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Reached 15000+ users after 100 days

I just published my first story on Medium about what I did in the first 100 days after launching my startup to reach 15000+ users. You can read it here: 👉🏼https://medium.com/@saeedzti/from-0-to-15000-users-in-100-days-e0aad06f0a5d?sk=4e47afbee319ae6fb36aae18b10a9bc1

  1. 3

    Congrats @markopolo!
    Your experience is awesome and I think that we can learn a lot from it 🤙🏻🤙🏻

    1. 1

      Thanks @00taffe. 🙏🏼Glad you liked the story. I have plans to write some follow-up articles and talk more in-depth about some of the technical issues and how I solved them.

  2. 3

    Brilliant reading, thanks for taking the time to feedback your experience to the community, I'll be reading your post several times as there's so much to glean from it 😃

    1. 1

      Thanks for reading the story, Reuben. I appreciate it. 🙇🏻‍♂️I'm glad I could help other people in the community who are in the same boat as myself to go to the next step.

  3. 2

    For a side project that you can only work on after 8 hours of dreadful work, this is truly impressive. Huge respect for you Saeed!

    A few questions:

    1. What's the usp of your site? I looked around but I don't think I get it...
    2. Your HN post:
    • How could you end up with 12 points if that's the first post? I thought that only people with karma can have their post noticed more easily...?
    • Do you mean that with 12 points you ended up having 3000 visits to your site?
    • Why didn't you choose the Show HN category?
    1. I can understand the spike in the launch day, but what about the rest of the traffic? I haven't seen them mentioned in the rest of the post (even in SEO or Automation sections) Could you provide a follow-up?
    1. 3

      Thank you @Petervu. 🙏🏼 I appreciate you taking the time to read the story.
      To answer your questions:

      1. The final goal of WFH (Work From Home) is to be a platform where remote workers and companies with remote positions connect to each other. I still have a long way to get there, but I'm slowly adding features.

      2.1. Before my first post on HN, I had 0 Karma. I used HN before but only to read articles. All the 12 Karma I have now, I received on the day I posted on HN.
      2.2. Technically with 0 points, I ended up having 3000 visitors from HN.
      2.3. Honestly, I didn't even know what the Show HN category is until now. But I think part of my success on HN was due to the catchy title I picked for my post and the fact that it was a fully working product that I built in two weeks. And people wanted to see the result.

      1. After the launch week, I started posting jobs on the website and all social media connected to the website(5 in total). I posted on average 7 jobs a day and that's 35 posts across 6 different platforms (including my website) every day. On top of that, I optimized the website for SEO and made sure Google can crawl it without any problem. The SEO optimization helped me acquire some direct traffic from google search. Then later I added the newsletter to bring back users to the website. All of these together slowly increased my daily visitors from 10 users/day 3 months ago to something around 130 users/day today.

      Hope that answers your questions.

      1. 1

        Thanks @markopolo!

        This gives me a lot of courage to try Hacker News on the front page. May I ask the time you posted it?

        Also, 130 users/day is great work, considering you haven't put much effort into writing long articles (go for it, it should increase the organic traffic significantly)

        1. 2

          Of course. I posted on HN a little after midnight (PST). Again, I think the title of your post is extremely important.
          And yes, I'm starting to realize the effect of these kinds of articles more and more. This one took me almost two days to finish, but my plan is to start writing 100-200 words a day to make it easier. Finding good content would still be a challenge though.

          1. 1

            Yeah my SEO specialist is starting from very small, niched questions and build up the blog. The advantage of writing many small articles and publish them in a short period of time is Google is going to index you much more quickly!

            May I pick your brain about the title for my product that I'm about to post on HN?

            1. 1

              Of course. I'd be happy to help. You can DM me on twitter or email me.

      2. 1

        Hey @markopolo

        Are you manually adding the jobs each day?

        If so, how do you plan on automating this process?

        1. 2

          Hey @sosa067,
          Yes, that is correct. But I plan to only do that until I have enough tractions. If by automating you mean scrapping the web to find remote jobs and post them WFH, I don't have any plan to do that. Ideally, after I have enough traction and daily users, companies with remote position will start posting their jobs on WFH. In the meantime, I will try to focus on making the posting process as easy and smooth as possible and add other features to make the whole platform worth your money when you post a job.

