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indiehackers.com

58 pointsjohnwheeler25 comments

Thanks for sharing your story! Great interview. I noticed you dropped the price from $50 to $20. Out of curiosity, why?

Also, any chance you could bump up the font size and/or contrast of the text? My old geek eyes are having a bit of difficultly reading the site.

Thanks again!

I'm still experimenting to find the right price point that maximizes quality job postings. I've had it at $0 and had to delete a few. One person posted an ad for what appeared to be a technology cult even (deleted).

I've been asked to bump the font size by a few people and have to defer to ctrl+ (win) cmd+ (mac) for now. I'm dog fooding this site and 14pt "courier new" is what I like best.

Any chance this might change your mind?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743628

Yes - that was very helpful. I did not increase the font-size (yet, still not thrilled about that), but I did make the body text and muted text blacker. Here's a before and after

http://imgur.com/a/7Hf4i

The difference is subtle, but it's an improvement in my opinion.

I like it. That, plus some ⌘+'s, have helped. I didn't mention it before, but I also appreciate the bright yellow hover/active state over job links.

Before feels better. But that's just my opinion

Looks like as of 2:20PM EST 10/25 there are 2,194 job postings. At $50/post, that's a pretty successful launch! Congrats!

The jobs that aren't highlighted in green were aggregated from StackOverflow. I mention that on the front page. So far, I've made $1775 total selling job listings. In the beginning, I was giving them away free.

Congrats on the $1775 milestone. Good work.

Thanks for this! 2 questions:

1. You are now making money off of it. So how is that working? Have you created a separate bank account and pushed all your revenue to that account, for the purpose of making filing taxes on it easier? Or did you go some other way?

2. How quickly were you able to solve the chicken and egg problem of getting employers to post and people to visit? Do employers know how many people view their listing? I'm having a hard time understanding why they would want to spend $50 on your site vs simply posting free of charge on HN and getting a pretty large audience.

1. Yes, separate bank account. Stripe is really nice in that they push funds automatically on a regular basis. I have another business which uses PayPal, and I like Stripe better.

2. I'll be working on the chicken & egg problem for sometime. I don't expect a quick turnaround, but the good news for me is it's fun driving steady traffic with blog posts. I just made IndieHackers today, and I'm working on a piece for SitePoint which will be out on Thursday. Just stuff like that along with my Medium blog https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com

From the IndieHackers post in the OP, you can see my Google Analytics since I started the project (minus a few early days because I didn't have tracking). I get several thousand visits when I'm able to get blog posts promoted, and several hundred in the ensuing days. Mind you, these are people who surf HackerNews, so they're going to be stronger candidates than average although the numbers are nowhere near one of the big tech boards (i.e. Dice) and probably never will be. I'm OK with that. I'm catering to an HN-like audience, and want to go solo as long as possible.

You can't post jobs free on HN afaik, unless you're a YC company.

Thank you!

Thank you for the detailed answer. Final question on the second part: I was referring to the "Who is hiring?" threads for jobs. So the employers who are paying and posting on OGJ are essentially betting that their job postings will be seen by others, right? It doesn't look like they have any way of figuring out if anyone will see their job.

I don't mean to hint at anything, just trying to get a clear picture.

Yes, my intuition tells me employers see the post on HN (or Inc, QZ) and think it's a cheap gamble for highly qualified applicants relative to other outlets.

I haven't put any sort of tracking in place, so they have no way of knowing if anyone will see their job unless people apply and say where they're coming from. Employers often use trackable short urls for this purpose.

I'd imagine they get as good if not better exposure than "who is hiring" because they get promoted to the top of my site and their listing lasts for 45 days, but I don't know.

Thank you! I think a lot of us try building something and hope to get people to use it, but not many succeed. Good job to you!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. The tougher the questions, the better.

I'm jealous! Yours is literally a fairy tale launch. Just kidding, actually no, but congrats man! Very inspiring story.

A few questions:

-What did the companies that posted on your site have to say about the quality and quantity of candidates?

-Do they feel it was $50 well spent?

-Did people apply through your site and find jobs so far? Do you have a way of tracking the stats?

-What is your future direction of this site? What features do you plan to add?

-Oh, and how did the $10 Digital Ocean VPS hold up with the sudden spikes of traffic?

-What did the companies that posted on your site have to say about the quality and quantity of candidates?

None of them have contacted me.

-Do they feel it was $50 well spent?

I don't know.

-Did people apply through your site and find jobs so far? Do you have a way of tracking the stats?

A few people wrote in to thank me and tell me they applied jobs. I haven't asked around, and there's no tracking in place.

-What is your future direction of this site? What features do you plan to add?

I want to keep focusing on the UX. Speed and ease of use are the features I care about most. I want the UI to be so good that people feel comfortable looking for a tech job no matter how old they are with the site catering to older geeks as a bonus.

-Oh, and how did the $10 Digital Ocean VPS hold up with the sudden spikes of traffic?

No issues at all. I use Flask-Cache backed by redis, which I'm sure helps a lot.