Remote Scouter

I recently noticed that I went over $100 in sales on Remote Scouter. It's a milestone that I think is worth documenting and highlighting because getting those first few people to buy into your product are always the hardest.

There are a few principles that I believe helped me achieve this milestone fairly quickly

1. Product Focus

I use the product myself everyday so much that I find myself constantly obsesssing over minor details, finding bugs, etc... It's very important to constantly be iterating slowly improving. Dramatic changes are nice, but the small, consistent ones add up as well.

2. Find Community

Took me awhile but I've found the communities of people who are likely the most interested in getting a new Remote Job. I haven't done as much promotion as I would like because I've been in development mode, but atleast I know where to start for finding my next dozen or so customers

3. Interviews

The only thing I wish I'd done earlier is perhaps conduct more user interviews. I started doing a few recently and it helped me understand better how people use my app (and it even got me another paying customer)

I honestly didn't expect to start making money from Remote Scouter till about six months in so it's exciting to see things pick up earlier than expected. The future is bright and there's quite a bit I have planned which will take me to new heights.

I slowed down this month a bit in development, largely because I'm working to avoid burn-out. Nonetheless, I feel good in what has happened.

Optimization

Spent a decent amount of optimizing for speed (especially on mobile). I dont' anticipate immediate returns from this decision, but I do think in the long run it will matter much more

Resume Builder

I reworked the UI for the resume builder so it's much nicer than before. Also required a vast rewrite of the whole thing since I shipped it so quickly

Marketing Experiments

I spent a couple bucks on both google and linkedin ads. What I've learned thus far is that google is by far the superior choice. Users from search are far more likely to sign up and check out the app. However, I still plan on heavily using LinkedIn for organic traffic and promotion. I'll likely run more google ad words experiments in the future once I have a stronger conversion funnel.

Highlights

• My traffic jumped quite a bit from my marketing experiments, which is nice, but I believe these to be short-term spikes that may fall off next week.
• I got my first paying customer (that I don't know). Happened sooner than expected which is nice
• Relaxation! Important to not overwork yourself, so I took some time to myself this month to get back into my hobbies

Next Steps

I'm almost done with the job tracker. Once that is finished, I'll be integrating that with the resume builder so users can automatically optimize their resume on a job specific basis. The same holds true for cover letters.

I'm going to spend more time this month focusing on development because there are a few key things I want built before I do a Product Hunt or HackerNews Launch. But once my core feature set is more fleshed out, I will go back into marketing more heavily.

Consistency, and patience will work in my favor.

Key April Stats:

MRR: $30
Visitors: 2353
Web Clicks: 173
Jobs: 14k

Woke up to find a new customer signed up for the monthly plan. Very exciting! From my past experience I've learned that the first one is always the toughest, but most motivating one as it helps further validate all the hard work. Going forward I'll stick to the game plan (building features, marketing, iterating), but for the rest of the day I'm going to go out and get some sun and enjoy life. Thanks for reading!

Lots of progress, mostly laying the foundation for the long term. Here are some highlights.

Traffic

At the beginning of the month I was struggling to get users. After spending time optimizing my sitemaps, job posts, and working toward getting a near perfect score on google page speed insights, I've gone from no search traffic to about 3-5 a day from google. These optimizations and many more will only help improve long-term traffic. I anticipate by the end of May I'll be atleast in the double digits for daily users from only google.

Blog

I've built and automated much of the work around the blog. Very happy with how it turned out, it gives me another way to improve long term organic traffic. Will continue to improve the design as well as write more posts.

Filtering

Additional filtering built out so the jobs can be sorted by industry, salary, etc... Much of this work was postponed from having to focus on the SEO/traffic optimizations but I finally got to it. Happy with how it looks.

Resume Templating

The first templates (with themes) have been built. I anticipate this part of the application can (and will) be much more impressive once I spend more time on it. Ideally I'd like to get to the point where using this part of the app is borderline fun.

Next Steps

I have some ideas in mind for promotion still: friends, app sumo, LinkedIn, IG, etc...I've made it a priority to focus on marketing/promo instead of features, (atleast until I get more users).

Key April Stats:

MRR: $25
Visitors: 575
Web Clicks: 67
Jobs: 8.3k

No better proof than using the product yourself. I landed an interview myself using Remote Scouter last week. Glad to see that within such a short period of time a tool like this has paid off. Going to continue working on sourcing jobs and improving the resume builder, still more work to be done.

Job searching/applying sucks so I decided to do something about it and build a tool that helps make it easier. So far it aggregates and helps you with your resume, ultimately though my goal is to automate as much of the process as possible. Ideally, people should no longer fear/dread applying to new jobs ever again.