Show HN: Remote Jobs (our answer to "Who Is Hiring Remote Workers?") (remote-jobs.com)
We're giving away coupon codes for a free month-long posting. Just email me at evan AT remote DASH jobs DOT com. The first few folks win!
I'm one of the founders of Remote Jobs -- also the same shlub who posted the first "Ask HN: Who Is Hiring Remote Workers?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857051.
85 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadWe're giving away coupon codes for a free month-long posting. Just email me at evan AT remote DASH jobs DOT com. The first few folks win!
As said above though, the pricing might be a bit high for a brand new site without a large userbase.
His charges look pretty modest if he has even a minimal success rate.
As it stands now, you'll have a dozen or so jobs, interest will fade, and employers will stop posting when they get few resumes
Why would someone pay money to list their job on a site with no traffic?
Why would someone go to a site like that if you only have a dozen jobs?
This can be something good...but they are shooting it in the leg by being greedy
We're also giving away coupon codes right now (see my post below) to drive job posters to the site.
And yes giving away coupon codes is good and well...but then you run into the quality problem that you use as an excuse to charge from the start.
Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with greed...provided it doesn't cause you to kill your business before it gets the chance to get off the ground.
I always remember being impressed with the way Heroku did things in the early days. After beta feedback it must have become clear to them that it made sense for them to rewrite from the ground up. This left them with a beta platform which they gracefully continued to support, renamed herokugarden, whilst also rolling out the paid for service. They then provided plenty of info on how herokugarden users could migrate to the new Heroku platform for free too. I'm sure they learnt a lot early on about what direction they needed to take the Heroku platform. Anyone remember the web based code editor? Without the early feedback from beta users perhaps they would have pushed more in that direction instead of changing course towards the Heroku we all know and love today.
I doubt running this site costs so many resources that they NEED to be charging right now.
another option would be to leave the charge now link and go out to craigslist, dice, etc and be like hey! want to have your job listed on our site for free?
Similar great idea, but no new posts in almost a month.
Someone said something about greed?
But for me, charging advertisers a significant fee is valuable to establish that they're serious about hiring. That's the rationale behind the fee structure on my site http://WheresTheRemote.com/ . To me, an advertiser paying a fee of something like 1x or 2x the hourly rate they're advertising (for an independent contractor or employee, respectively) is a token of their sincerity about wanting to hire and pay the rate they advertise, which the site requires them to include in the ad. Conversely, unwillingness to pay such a fee makes me concerned that they would just waste the time of the job seekers visiting my site and I don't want to publish the ad, since quality is an important goal for my project. Of course, having a decent amount of traffic would help establish the value proposition for advertisers to pay such a fee.
for now you can easily moderate postings yourself.
I would suggest using Turk or finding another resource that can do the manual moderating, you need to be expanding the core tech and business. Getting bogged down in these kind of tasks can kill your momentum.
If they don't see who's posting and what's being posted, how can they know if they're doing a good job. How can they spot the opportunity and pivot?
I know you don't mean it this way, but in a way you are saying hide from the customers and carry on coding.
Manually checking every post could be an excellent way of figuring out who's using the site and what the common frustrations are.
If they were getting 100 listings a day it would be a different matter, but I doubt they will be getting that many.
I disagree that it would be wise in general to invest a lot of time in "expanding the core tech and business". I would have started working on http://WheresTheRemote.com/ sooner if I hadn't put it off waiting until I had time to build the application I envisioned in between client projects. Eventually I realized that the hard part was going to be attracting users / advertisers and that I could launch the site and just moderate and update it manually or semi-manually until / unless I had the welcome problem, as vaksel mentioned, of having too many ad submissions to keep up with. (Welcome if there are enough legit submissions, anyway.)
In any case, remote jobs are a niche market. There's an implied limitation on the number of ads that will be in play, so it probably makes sense to pace work on the technology according to the amount of interest / activity / revenue the site actually generates. In the beginning it might be most practical to just manually moderate submissions, and maybe implement something like CAPTCHA.
"Remote technical jobs" is a niche that interests me (I found my current remote development job via HN) but "remote jobs" in general makes me think of all the spam email I get to get rich working from home (stuffing envelopes or jebus-knows-what-else). There's a huge difference between the high-powered developer who wants to live someplace beautiful and the out-of-work grocery store clerk who's reading the spam about "make thosandds from the comfort of you're own home" (and the "employers" targeting these people...).
With WheresTheRemote you're possibly shooting yourself in the foot a bit with the name; I wouldn't look to a site seemingly television-related for a technical job (to post one, or to find one). If you're actually looking for remote jobs of the sort that unskilled people can do while watching TV, you'll probably need to make it pretty cheap to post a listing (and regardless, certainly do something to get the ball rolling -- from the text on the front page, it seems like you don't have a single posting).
remote-jobs has some hints on the targeted niche based on the categories on the home page (seems closer to the HN remote listings, though it might help to explain your niche more explicitly).