          1. 1

            That makes complete sense. Do the manual work first, and the automation comes from simply gaining enough user interaction on the site.

            Just curious, how long does it take you per day to add the jobs?

            1. 1

              When you keep doing something over and over, you slowly learn which part you can automate and how you can find what you are looking for faster.
              Currently, it takes me less than 5 minutes to post a job. In the beginning, I posted 10 jobs a day, now it's under 5. I have already automated one of the more time-consuming parts of the job posting process which is adding tags. I realized that after posting a few jobs, and now the tags are being extracted automatically from the job description and requirements.
              With the addition of https://wfh.team/companies section to my platform, It will even be faster to post a job for your company since all the company info such as your logo, name and benefits sections will already there.

              1. 1

                I think because you're focusing on remote work, your approach works great because you don't have to worry about aggregating searches by location.

                Great job btw, lovely looking site too

  4. 1

    Congratulations @markopolo 👏 Your article is awesome and inspires me a lot.

    I have two questions:

    • Which % of your job offers published in WFH are posted by companies (paying 99$)?
    • The process that you followed to decide the pricing (did you do a price testing strategy?)
    1. 1

      Thanks @jordip. I appreciate it. 🙏🏼

      • None currently
      • Since I don't have any paying customers I don't have actual data to decide on the price yet, but when I was deciding about the number, I looked at some of the other paid websites for remote jobs, and they normally charge around $299 for a single job post for 30 days. I wanted to be cheaper than others, but also not free. So I picked $99. But with more data and actual paying customers in the future, this number can change to anything.
  5. 1

    Congrats, this is really inspiring to see, especially as many of us (including myself) can relate to having experience building, and then abandoning, side projects

    1. 1

      Thank you 🙇🏻‍♂️

  6. 1

    Interesting article, you should write more!

    1. 1

      Thanks man. I appreciate the support. 🙏🏼

  7. 1

    Hey Saeed Ezzati,

    I do like you business idea and I could see a lot of potential in it. I was just wondering how you plan to make money off the business (revenue model). Do you plan to create add revenue long term (traffic to website is increasing so this could work) besides getting employers to pay $99/post!

    Thanks a bunch,
    Usama

    1. 1

      Thanks for reading the story, Usama. 🙇🏻‍♂️As I mentioned in the article, with the growth of my mailing list, another way I'm thinking to monetize is by accepting sponsors for my newsletter in various forms. Another way is by offering different kinds of boosts to either side of the market to be seen more frequently by the other side. Kinda similar to how dating apps make money.

  8. 1

    Interesting medium post, Thank you!

    1. 1

      Thanks. I appreciate it. 🙏🏼

  9. 1

    Awesome achievement! Congrats!

    1. 1

      Thank you so much for reading the story 🙇🏻‍♂️

      1. 1

        I need to learn automation too very well, it's of very great value

        1. 2

          If you use Python, I recommend Tweepy (https://www.tweepy.org/) to start. It's super easy to set up and very powerful. There are also many other libraries for accessing Twitter API in other languages.

  10. 1

    Make this link easier to click ;)

    1. 1

      URLs are supposed to automatically turn into links. Not sure why it didn't. Here is another try. https://medium.com/@saeedzti/from-0-to-15000-users-in-100-days-e0aad06f0a5d?sk=4e47afbee319ae6fb36aae18b10a9bc1

      1. 1

        I copied link already ;) great article, I don't understand almost all used technology but I hope I will know more in the future ;) Actually I am looking for remote job so your website is perfect for me

        I think I will send my feedback later but for start:

        • why I have to sign up? you dont have any information what I get
        • add some information that password need one big letter and special symbol before
        1. 1

          Thanks for the feedback May. I appreciate it. 🙏🏼
          You only have to sign-up if you want to post a remote job or add a remote job to your favorites list. This way you'll get a chance to edit your job posting in the future.
          There is no need to signup if you just want to browse through the job postings and find something you are interested in.

  11. 1

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