Software dev jobs with a better work / life balance
It's always amazed me that 99% of jobs are for 5 days / week. As an indie hacker, I always wanted a job which was 4 days per week (max) so I could dedicate some time to my side project. That's why I created 4dayweek.io
The last couple of months have been pretty crazy
My site has gone viral on TikTok a few times (people keep making videos, which is so cool / insane / crazy to me)
I've also made a ton of changes to the platform based on user feedback
Revenue has been pretty flat though, but everything else is trending upwards... so hopefully the $$ catches up 馃
Ahhhh, can't believe I'm doing this. I've just quit my job to focus 100% of my energy on 4dayweek.io. Can't wait to get started
The plan is to initially double down on SEO + content writing. I'm going to outsource most of this though. Our baby is due in January so the time to do work is now 馃槄
I now have 2 customers who are on a monthly subscription. It's been a lot of work, a lot of phone calls, a lot of SEO, a lot of blog writing - but I'm finally getting somewhere...
I've changed my business model to focus on attracting recurring revenue, instead of 1 off job ads - and so far it looks like its working. Onwards and upwards!
I've been adding a lot of features lately, whilst also trying to cold email 1 person (at least) every day - I hate this part :p
I've started ranking companies based on their work-life balance. For example, companies are rated on:
I'm thinking of charging customers to get "featured" on this list (e.g. shown at the top), given they have a good work life balance.
It could also incentivise companies to offer a good work-life balance which is a nice side effect.
After working on this project for 6 months, I finally sold the first 4 day week job advert in the newsletter for $199!
Then, 2 days later, another sale for $199 - both sales were inbound as well which makes it even sweeter!
So pleased to have gotten to this point - now the hard work really begins 馃挭
I was (oddly) nervous sending out the 1st newsletter for some reason - I've avoided doing it for a few months now but now that it's done, it wasn't all that bad :p
I decided to keep it fairly short and simple, focusing on listing new 4 day week jobs and also included a large CTA link to my Twitter profile (ahem https://twitter.com/philostar) which got about 15 new followers 馃コ
Now I just need to try and keep it fresh and interesting...
1st edition:
https://mailchi.mp/2a6167ad380b/4-day-week-001?e=[UNIQID]
And the results were:
No idea if these click through rates are any good but happy enough!
I've been focusing on SEO recently (wow have I learned a lot...). I signed up to Ahrefs and have been watching their videos; based on this I've been doing some keyword research.
I noticed there was decent search volume for "companies with a 4 day work week" . So I spent a weekend building it and it's now live - hopefully gets some decent organic traffic over time :)
https://www.fourdayweek.io/4-day-week-companies
For my next SEO "hack", I'm going to build a pay raise calculator tool. I want to emphasise how dropping to a 4 day week actually increases your hourly rate (i.e. you'll be on a lower tax bracket).
I've also been doing a lot of other SEO optimisations (e.g. page speed, meta tags etc) and it's slow translating into Google traffic. The numbers are still tiny (<100 per week), so the title of this post is a little click baity (sorry) but its still progress :p
Also I've continued to get a few signups to the newsletter each day
The growth has been slow and steady. No growth hacks, just posting on social media, writing blogs, optimising the website for SEO etcs. I'm noticing that my reach on LinkedIn is much better than Twitter, so I'm going to start focusing on that more.
Still not sent a single newsletter yet though... 馃う
Load speed is one of the major components of how Google ranks websites. I therefore focused a lot of time trying to optimise how quickly it rendered.
To make it faster I:
Blog to follow!
The launch went ok, not as good as I hoped but some lessons learned:
I got 100 more email subscribers taking the total up to 600. Not the best, but something to work with
It's always amazed me that 99% of jobs are for 5 days / week. As an indie hacker, I always wanted a job which was 4 days per week (max) so I could dedicate some time to my side project. That's why I created 4dayweek.io