The Silicon Forest

April's Stats:

• 3,393 unique pageviews (down from 3,442 from last month)
• 1,596 users (up from 1,202 last month)
• 489 email subscribers (down from 490 last month)
• $0 revenue (down from $425 last month)

May's Stats:

• 3,383 unique pageviews (down from 3,393 from last month)
• 1,515 users (down from 1,596 last month)
• 499 email subscribers (up from 489 last month)
• $0 revenue (no change from $0 last month)

April and May Recap

We have had a slow few months. We've kept up our job postings and weekly newsletter to keep the site functional and valuable, but other than that haven't done much to grow it as other things in life have gotten in the way. They call it a side project for a reason, right?

Kind of feels like we are in the classic "Valley of Despair" and need to just keep going and power through the lull / slowdown of progress.

We'll see if we can kickstart some more activity this month.

Thanks for reading,

Alan & Kyle

March's Activities:

• Published interview blog post: How to Get an Engineering Job at Ruby
• Coordinated with interviewees for next two blog posts
• Added 80 jobs to the site
• Added 10 companies (206 total)

March's Stats:

• 3,442 unique pageviews (down from 7,346 from last month)
• 1,202 users (down from 3071 last month)
• 492 email subscribers (up from 460 last month)
• $425 revenue (up from $0 last month)

March's Focus:

This month was an admittedly slow month in terms of work put into the site, but there's nothing better than not doing much work and still generating revenue! We were excited to get 5 sponsored job posts this month. So far there hasn't been a consistent pattern in when or why people purchase sponsored jobs so we'll keep experimenting in this area.

We did publish a new blog post this month, How to Get an Engineering Job at Ruby, and we hope to build it into a series where we continually feature local companies and build up the valuable content on our site.

February's Activities:

• Published our first blog post: 60 Tech Companies Hiring in the Silicon Forest
• Launched on Product Hunt
• Did outreach for written interviews series
• Created defined categories for the "industry" field
• Added 80 jobs to the site
• Added 20 companies (226 total)

February's Stats:

• 7346 unique pageviews (up from 3,611 from last month)
• 3071 users (up from 995 last month)
• 460 email subscribers (up from 379 last month)
• $0 revenue (down from $99 last month)

February's Focus:

This month started out with a bang as we were blown away by the response to the blog post we published. The day we published and promoted it was the highest trafficked day for our company (higher than our launch!) and the traffic coming to the blog post continued for over a week. It 10x surpassed our expectations and made us rethink what investment we put in content marketing going forward.

We also "launched" on Product Hunt this month, with pretty low expectations and results since our site is such a local product and not relevant to the greater Product Hunt community. Still, it's another link to our site and good experience in conducting product launches for us, which will help throughout our careers.

The second half of the month we dedicated to content marketing since our first blog post did so well. We did some outreach to conduct written interviews (similar to this) instead of video ones to test how they will perform. We have a few in the pipeline and hope to publish them in March.

January's Activities:

• Built new SEO-optimized landing pages for each city
• Reached out to code schools & bootcamps about partnerships
• Researched and wrote our first blog post: 60 Tech Companies
• Hiring in the Silicon Forest
• Added 80 jobs to the site
• Added 10 companies (206 total)

January's Stats:

• 3,611 unique pageviews (up from 2,495 from last month)
• 995 users (up from 769 last month)
• 379 email subscribers (up from 307 last month)
• $99 revenue (flat from $99 last month)

January's Focus:
This month we focused on growing two channels: SEO and content marketing. We created some new landing pages that target specific keywords to try and improve our organic traffic.

We also researched and wrote our first blog post: 60 Tech Companies Hiring in the Silicon Forest (https://www.thesiliconforest.com/blog/60-tech-companies-hiring-in-the-silicon-forest). We launched it yesterday, and it has gotten a great reception. Please feel free to share it.

December's Activities:

• Added the ability to purchase multiple featured jobs
• Published & promoted a video interview with Tripgrid to Youtube
• Updated how we promote jobs on social media to tag companies
• Updated our database to automatically log companies & jobs created in Webflow
• Created Q1 plan
• Added 81 jobs to the site
• Added 19 companies (196 total)

December's Stats:

• 2,495 unique pageviews (down from 4,941 from last month)
• 769 users (down from 1,294 last month)
• 307 email subscribers (up from 285 last month)
• $99 revenue (up from $0 last month)

December's Focus:

December was a slow month but we still made good progress in several facets of the business. It was encouraging to see that despite not doing as much marketing and promotion as previous months, we still were able to grow our newsletter, generate revenue, and still have users come to the site.

