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