Another thought on getting the ball rolling (for either site): what you really want is a set of really plum job listings in your niche that you can feature on the front page, and convince job seekers that there are good opportunities here (and job advertisers that they're on a site that is/will be attracting serious prospects). Maybe ask the employers with those great listings to self-select and contact you directly, and you'll post their positions for free?
Good feature request. Thanks!
+ another request for EU-based jobs :)
http://remote-jobs.com/jobs/30_Drupal_developer
I thought the website was called "Remote Jobs"? If I go to this website, I expect all openings to be for remote workers.
Just a thought anyway, I like the site!
It's also why we're offering free coupon codes to the first few people who email me (see below).
The trademark for it is dead as well: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4007:lt...
The trademark registrant and domain registrant might be related or one in the same. Both were registered in 2001. Looks like it was intended for a remote job entry app.
Worth watching.
However, how many talented folks still use LI? You can call me biased but, seriously, I've hardly used LI since a good friend of mine there left the company about a year ago. I don't find value in it. Therefore, when looking for a hire, you'd never reach me.
I've heard similar anecdotes from several other people in my "cohort" of Ruby/Rails nerds.
EDIT: We're probably reaching a different audience. If it's an audience that interests you, we may be able to help you. If not, then perhaps not. We serve a niche.
Great design by the way!!
Our sluggified SEO friendly job posting URLs choked on a more interesting job post.
I think the best strategy is to publicly advertise that you charge $75 for a post, but to get content up (and it looks like you have) give it away for free strategically (again, sounds like you're doing this).
Also, to make sales, tell potential posters that you'll put in an inordinate amount of advertising for their job to drive overall traffic.
It seems that all job board shares 90% of the functionality, but the best choice is still to develop one from scratch. You'd never think of developing an online store from scratch anymore, but I don't think job boards should be any different. Then you'll get all the customization and metrics that Shopify gives you for products. I'm in the process of validating this idea.
Just a suggestion though, the site looks sweet!
I also tend to prefer work that is not too many time zones distant.
1-3 what? Hours per day? Years? Months? Fortnights? Somewhere / somehow, you should inform what unit you're using. Add it on the end, or maybe a mouse-over. Or, if there were enough listings to make it clear (ie, a 4-5h/day entry), it'd be fine-ish the way it is.
Similarly, I notice that the Mobile Developer falls into a second line - trim it, inform it's been trimmed (...), and a mouse-over would be useful.
All in all, looks quite nice, and fast to use from a consumer standpoint. I'll have to keep an eye on it!
It's definitely a chicken and egg problem. Allowing free ads might help get the ball rolling, but I've resisted that since I'm concerned it will lead to low quality, which is one of the problems I have with other job sites. I don't want to hurt the site's reputation right out of the gate.
Moderation is one way to address that, but one of the core ideas of my site, which I think sets it apart from a lot of other job sites, is to require advertisers to include rate of compensation in their ads, and encourage accuracy by basing the fee for posting the ad on the advertised rate.
Trying to charge for something like this right off the bat without a lot of traffic is a difficult proposition, in my experience. But people seem to be willing to use mediocre web services and job sites, so allowing free ads to begin with, even if it results in low quality ads, might be a more realistic way to get something like this started.
So far I haven't compromised any of the original ideas for my site, but it hasn't gotten any traction either. I hoped that offering a money back guarantee would encourage a few advertisers to give it a shot and get the ball rolling, but so far that hasn't been enough. It's also difficult to figure out where / how to advertise something like this to even reach the right audience and make potential advertisers aware of it, at least without spending a ton.
If I'd known that all it takes to get people to start advertising jobs is to post the site on Hacker News, I would have done that months ago! I suspect that the activity on remote-jobs.com also has to do with the coupon offer though.
I'm considering making some changes to my site to get the ball rolling and then start charging or return to the original ideas for the site if and when there's enough traffic, as some have suggested. I don't think there's anything greedy about charging for such a service. If people are willing to pay it right off the bat, great, if not, that's another story. It might be more realistic to not charge or charge a small fee at first, and I agree that even charging a small fee would help to weed out the worst kind of posters who have free reign on some other sites.
I have problems with all of the job sites I've seen and the goal of my site is also to provide a better venue for finding remote jobs, and to try to level the playing field for job seekers, e.g. by requiring rate information in ads, backing that up with the fee structure, limiting the time ads are displayed moreso than most sites to reduce the opportunity for lazy or busy advertisers to waste job seekers' time with stale ads, etc.