entrylevel.io
Job aggregator for entry-level positions
Last month, we launched our MVP of Entry Level and received a lot of great feedback. Our users wanted a simpler user experience and a way to view jobs by categories.
Today, we launched v2 of Entry Level:
- Complete re-design of the landing page
- Categorized layout
- Search query-based string
- Student Layoff List
- 10k+ jobs
We have over 100k entry-level jobs in our backlog waiting to be added. We are slowly adding them to the site to avoid server crashes.
Goals now:
- Add filter/sorting capabilities
- Rank on SEO
- Streamline the process of adding more jobs
- Marketing Entry Level to companies
- And increasing our user base
8 weeks ago, we joined Pioneer.app, a fully remote accelerator. Our hopes when joining was to receive early user feedback and a few extra users.
This week, we ranked in the Top 10 Global and #2 in US-West. We have also been selected as a finalist to win Pioneer for the month of April!!
https://imgur.com/a/ZmU0FNd
https://pioneer.app/leaderboard#global
Two weeks ago (Mar 26), we launched our first version of MVP for https://entrylevel.io ( a job aggregator for entry-level positions)
Our goal was to get some feedback, fix bugs, and get about 1,000 users.
The launch went better than expected, and the feedback was generally positive.
We posted our launch in Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, Hacker News, and Reddit.
It was best received on HN with 269 upvotes, it made it to #1 on the front page for a good while. We posted on Reddit again on Monday, April 1st and received 364 upvotes.
Analytics:
Before launch
- 3k users
March 26th
- 9.8k users
- 10k sessions
- 22k views
- 0.43% bounce
1 week
- 14k users
- 15k sessions
- 35.4k
March
- 17k users
- $350 revenue
- 18k sessions
- 39k views
- 14% bounce
Feedback/Critiques
- Most requested type of jobs were remote
- People wanted jobs categorized and with a filterability
- Searchable tag
- Some jobs were not entry-level and required 10 years of experience
- Expired jobs listed on the site
Bugs
- People using Brave automatically had Adblockers and unable to use the site
- Firefox had a bug native to the web browser we had to debug
- 10 other total errors while in production
Goals Now
- Grow Entry Level to become the biggest entry-level job aggregator
- Implement features requested by users and fix bugs
-
3
This is really cool, thanks for sharing the numbers. Before posting on major websites you had 3k users, how did you manage to acquire your first 3,000 users?
-
1
Thanks! We grew to 3k in 3 weeks. I posted in channels and communities where my target audience hanged out. Every week, I updated those channels of milestones, changes, and new features. We asked for lots of feedback and grew a following.
-
-
2
Hi Donald,
This is so exciting!
Have you been talking to your users individually or watching their behavior on the site?
Also, what's the tech behind this?
Thanks for sharing,
Jonathan-
2
Hey Jonathan,
Thanks for responding!! We mostly talk to users individually. I ask them questions like would they continue using Entry Level? What features would they like to see? What would make them come back? and questions like that.
We watched user behavior in the beginning, but then I passed the free tier on Hot Jar so that's on hold lol.
Technologies Used: React, ContextAPI, Node, Express, Postgres, and ElasticSearch
-
1
Very cool!
I'm doing free consults to the community.
If you'd like to dig a bit deeper, I'd love to hear more: https://calendly.com/jonathanoron
Feel free to book me :)
-
-
-
1
Interesting idea with a narrower niche.
Quick feedback: Not sure if it was just me, there were no results under "Recent Jobs" when I landed on the home page and saw the results only after searching for a keyword and location. At first, I was worried the site had no recent jobs as all, so I thought no use staying/searching.
-
1
Thank you for your feedback. Some of our code broke yesterday after a recent deployment. It has been fixed.
-
Sharing here how we did it. Maybe it'll help you with your launch too.
Before launch:
- Build a lean, but usable MVP
Focus on the core features of your product. Don't start building every little thing you can think of. What do you need to build for your product to function? For us, it was users searching and applying to jobs.
A very good blog post from @levelsio building an MVP:
https://levels.io/how-i-build-my-minimum-viable-products/
- Get early user feedback and build an audience
Join communities where your target audience hangs out and be an active member. Provide value, feedback, and ask questions. We are an active member of Makerlog, Reddit, Pioneer.app, and Indie Hackers.
We would not be where we are without their early feedback. We constantly talked to our users, asking if they found value in our product, if they would keep using it, what would they like to see and iterated based on that feedback.
- Launch repeatedly
We launched 2 times before on https://news.ycombinator.com/show before getting to #1. Every week, we updated communities of new features/milestones like
https://getmakerlog.com/, IndieHackers, https://reddit.com, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook groups.
- Research how others did it and take notes
(Reading posts from Hacker News and Product Hunt will help)
Some great resources we used:
https://levels.io/product-hunt-hacker-news-number-one/
https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-i-launched-the-2-most-upvoted-product-of-all-time-on-product-hunt-f3772fb20ad8
- Make sure your server can handle the traffic
Prepare for the best-case scenario. You do not want to upgrade your server during launch day as your site will be down for 10 mins or more. We scaled our https://www.linode.com/ server up 2 hours before our launch which helped tremendously.