One of the experiments we launched was doing video content. We worked with a startup Tripgrid to do a video interview with them about their company, culture, and what it's like to work there.

Check it out on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbgpmsRR-cY&t=5s&ab_channel=TheSiliconForest

The goal of the experiment was to create content that is unique to our site, in an interactive format, and that job seekers want and can't find anywhere else. The video is embedded on Tripgrid's page, job posting, and discoverable on Youtube / in search. We were happy with how the first one came out and plan to do a few more to test the reception and determine if it's a type of content we want to invest in long term.

Another successful experiment was changing how we promote our jobs on social media by tagging the company in the tweet. It sounds simple, but required a little bit of work because we automate these social posts with Integromat when a job posting is created in Weblow. We've gotten more engagement on Twitter as companies have retweeted us and promoted our site to their followings.

We also took some time around the holidays to plans out what we wanted to accomplish in Q1 of 2021. Here are our high-level goals and activities to achieve them:

Goals:

• Users: 3,000
• Newsletter Subscribers: 200
• Newsletter Open Rate: 40+%
• Click through rate: 13%
• Revenue: $297

Activities:

• Create Unique Content:
  • 3 Company Interview Videos
  • 1 bigger blog-style post to launch, promote, and get PR for
  • 3 email outreach campaigns (e.g. Codeschools, Universities, etc.)
• Post 5 - 10 Oregon Tech related articles on Twitter/Linkedin (i.e. news articles, retweet, etc.) in addition to jobs & events
• Do 10 hrs. of SEO research and make modifications based on research
• Launch on Product Hunt
• Continue publishing weekly newsletter

We're excited to make 2021 a great year. Thanks for reading!

Alan and Kyle

November Activities:

• Created new city pages to provide more info for regional hubs (e.g. Portland, Bend, Eugene)
• Media outreach to local TV and radio news stations
• Outreach and calls with alumni programs at Oregon universities
• Switched our database from Notion to Airtable to enable more automation
• Outreach to #opentowork tech workers on Linkedin and laid off lists
• Outreach to tech organizations on the site
• Created sponsorship packages
• Added 81 jobs to the site
• Added 19 companies (168 total)

November's Stats:

• 4,941 unique pageviews (up from 3,110 from last month)
• 285 email subscribers (up from 121 last month)
• $0 revenue (down from $99 last month)

November's Focus:

This past month we decided to put our focus on growing the site's audience rather than splitting our time between job seekers vs. companies. We reasoned that even if we did get multiple companies posting sponsored jobs, our audience isn't big enough yet that the companies would be overwhelmingly successful and want to use the site again. So we focused our activities on growing website traffic, brand recognition, and email subscribers.

One of the more successful strategies this month was reaching out to alumni programs at universities across the state. We were able to secure several calls and people were overwhelmingly helpful in helping us spread the word about the site by adding links to our site, sharing it with departments, and intro-ing us to their colleagues and peers in the space.

We're going to continue this outreach to specific departments/colleges (engineering, business, communications) at all the universities and smaller schools as well.

We also did outreach to tech organizations in Oregon with the ask to be mentioned as a resource in their newsletter. We were featured in the Technology Association of Oregon (TAO) newsletter and are following up with others that were receptive. We also tried doing Linkedin outreach to people who marked themselves as #opentowork and though it was a bit manual, the success rate was encouraging so we'll plan on doing more outreach on a monthly basis going forward.

Though it wasn't our focus this month, we did have an inbound opportunity in a company that wanted their jobs and company to be featured more prominently on the site. We had previously brainstormed potential sponsorship options but this kicked us into gear to create formal sponsorship packages. We had our first sales call and walked the company through a deck of the various options and it went really well. Now we are following up – we'll see how it goes!

Next Month:

In December we'll be doing more outreach but expect it to be a bit slower due to the holidays. We have planned to do some experiments with video interviews and see if those would be a valuable addition to the site. We'll also be doing some planning for 2021 to have a more concrete action plan for Q1.

October 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.

It took us 8 weeks to create the first version of The Silicon Forest. We worked mostly nights and weekends and built the entire site with no-code tools. We are using Webflow for the site and Mailchimp to manage our newsletter. In hindsight, there were a few features we built that probably could've waited until later. We are starting to collect feedback from users and the feedback has been very positive. Excited to share more soon!