Show IH: How I got my first paying customer in 10 days

I launched a job board and got my first paying customer within 10 days. Here's what actually happened, in case it's useful to anyone else starting from zero.

Quick background on me: I'm an ex-corporate lawyer from London and a self-taught coder. I built and sold a crypto startup before this one, so I've been through the startup grind once already.

This time around I built PredictionJobs (https://predictionjobs.co/), the first dedicated job board for the prediction markets space. It pulls together roles from prediction market companies like Polymarket and Kalshi, so you don't have to dig through general job boards or crypto boards to find them.

My main focus from day one was SEO. A brand new site with no traffic and no audience needs a way to get found, so I leaned hard into programmatic SEO. I built pages for every company, role, and location combination I could. So instead of one generic "prediction market jobs" page, I have hundreds of pages targeting long tail searches like "prediction market jobs in New York" or "Polymarket engineering roles". I also spent time getting the site fast and clean, since speed helps with rankings and the site feels better to use.

Then something I didn't plan for happened. A large account in the prediction markets space posted about the job board on Twitter. I didn't pay for it or ask for it. They just found it and shared it. Traffic jumped overnight, and that one post is what drove my first paying customer. A company paid $100 to post a job opening on my site.

Right now the site is close to 1,000 visitors in its first couple of weeks, with one paying customer.

The main thing I took from this is that SEO is the slow base that compounds over time, but one share from the right person in your niche can do more in a day than weeks of SEO (but both matter). I don't think I get the Twitter plug if I hadn't focused on SEO early.

If you're working in the prediction markets space, or you know someone looking for a role (or hiring) in the space, sharing the job board would mean a lot!

Also keen to hear from anyone who has tips on how best to grow a job board!