Remote Weekly

Remote Weekly v2.0 is out! API included.

I call this release "back to the drawing board", because in 2020, RW went full circle:

• target audience-wise,
• business model-wise.

RW launched before the pandemic. The goal was to deliver highly personalized job offers to remote working professionals using:

• basic word processing and analysis,
• machine learning,
• and eventually, an AI.

The early feedback and traction were good. So what happened?
I got sidetracked.

When the lockdown started happening around the globe, I saw huge traffic and sign-up spikes.

But that's good, right?
Well, it depends. Most of the new traffic wasn't my target audience.

It was people suddenly finding themselves locked at home, looking for a remote job. Any remote job.

They had no preference, experience, or focus. I couldn't categorize them and deliver relevant results. And yes, sadly, they had little to offer to any potential remote employer.

I failed to notice this and started steering RW in the wrong direction.
While listening to the wrong feedback, I made a series of bad decisions.

1. Prioritized quantity of jobs over quality
2. Made the service free for everyone
3. Introduced paid "post a job" option (b2b)
4. Introduced paid ads (b2b)
5. Built a bunch of new features no one really needed (classic)

And then the worst, absolutely unspeakable thing happened. I have effectively transformed RW into yet another job board with all those changes. The fate I have actively tried to avoid and feared from the beginning.

Yes, the project was somehow profitable during that period. This, however, wasn't a recurring revenue. There was also no product-founder fit.

To be more specific. The business model seemed to be doable, but... would require time investment in areas I did not want to participate in. At least not full time.

1. Getting much higher traffic and more subscribers.
2. Looking for b2b clients to advertise their remote job openings or products, mostly through cold outreach.
   This vision did not please me at all. Something had to be done. And it was.

Today, I am happy to release Remote Weekly v2

What's new?

1. Much more aggressive job filtering.
2. Ditched both sponsored jobs & ads since it didn't fit into the core idea.
3. Switched to a freemium model. Thanks to this, I have to grow only one channel instead of two. The funnel is also much simpler.
4. Released paid API access. Guide how to build stuff on top of it incoming, #nocode version included.
5. I have kept some of the new features. Like public profiles or full-text search.
6. United everything under a new domain, remoteweekly.ai

Explore the latest version at remoteweekly.ai, API at api.remoteweekly.ai.

Cheers!
Petr from remoteweekly.ai

Time flies fast. It's been 5 months since I posted the last milestone celebrating 500 subscribers.

I'm happy to announce that this number is now almost 9 times bigger - we are now at 4200 subscribers and counting. I'm not even sure if subscriber is the correct term here - because the original newsletter has evolved into a product with scale I didn't anticipate. But more about that later.

The numbers

Presumably the most interesting part for you IndieHackers. Some of these are publicly available on our /open page. Some, I had to dig up for a bit.

• Visitors

1. Landing visits - 15k + 3k
2. Avg session - 2m 22s
3. Bounce rate - 63.77%
4. Members - 4.21k
5. Visitors ➜ Sign ups - 28%

• Vacancies

1. Jobs collected - 47.31k
2. Jobs displayed - 3.19M
3. Socmedia likes & upvotes - 6.5k

• Emailing

1. Emails sent - 21.74k
2. Delivery Rate - 94.12%
3. Open rate - 79.34% (data from 7 May, 2020)

Product evolution

So listen kids. It all started with a newsletter. It wasn't an ordinary newsletter. It was a magical one. This newsletter was powered by machine learning algorithms and could personalise delivered job offers based on your skills, preferences and feedback with great precision.

In order to send personalised newsletter to every subscriber, Remote Weekly had to collect a lot of remote jobs. Several thousands per month to be precise. It felt wrong having all this data and only use them few times per month. Also, job offers expire fast.

That's the reason why we rolled out Remote Daily, a sister website using the same database, with simple Google-like search box.

However, last month. Last month, we did a big thing. Last month was the bomb.
Last month, we:

1. Merged the newsletter, fulltext search and account management under one roof.
2. At the same time, we introduced the live feed™ and used it as the default screen after logging in.
   This includes an actual RSS feed tailored for you.
3. We also implemented the bookmarking system. Newsletter, list, detail, fulltext search. It doesn't matter where you click the button, all your bookmarked job posts will be saved in one place.
4. Kicked off our own subreddit, Facebook group, Telegram channel and instagram account.

Continue reading at remoteweekly.cc/posts

I had to cut the post in half because of IH character limits for milestones.

If you wish to continue reading, please to use the link above. Inside:

• Target audience shift
• Monetization
• First customer 🥳
• Final note

Originally, I set the 500 subs goal for the end November - got there 3 days later. Still, close enough.

📊 Stats for November

• 6,875+ visits combined
• 511 subscribers (+222)
• 1,667 emails sent
• 19.80k job offers in db
• 98.37% delivery rate
• 70.16% click rate
• Zero spam reports

More info, charts and 🥧 pies: remoteweekly.cc/open

💚 Also happened

A) Created Google Sheet with all the companies hiring remotely in last 30 days and shared on social media, which resulted in:

• 593 upvotes on r/WorkOnline
• 151 likes on Facebook
• Approximately 510 visits and 91 subscribes

B) Made Remote Jobs Search Engine because I already had the data so why not. Basically I just connected new frontend to my database.

