4 Day Week

Software dev jobs with a better work / life balance

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Jobs & Hiring

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

May 2, 2022 Hit 15,000 newsletter subscribers

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

December 1, 2021 Quit my job to go full time

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

September 16, 2021 2 recurring customers 馃コ

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!

July 22, 2021 Lots of new features

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:

  • Whether they have a 4 day work week
  • Remote working
  • Flexibility
  • Openness to employee side projects
  • Vacation policy

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.

June 21, 2021 Made our first $ 馃槏

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

May 7, 2021 Sent out the first newsletter 馃帀

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:

  • Deliveries: 914
  • Opens: 371 (40%)
  • Clicks: 146 (16%)

No idea if these click through rates are any good but happy enough!

April 4, 2021 Increased organic traffic by 300%

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

March 13, 2021 750 email subscribers!

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

February 28, 2021 Reduced website load time by 70%

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:

  • Used lazy loading of images / divs
  • Removed unused packages
  • Gzip'd web responses
  • Added a loading graphic (improves "first painted component" on the Google analytics metric
  • Loaded CSS / Fonts / Javascript asynchronously

Blog to follow!

February 5, 2021 Launch results

The launch went ok, not as good as I hoped but some lessons learned:

  1. Don't post a HN thread which starts with a number (e.g. 4) otherwise it'll limit its reach
  2. Submit to Product Hunt at 12:01 PST time... and not half way through the day (oops)
  3. Don't rush the launch as much as I did - speed is important, but this launch was a bit amateur - I should have had more content etc lined up in advance

I got 100 more email subscribers taking the total up to 600. Not the best, but something to work with

About

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