Jobd

So how can you attract an audience? Do they just spontaneously appear and stare at your blank page? No. You need content. Or in my case, job posts. Which also begs the next question.

But how can you attract job posters? By having and audience, duh! Now you see the problem most community startups face. We often call it the Chicken and Egg problem. You can't have A without B and also B without A. So what do you do?

I'll be honest, this is uncharted territory for me and I really have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to growing a community. I am open to suggestions / corrections from those of you that have been here before. But my loose plan is this:

• Find awesome jobs
• Offer to post their job ad for free or sharply discounted
• Repeat until I have a job board filled with awesome web jobs.
• Job seekers will be forced to stare at my non-blank job board and subscribe to my job newsletter. (jest implied)

What do you think? Other ideas?

From idea to launch it took me about 7 days to launch with a day off in the middle, which makes it 6 days. Only 3 of which were full-time days. The rest were early mornings and evenings. With the long memorial weekend, the conditions were better than normal to launch something.

So I decided to launch a job board for web professionals. I have been carousing through job boards recently and thought I could make something that feels just right to me.

First, I knew that my wife could hardly stand yet another project started and not finished so I though I'd better make this one count. I gave her a HARD deadline of launching on Memorial Day and she accepted the challenge of watching our 3 diapered kids by herself for the duration so I could launch. She is truly a saint.

So it was project time and I knew I had 3 full-time days to work on this so I laid my rough plan like this:

• Day 1: Design
• Day 2: Develop
• Day 3: Deploy
• Misc Time: Fix bugs & wrap up small things.

Things went relatively smooth except for the inevitable bugs and other unknowns wreaking havoc on my schedule. I knew it would happen. In the end, I wasn't able to finish on Memorial day but it was soooo close! I finally launched 2 days late, but I did. It may be an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) but it stands in stark contrast to my graveyard of unfinished products. IT LAUNCHED 🚀.

To recap what I think was key to it launching this time:

• Get an accountability partner
• Stop over-obsessing about the details and just LAUNCH!
• Make a difficult and hard deadline for yourself to push yourself
• Publicize your deadline to your partner and friends.

Up Next: The Chicken and the Egg: Growing a community.

Let's be honest, life happens and I needed a way to augment my income. That is the core reason for most startups, is it not? I figure that if it fails tremendously (I hope not) that all that would be lost is my time and hosting costs. So why not?

But there's more. I have been carousing through job boards recently and although some of them are pretty great, it wasn't how I'd like it exactly. And I have a theory that there are hundreds of thousands of people that think pretty similarly to me. So why not create something with the Brian flavor added to it? Other people may find it useful and that is the main reason why I'm doing this.

To be fair, in it's current state (MVP), it isn't there yet. But it will be. Soon.