- Collect emails
Add a way for users to subscribe to your mailing list. Make sure it's ready before you launch. We collected emails to our Postgres database and transferred it to https://mailchimp.com/.
- Make your title personal and less marketing-y
Example from http://makebook.io:
Show HN: I made a site that lets you subscribe to pet food delivery
Our HN title:
Show HN: I made a site that aggregates entry-level positions
And it worked..
Launch Day 🚀
- Launch your product at 12:01 am PST
Posting at 12:01 am maximizes your product's 24-hour time frame. When we launched, we had the highest # of traffic between 12 am - 6 am pst. If we had launched any later, we would have missed out.
- The first hour is the most critical
We shared our HN post with a few friends within the first hour which helped move us from newest to show. From there, we were in the top 10 on Show HN which helped with more people viewing and we took off.
- Announce your launch in the communities mentioned in #3
People that follow you and like what your doing will check out your launch. If you're in the front-page by now, leverage that and let people know. We sent out multiple updates letting our followers know where we placed.
- Reply to comments on your HN page
Stay in the comments and reply positively. Hacker News comments can destroy your launch so be careful. Luckily, we received lots of good feedback. Our product, rose through the ranks thanks to the comments.
And that's all we really did. I believe if it worked for us and many others, it will work for you. Good luck!
Here's our Hacker News page if you want to check it out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22691295
Also, created a twitter thread if you want to check it out.
-
2
Congratulations! You are targeting a great jobs niche. You deserves long term success.
-
1
Thank you very much!
-
-
2
Good tips, thanks for taking the time and write down your journey. Making a product is already taking enough time, but marketing and getting it to users is another huge time and effort. Constant work, with patience.
The steps are alright, but I want to add something here, you can't do this alone. You need company, wing-mans, soldiers :) This is no easy journey for a solo founder, too many battles on too many fronts. Even if you willing to spend the time, your mind and soul burn out.
Good luck with entrylevel.io
-
1
Thank you. Yes, you make a great point. I wouldn't be where I'm at with Entry Level without my co-founder. We make a great time and cover each other's weaknesses. So much stuff needs to be done, and being alone is definitely a burnout.
-
-
2
Thanks for the post.
-
1
Yeah, no problem! Glad you like it.
-
We are officially placed in the Top 100 Global on Pioneer.app. We still have a long way to go until we reach the Top 50 to be selected by an expert. Along with this milestone, we have also reached 3k users and growing.
With our Product Hunt launch date closing in on us, we are finalizing designs and fixing bugs so that our users will have a better experience.
In the first 2 weeks of our beta launch, we grew to 2.1k users, 13% retention, and $70+ in revenue. To get there, we posted weekly updates on communities like Indie Hackers, specific subReddits, LinkedIn, and many others.
Leading up to our Product Hunt release, we have been adding new features, design tweaks, and accessibility based on user feedback. The biggest feedback received was that our search returned unwanted results and took over 6 hours to debug. Every week, we also add thousands of new jobs that may fit someone's criteria.
By next week, we hope to add category filtering. We will soon start adding remote-based jobs for those that were affected by COVID-19. Many friends I know, have lost their jobs because business has been slow. We want to help make jobs easily accessible to everyone.
Join our slack community to receive updates on newly posted jobs, job hunting tips & tricks, and chat with other students, grads, and more @ https://bit.ly/38YPJvH
After releasing our beta, we were able to generate a small revenue from users viewing and clicking on jobs. The hardest part is maintaining a steady stream of income. $1 a day is very small, but is a start. Our goal is to double that weekly total and providing value to our users will do that.
We have close to a few thousand jobs on entrylevel.io and to provide value to our target audience, we are focusing on tech jobs.
We want to make a site that provides value to job seekers. To do that, we must start with-ourselves and post jobs we would apply for and hopefully others as well.
-
2
Congrats! $30/mo pays for a great lunch around here, that's great already :) As someone looking to possibly hire an entry level writer at some point, I would expect that the next step on your roadmap is a checkout form? They are integrated in an hour or two with Stripe, and would have possibly caused me to buy a spot just now (but with mailto: the mac client opens, I'm too lazy to take it over to gmail....)
-
1
Thank you for checking us out @dqmonn! We understand your pain point and working to integrate stripe with a checkout form. Will keep you posted :)
-
1
@dqmonn We finally have a job form put together. Please let us know what you think! https://bit.ly/2K4os0H
-
-
For the month of March, our company goals are to launch MVP, double monthly revenue, receive user feedback, and provide value to individuals searching for a job.
Tech goals:
✅ Categorizing job titles
✅ Searchable tags
✅ Site loading Async/Await
✅ Email Mailing list
✅ Post jobs
so we showed some people our app to get more feedback and got some constructive feedback about making our app more accessible for other people. We were able to increase our user base by sharing the link in our schools slack channel. We also got positive feedback from most users!
Technically our website was already deployed for about two days now but today we decided to share with a few people. We also posted on slack channels for feedback. The feedback that we have received would help us in further developing our application. Also used this opportunity to monitor our server and check if can handle the load.
Comment