Relaunching Front End Remote Jobs

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A few things have come my way in the last few months or so that have made relaunching frontendremotejobs.com become appealing to me.

Before that though, I should address that I made the explicit decision to sunset frontendremotejobs.com. From July 2022 to mid-November 2022 the domain redirected to a page on my site with a little explainer of what the site was and why I started it.

My main reasons for shutting down the board was 1) I wasn't making any money 2) I wasn't investing any time in it (between my job - pays well, rewarding work - and the 3 kids, I have very little time or motivation to spend time on my computer outside of work hours) 3) I wanted to start cancelling different services I was paying for the site (email, hosting).

Shortly after I implemented that change, Peter Askew (@searchbound on Twitter) posted a thread about how to create a niche job board (How to Create a Niche Job Board). It followed my path almost exactly, with a few exceptions.
  1. He recommends buying a premium domain for the type in traffic (eg $1000+). I paid $15 for frontendremotejobs.com
  2. I think I ended up making $200(?) total from frontendremotejobs.com over the several years I ran it. Compared to the $73k or something he talked about for duderanch.com.

Reading the thread got me thinking again about the job board. Did I do something wrong? Should I have kept going? What would I do differently now?

Then I heard the japan-dev.com story on the Indie Hackers podcast--another success story about a niche job board.

What really stood out to me was the $63k monthly revenue metric Eric shared over the summer and the pricing model that helped him achieve that. Rather than selling job posts - Eric signs contracts with companies to pay a fee for hired individuals. So they pay 10%-20% of the first year salary. Less volume, but much higher payout when the time comes! If we're talking a $70k salary for a mid-level front end dev, that's $7k-$14k in revenue.

At some point I also came across https://railsdevs.com which has a similar business model, but focuses on independent developers. Businesses pay a subscription ($299/mo) for access to individual profiles, and then 10% first year salary for hiring someone.

The backdrop of all these success stories in my mind is the rapid shriveling up of the venture capital market. The VC market has drastically changed this year compared to 2020. With the market looking like it is, bootstrapping a business seems like a safer move than ever.

And lots of people are going to be looking for jobs as unemployment rises. Probably less job posts, but more job searchers. A great time to build the audience supply side of the job board business.

After working at a startup for the past 3 years, I feel like I have gotten some experience in trying things out, seeing what sticks, and iterating on strategy. I feel more confident than ever that I have the ability to run a business of my own. I just need the grit.

So here's what I'm thinking.

  1. Get a site back in place to be able to point people to and test out how my SEO is.
  2. Identify HR and recruiting folks to reach out to (Hi, i've got ~1000 front end developers looking for jobs. Would you be interested in a free listing - only pay if you hire someone.)
  3. Come up with a plan / target to grow via SEO. I had an idea for a soft skills course. Could be a lead magnet, could become a paid product ast well.

I got the initial site up and running in about a week - I did a full redesign but tried to keep it lean. Check it out at frontendremotejobs.com!