October Update
by Kyle MorrowOctober Activities:
- Registered the business with the state
- Did our "launch" where we promoted it on our personal social media channels and reached out to prominent people in the Oregon tech community
- Emailed 50+ people whose companies are on the site
- Added an email pop-up and newsletter archive to the site
- Improved the jobs search filters
- Did PR outreach
- Added 60 jobs to the site
- Added 17 companies (149 total)
October's Stats
- 3,110 unique page views (317% increase from last month)
- 121 email subscribers (800% increase from last month)
- 3 jobs and 1 company submitted by the community
- $99 revenue (1 featured job)
Working: The Launch & PR
This month was all about marketing as we "launched" the site and publicly talked about and promoted the site. The reaction was super positive, board member Rick Turocyz wrote about it on his blog and helped promote the site on social media as well as the PDX Startups Slack. Malia Spencer of the Portland Business Journal just published a story on it as well. Overall we are very happy with how the launch went and the numbers it has helped us achieve this month as you can see above.
Not Working: Cold Emails
One tactic that we tried this month that hasn't been the most successful has been our cold emails to HR managers and founders of companies who have profiles on the site. Our response rate has been probably ~5%, lower than what we're hoping for. We're going to continue trying cold emails, targeting different job titles and messaging, as it's a fairly cheap tactic.
Next Month
Our process for adding jobs to the site is pretty manual right now so we're going to research to see how we can automate some of the more time-consuming aspects. We're looking into ways to be notified when companies update their careers page with new jobs. If you have any ideas on how we can make this process smarter/faster, we're all ears!
We're also going to be doing some outreach to Oregon colleges and universities and see how we can partner with them in different ways. We've already got some interest from OSU and their alumni program. If we can figure out a good partnership or some co-marketing, it seems like something that we could replicate to all the colleges and universities.
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Nice work @Kymorrow. Will be interested to see what you come up with in terms of automating the jobs that get posted on the site.
Had briefly looked at how you might scrape LinkedIn for my own job board, but didn't get very far to be honest.
In any case, congrats on getting the featured job! How did that come about if you don't mind me asking?
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Hey @AlexC0. We have also been looking into a few scrapping options but I'm worried about maintaining high quality jobs. We are pretty particular about what we post. I haven't been able to find a great solution yet but I will definitely share if I do.
We were pretty excited about the first featured job. We have an option on the site for someone to purchase a featured job for $99 but we didn't expect anyone to buy one until we had more traction. We primarily included it to signal that we will be moving in that direction.
A couple weeks after launching, we were featured in a Portland tech blog and after that a company purchased a featured job through the site. It was pretty random actually. We didn't have any connection to the company. Hopefully we will see a few more of those next month.
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Well certainly a nice surprise to get someone purchasing a featured post when you weren't even really trying - well done!
I feel your pain with the scraper. I've started building one myself in python, but I need to customise it for c.8 sites which is really time consuming... if you find any off-the-shelf solution it would be fantastic!
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Will do!
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