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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

charging before you have mass adoption is a recipe for disaster...you should wait until you have mass adoption then make a premium listing and charge for that.

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

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Sorry, I respectfully disagree. If the market will bear it, you can charge for a service before "mass adoption"

not when the service suffers from a chicken and egg problem.

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

To be clear, greed certainly isn't our intent. As Dave (djbrowning) wrote, we're concerned about the quality of the content on the site.

We're also giving away coupon codes right now (see my post below) to drive job posters to the site.

What about manual approval until the site has momentum?

We (Dave & I) both like this. Thinking more about it. Thank you.

If quality was your only concern, you'd just charge a one time $5 fee. So I'd say greed is at least somewhat involved.

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.

Business exist to earn money and the best way to convince others of the value of your service is to charge for it. You can argue that it isn't good business sense, but calling it greed is a judgmental call that you have no evidence of.

I think a good strategy is to get your minimum viable product out as soon as possible and call it a beta. Don't charge for the beta and provide plenty of warning to existing clients by signalling early on your intention to charge for some/all features when you are out of beta. After a private beta period, this is how I'm planning to handle Mighty CV, a resumé building app with hacker leanings that I've been working on. I'm looking for private beta users to kick the tyres a bit, so if you feel inclined then you can sign up for the private beta at http://www.mightycv.com.

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 think the $75 per mo is actually a smart idea. It gives the founders lot more leeway in finding and sustaining quality traffic for the postings.

Nothing is wrong with being greedy/wanting money for your effort. Just make sure to find an answer for the above mentioned "Chicken-and-egg" problem.

The typical employer expects to pay to post a job listing. Yes more traffic is better, but I bet this site will start getting major traffic within a month. Being a specific niche I also predict it will get some major google SEO juice before to long. So that egg better start running or the chicken will catch up!

It's not greedy, it's just not a good idea to try and capitalize on a service that isn't running on all cylinders yet. Having said that, definitely a chicken and egg problem. I would worry about getting users before starting to charge for the service. Once a larger number of members has been obtained thinkings of ways to monetize it should be fairly straightforward.

I don't think the chicken/egg problem applies here. It applies to e.g. dating sites because there are other options (e.g. other dating sites, bars, etc.). In this case, a ton of people want to work remotely and there is no central place to find that. Now I know of one place, so I'll definitely be checking it often.

well said on both posts sir.

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?

Anecdotal evidence: http://functionaljobs.com.

Similar great idea, but no new posts in almost a month.

Um.... and they cost a metric ton more than we do...

Someone said something about greed?

They might seem a lot more expensive, but when you're looking to hire a new employee (an expense on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars), the difference between $75 and $500 to advertise the position isn't really that significant.

You are here assuming that this source will bring enough traffic to be your only source? Otherwise, you'll need to advertise in many sites and at that time the price makes a difference.

In addition to what csomar said, for a small business or someone looking to hire an independent contractor, I think many advertisers would consider $425 to be a huge difference. But, I think a lot of potential advertisers would consider $75 significant in the first place.

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.

I think his point is that the market won't bear it.

That's a really interesting point. Our concern with free listings was a flood of poor content, which would hide the good ones.

that's a good problem to have...that means you are actually popular enough for people to exploit....then you can introduce the paid pricing.

for now you can easily moderate postings yourself.

That's a good point. Thanks.

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.

I totally disagree.

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.

Just because they dont manage every post does not mean they cannot check post to see the nature of their business intelligence. Just as PG does not read ever one of the articles and lets the user flag articles that are spam so can they use individuals to weed through the crap, by the nature of the job the person will be getting rid of the crap and only leaving legitimate posts, there is no value in weeding through the crap themselves unless they are going to pivot into a link spam software company. You are mixing the idea of the job of eliminating spam with business insight, the two are not linked and I still contend that wading through spam for a developer or owner is an absolute waste of resources for a start-up. Especially when a hire could do it for a 3rd of a developers costs.

I don't know how much Turk costs or how well it works, so I don't know if it would be a wise expenditure if you're not making any money. Again, it's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Not charging would invite more spam submissions, but deprive you of a revenue stream to fund outsourcing of moderation. But if payment is required before you even have to moderate submissions, that would minimize the amount of spam you'd even have to see.

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 jobs" may be a larger niche than these discussions seem to assume.

"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?

Then maybe your solution is one that ensures the good ones rise to the top?

Maybe if registered users were allowed to downvote crappy postings?

How about if high karma users were allowed?

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