RailsGigs

Though we've releasing this slowly for weeks and building up a base of listings, today is the day we officially launched Canadian Rails job listings!

The only learning is the one that gets repeated over and over again. It launched with about half the scope originally planned, and in retrospect that seems just fine!

I don't know that I have a lot of wisdom to share around this, but I do want to recognize it as it's a big number that I didn't think would be accomplished.

It's been a real grind, especially all of the content that has been seeded. There's some automation done around this, but I have an excellent associate named Rahul who bears most of the load.

We work at this a little basically every day. I guess that's the wisdom here.

We also have a good relationship. I've built some tooling for us to use. It's not very elaborate, though I can envision just wildly powerful and complex tooling. But I've resisted the urge, and only focused on making incremental improvements. Progressively adding data validation, for example.

I'm trying to decide when we'll stop seeding content or do more automation around seeding or what. So much to do and so little time.

I've generated $400 in revenue by employing the sales hack of "asking people for money."

Currently, job postings on RailsGigs are free. We seed the job postings, but employers also submit job postings via email. (For a sense of where that is when an employer clicks "Post a Job" it brings up their email client.)

For the past couple of weeks, I've responded to these emails with a "we'll get that posted for you!" and also with a pitch for them to pay for featured placement.

It did not take many tries before I closed a deal!

There was one small hitch: I had no way to get paid! I debated rushing to set up Stripe but ended up sending an invoice through PayPal since I already have a PayPal account set up.

Once upon a time, I would have waited for all of this to be perfect. I even considered not collecting the money, but the reality is that $400 adds to the runway I've allocated for this project.

Pretty freakin' awesome. So validating. Ask for that money, people!

I had been hemming and hawing about re-launching RailsGigs, a project I had worked on for a few months and then shelved in 2020.

I had been looking for a project I could work on along my Fractional CTO and Rails consulting activity.

I have a long-time interest in Rails as I've used it since 2007. I've also been the senior engineering leader at a couple of fast-growing startups (one of them, ezCater, a Unicorn.) I know how hard it is to find Rails engineers!

Anyway, this project combines my love of Rails, solved a problem past-me has had, seems likely that it can be profitable, helpful, and a great way to support the Rails community that's done so much for me.

So without doing too much analysis, I just went for it.

No big fanfare or anything like that. I just built it, started populating it with data, and shipped.