Show IH: JobTrack, a CRM for job seekers
I recently launched my app, JobTrack, to public beta and I'd love some feedback from the IndieHackers community! I'm a solo founder currently working developing a customer base and getting traction before seeking investment.
JobTrack is a tool to manage your job search. Easily save jobs to apply to later, see how you’re progressing with existing applications and get reminders to apply and follow up to jobs. CRM functionality such as document and contact management make it easy to stay organized and meaningful stats show you how your job search is progressing.
Check it out at https://jobtrack.io and please don't hesitate to leave feedback!
Ramit Sethi has a course Find Your Dream Job. I've heard of similar courses like Double Your Freelancing and others. They typically cost several thousand dollars.
In these courses, they teach you to pick several companies, group them into tiers depending on how much you would want to work there, then reach out to people, follow up by email once a month, etc.
Perhaps you can make a partnership with these entrepreneurs and sell your software as an add-on to their course. Since they already have a large audience, you'd get a large exposure for free.
Job hunting is (for most people) something they do for a few months every 2-5 years. This makes it really hard to build a business, as you can't charge recurring revenue. I would look at maybe charging a flat rate until they accept a job offer?
Your marketing site is focused on the mechanical process of searching and finding jobs (spreadsheets, browser tabs, access on your phone). I suggest that you focus more on the relationship between the job seeker and employer. For example:
It's a bit wordy, but those points are far more interesting to me than replacing a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets work pretty well!
Also, I wonder if the overall positioning/branding isn't quite right. No-one wants to track jobs, they want to get a job. Perhaps something implying getting the edge over other candidates? JobEdge?
I would probably pay $100+ for something like that. You could also look at adding on a recruiting angle, where people could pay $x00 and you would vet them and look for jobs for them. Maybe paying for referrals would be a good marketing channel?
@danielcompton Thanks so much for the thorough feedback, I really appreciate it! I think you have some valid points about messaging the value proposition. I'm certainly going to take this all into consideration.
Regarding pricing, you're absolutely right about recurring revenue. That is one thing I've been cognizant of since starting JobTrack. I like the idea of a flat rate until the user has found a job. I'd initially been thinking of pricing in buckets of 3 months or so, which is effectively the same thing but perhaps a fixed price is more appealing.
I think you should pivot to helping contractors or freelancers. Job searching CRM is tough field because if your product works then you ultimately have high churn.
This is super cool. I'd love to work with you and integrate our freelance programming jobs somehow. https://www.breakingintoconsulting.com/jobs.php
Thanks for your input. You're right about churn. Hopefully people aren't engaged in a job search for longer than 2-3 months. That being said, more and more people are "passively" job searching these days and we're building out more "career management" functionality to cater to this. An example is a tracker you can save jobs that you're not interested in applying to right now, but would like to review in the future for application or inspiration.
The career management and passive job saving are good features to keep you front of mind, but would be hard to charge much for, as they don't solve a solid pain point for a lot of people.
Agreed. The goal is to stay front of mind and then when a user begins a new job search hopefully they step up their use of JobTrack (and perhaps buy a premium tier for the duration of their search)