Reflecting on 6 months of building a niche Data Science Job Board

Intro

Hey Indie Hackers community,

Six months ago my brother Alex and me launched Data Job, a job board with hand picked Data Science jobs in Germany. It started as a Google Spreadsheet and in six months grew into a site, an email newsletter and a Telegram channel.

Data Job is our fourth project in the past 2 years. It is also the first project that solved a problem we can relate to: finding Data Scientist jobs at great companies in Germany with visa sponsorship in one place.

The story

About a year and a half ago my brother Alex started looking for a job in Germany as a Data Scientist. Having worked on interesting problems at a Russian fintech in a strong team with modern efficient tools, he wanted a similar opportunity in Germany.

He dug into the job market. Shortlisted the companies by reading everything he could about them:

• corporate blogs
• employee profiles on LinkedIn
• company reviews on Kununu, GlassDoor, Reddit, TechPays EU, Blind, etc.

Then he applied to the jobs at companies that resonated with me and landed an offer at one of them.

The beginning of Data Job

The idea of a job board grew out of the job search questions Alex was receiving from people on LinkedIn. They started texting him after job start at a German company. This and the google search traffic for the “Data Scientist job in Germany” query led to a weekly Google Spreadsheet that Alex started publishing on LinkedIn and other social channels. The Spreadsheet included Data Scientists job opportunities that matched the following criteria:

• jobs at modern tech companies in Germany
• with good products that users actually use
• strong talent on the team
• with visa sponsorship and relocation support

The job search experience and companies list Alex collected, helped a lot in the beginning.

By the way, here is how the original weekly spreadsheet “publication” looked like (see below). It looks awful to a “design” person. But it did the idea validation job just fine.
Original Google Spreadsheet that started Data Job

Data Job six months forward

Seeing the number of Spreadsheet visitors grow, Data Job slowly evolved from a simple spreadsheet into a functioning website. We publish Data Scientists, Data Engineers and Data Analysts jobs in German that offer Visa Sponsorship and relocation support. Jobs are published every week on our site, weekly newsletter, Twitter and Telegram channel.

I love graphics, so I run all things website. And Alex handles the jobs list. Since I’m no coder, but I am super interested in building my own internet services, I run the site using the no-code stack:

• Webflow
• Zapier
• E-mail Octopus
• Google Analytics
• Ahrefs
• Bitly
• Outlook and Gmail
• And a little bit of Chat-GPT

I have thought for a long time, that without an computer science degree, I won’t be able to start anything online. But as the saying goes, we are our worst enemy. For now no-code stack is enough for us to build and run a basic job board. Here is a sneak peek at the current design:

Current version of Data Job website

Current job board’s growth is based on programmatic SEO and content on the job search and relocation to Germany topics. Since I’m new to SEO, I have to read a lot and apply new knowledge on the go. I find it cool.

Several highlights of the SEO things with positive results that we have done so far include:

• Separate pages for Data Scientist jobs in different cities of Germany. For example, Data Scientists Jobs in Berlin, is one of them.
• A dedicated Data Scientist salaries in Germany page. It is a simple table that makes it really easy to compare compensations across different grades and companies.

I learn about SEO from people, who have done it. Here are the posts that taught me a lot in the beginning:

• Alexey Chernikov, with two posts
  -- Very simplistic version of SEO 101 for indie hackers 👾
  -- Thousands of Google clicks without a single blog post? 🤖
• Danny Postma, with "You're only successful because you have a large following." post disclosing his SEO strategy.
• Lior Neu-Ner with his Remote Rocketship SEO startegy blog post.
  Vasco Monteiro, with the breakdown of Nomad List SEO

I come back to them systematically and always find something new I can use.

All that being said, I want to share some of the numbers and their traction in the charts below. The absolute numbers aren’t big. And there’s nothing to show off.

Data Job site is growing in terms of clicks and impressions per Google search console. It is slow. And it is discouraging from time to time. But, for some reason I want to continue building.

Data Job Google search console stats for 6 months, 2023

The total number of subscribers on Telegram is ~400 people. It is growing slowly. The spikes that you see on the chart are reposts in several Data Science communities around Telegram.
Data Job Telegram subscribers stats for 3 months, 2023

Twitter is small as well. The total number of subscribers is ~580 people. My impression is, Twitter subscribers are mostly Junior Data Scientists and Data Engineers. The growth is slow, but consistent:
Data Job Twitter subscribers stats for 6 months, 2023

The e-mail subscription metrics are quiet humble so far as well:

• 200 people with slow growth
• AVG open rate is stable at ~53%
• AVG link click is stable at ~11%

Our subscribers and website visitors are a mix of Data Science and Data Engineering talent of different grades including Junior, Middle and Senior Data Science professionals. They are English speaking and they are interested in finding a Data Science jobs in Germany. We do know that Seniors come to the site, because we save them time on LinkedIn scrolling. Whereas Juniors and Middle level Data Scientists simply look for a job everywhere they can.

Monetisation

So, where is the money?

The original plan was to charge companies a referral fee for successful candidates, who came to them through Data Job. Several months of cold e-mail without any responses or with polite rejections have made us think, referral fees might not be the way to monetise. So we started to look around for other monetisation options.

Our current monetisation pivot is a paid resume writing and job application service. As usual, there is a basic cheaper package and a premium more expensive package. You can come check these on our site.

Testing the hypothesis of paid resume writing services on Data Job

For now we are MTurk-ing the first consumer cohort, no fancy automation. We will introduce automation, if the demand grows big enough to outpace our free time capacity.

Of course we have several more options that are still on the table include:

• Paid listings for companies
• Paid access to the job board for our users

We do not plan to stop here. We will be testing different monetisation options until we find the one that works well. We are not in hurry.

Outro

This is the essay paragraph, where the people, whose blogs I read, share learnings and take aways.

I’ll try to make my take aways as short and precise, as I can:

• Solve the problems you can relate to
• Start small way
• Use the toolset that you can (my biggest one)
• Apply new knowledge right away
• Don’t be afraid to try new things and show them to the world

This is it for this post.

I’m thankful to everyone who was able to finish it.

Dima & Alex

P.S. If you guys are ready to share any growth ideas for us, including SEO, blog posts, monetisation, feel free to DM us on Telegram.

P.P.S. Also a special thank you to Ilya & Danil for doing all of the work related to the Telegram Channel.