 3: Leverage any earnings to create a flywheel

Assuming the product is validated, then I have some initial ideas for how to begin to generate a flywheel with any proceeds.

My long-term vision for this (and any of my side-hustles) is to generate a steady stream of incoming traffic through content marketing, and to keep what users I do have through semi-regular email marketing / newsletters and a useful product.

I will use the proceeds from initial sales to hire a Growth Marketer to write a series of blog articles, tweet threads etc which could be useful to my target users, and I will spend my time outside of work writing/producing a weekly or monthly email newsletter with relevant news in the space.

My initial target for this MVP is 1K MRR - if I hit that then I will consider the MVP fully validated and will then look to hire a Webflow developer to build a more bespoke version of the product with some cool features that I have in mind.

So, that's my plan. I'll try and keep you guys in the loop for anyone who is interested, and I'm very welcome to any feedback or criticism about my product or growth plan.

Thanks pals, looking forward to my latest attempt at bootstrapping a product alongside you all.