C) Collaborated on an article about Remote Weekly. Another one is in progress.

D) 129 people clicked on the red pricing CTA in header

• 20 when the price was $399
• 21 when the price was $99
• 22 when the price was $199
• 23 when the price was $299
• 43 when the price wasn't displayed

E) Automation: Made little bot which Tweets daily instead of me

F) Managed to get my domain remoteweekly.cc banned on Facebook 🤦‍♂️

🔥 Working on right now

• Finishing Portal for partners to finally allow companies post jobs & pay for them. I'm also experimenting with some affil links to online courses as secondary revenue stream.
• Preparing special landing pages for more niche groups (copywriters, designers, socmedia etc.)

Haha, just kidding! Noone needs yet another remote job board IMO.
(Although one applicant told me there is never enough job boards, so what do I know.)

There is however one issue that was bothering me for couple of weeks.

The thing is - Remote Weekly is a smart newsletter. It crawls various job boards, Facebook groups or subreddits, applies a little bit of filtering, text-analysis and machine learning so that it can send you only the stuff you are truly interested in.

That is all fine. Except - There is this database of valuable data only being used on the weekends. Isn't that a waste!

And that's why I've stitched together a lil website - https://remotedaily.cc/.
It's basically remote job fulltext search engine.
Goal is to help people who are actively looking for remote position and can't afford to wait for the weekly newsletter.

That's right, I've created side-project inside my side-project.

One neat trick:
You can bookmark any dynamic url to quickly check on new jobs (they are highlighted)

• remotedaily.cc/remote-jobs/frontend-developer
• remotedaily.cc/remote-jobs/graphic-designer
• remotedaily.cc/remote-jobs/team-manager

Check it out! https://remotedaily.cc/

So remoteweekly.cc got to 200 email subscribers this week, yay! 🥳

Some numbers:

• Sent 322 personalized emails
• Delivered 98.14%
• Open rate 125.47%
• Click rate 72.05%
• Zero spam reports

What's new:

• You can now choose how many job offers you get in one email (few, couple, a lot)
• About one million tiny bugfixes

What's planned:

• LinkedIn / Github login so people don't have to fill in their skills
• Live preview of the email for impatient users
• /open page with all the stats live and public
• Opt-in matching system for subscribers and headhunters
• Featured job posts

Follow Remote Weekly journey here on Indie Hackers or on Twitter.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Although remoteweekly.cc was never gonna be a Product Hunt superstar, it’s good for my mind to just check out this milestone when building a new thing.

I usually do Product Hunt, Hacker News + few subreddits first; and move to an actual day-to-day marketing and promotion of the new thing within the next few days after processing the initial feedback.

This time I did only PH with HN and Reddit to come next week.

I scheduled the post for Sunday (that’s right), but when I checked later that day, it was re-scheduled for Tuesday and eventually launched on Monday! Someone at PH probably had some fun with that, hehe. However it actually served me well as Remote Weekly got 94 upvotes, 400 visitors and 150 subscribers. Not bad for a newsletter 🤷

Follow Remote Weekly journey here on Indie Hackers or on Twitter.

Peace out!

After making getremotejob.xyz, I didn't really plan any more involvement in the remote work field. After all, the market looked pretty crowded already - for years. It was only meant as a quick way to help out my friends (and other people) asking advice on the remote work and digital nomading thing.

However, it surprised me how many positive responses this simple and stupid html table got.

That got me thinking about an actual product.

What could it be? Mmmm.

• Making another job boards seems like a nonsense.
• Curated list of resources - already got that one. Also difficult to monetize, even with major overhaul.
• Curated newsletter with remote jobs? But curated for whom? I can only curate for myself.
• I know! With a bit of coding and machine learning, I can make it curated for anyone! (Kinda like newsletter / personal curator hybrid.)

Here’s how it’s gonna work

1. Visitor signs up and fills his interests (positions)
2. The system periodically downloads remote job offers from many many many remote job boards and maybe even social networks
3. Each weekend, subscriber gets an email with only the remote job offers he is interested in

Possible "business models“

1. Promoted job offers (b2b)
2. Matching job candidates with headhunters (b2b)

Advantages

1. The remote work trend is clearly long-term on rise and unlikely to stop
2. Email-based products seems underrated to me, which can mean less competition
3. Unlike category/label based job boards, this product starts with your preferences and learns using your feedback from each email, meaning it will be truly personalized

Disadvantages
The main disadvantage is clearly the weekly interval which can cause some positions to be already filled when you get the email. On the other hand, if a position gets filled so fast it’s a bit strange. It's also not meant for people activelly looking for a job.

Disclaimer
The ideal persona for this product is not actively looking for a job. He/she already has a job, but is thinking about going remote for some reason (traveling, commuting, family).

So I've been doing this digital nomading & remote working thingy for a while now; and there was barely a week without people asking me for an advice on how to start with one or the other.

I've put together basically a spreadsheet of various resources, companies, Twitter accounts and job boards - all remote work related - and made website out of it.

https://getremotejob.xyz

It's a list. Nothing more. Probably never will be.