Show HN: JobBoard.io - SaaS platform for niche job boards | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: JobBoard.io - SaaS platform for niche job boards

jobboard.io

45 pointscmalpeli37 comments

Hi everyone - this is my first show HN post.

http://www.jobboard.io is a platform for operating niche job boards that I've bootstrapped as a side project over the last 6 months or so.

My reason for doing so was two-fold:

1. I've run several niche job boards for quite a while, some of them bringing in decent revenue. The 3rd party platform I was using was one where I had to give up 50% of the revenues - not a tenable situation once I began to show signs of success. Since I needed to build something that would support multiple job board sites - I figured why not turn it into a SaaS offering as well. One that does not take a rev share, and charges a flat fixed amount.

2. I wanted to teach myself Ruby on Rails. It's ROR/Heroku/Bootstrap based.

I've been writing code professionally since '99, starting out w/ classic ASP and then moving to .NET. Over my career i've moved into higher and higher management positions (now a VP of Tech @ a media co), and thus moved further and further away from actually building things. This has been a great outlet for me - and allowed me to stay more current and up to date on the technical side of things.

Appreciate any and all feedback. It's been quite a learning experience....

Very nice. I wanted to make some niche job boards but you just killed my dreams. Not a problem though, I have a big list of other ideas people will probably implement before me.

Best of luck on this one! I think this is definitely a lucrative idea.

Thanks ;) Sign up for the service - would be happy to give you an extra free month if you still want to run the job boards. email me: info at jobboard.io

How do you feel about the .jobs TLD?

Kinda meh, I suppose. I suspect the primary perceived benefit was for SEO, and with Google Exact Match Domain penalty/update - that benefit is gone.

Wow that's really interesting. My previous employer was a "middle man" of sorts for .jobs domains (I can't remember the word; not a tld manager but something else. They reserve .jobs domains for other people). Using ".jobs" was in fact an SEO strategy, so you see domains like indiana.jobs, django.jobs, etc., which both pull from the same pool of jobs, but filter based on the specific domain.

It looks interesting. I was having trouble deciphering your plans though. Why would I need a "standard" versus "business" niche job board? I got to thinking what sort of target customer I'd be if I needed one plan or another:

* Standard - Small/Medium business. They want a personal job board for their postings, and they'll dump everything on one board.

* Business - Recruiters. If a recruiting company is serving a general field (say, oil & gas), they'll have perhaps 2-3 niches that they fill, perhaps engineers & managerial.

* Enterprise - this stays as is, a single large corporation may want to host multiple business groups or departments with their own job boards.

Thank you for this - I agree that I need to make a better distinction between the first two tiers.

Interesting. Reminds me of a recruiter who runs several jobs board. He blogs at recruitingdomainnames.com about domain names... he might be interested in your solution. I saw him in this very interesting interview which I highly recommend: http://www.domainsherpa.com/jason-davis-slouch-interview/

Hey thanks for this - i'll be sure to reach out to him....

All I can say is that the pricing is egregiously high. At that point, it becomes more lucrative to simply develop one's own board.

You must be pretty cheap if you can develop a job board of your own for less than they are charging. For a business plan, it's $99/mo.

To develop a quality job board, you're looking at at least 20-40 hours of work. What is your hourly rate?

Now factor in the cost of hosting and managing the job board.

Yep, the pricing seems about right to me.

My general rate is $50/hour. However, I'm a full-time student and as such I have very little capacity for employment and have a difficult time locating projects at all, so my time has effectively no intrinsic value. At best, I made what equated to $3.75/hour over the course of the summer.

Undertaking personal projects yields far more value than purchasing a solution when one's time is more or less devoid of monetary value and one's net worth is less than a thousand dolars with unsteady and extremely limited income that arrives in disjunct and infrequent chunks.

I'd love to be in a position to drop thousands of dollars each year on sass. Unfortunately, such options are far beyond my means.

Sounds like this solution is not for you. That's ok, even if it were free, you'd probably still want to build your own (if you even have a need to host a job board).

Thanks. Also keep in mind one of the largest competitors in the space (Jobamatic) takes 50% of your job posting revenues. So selling one $99 job listing is the same as the low end $49/mo plan. Have any degree of success and you are quickly paying 100s (or more) per month. Step up to "enterprise" solutions and you are paying 1000s per month...

In my experience, I've talked to people who have paid many thousands of dollars for mediocre-at-best job board software. You probably overestimate the prospective market's capabilities and/or underestimate their willingness to pay.

Cool side project. Just put of curiosity, do you run all of the current boards linked (rorjobs, webopsjobs and analyticsjobs)?

Thanks. Yes - all three featured clients are boards I operate. Hoping to change that over to some of my outside clients - but need permissions, etc.

Well from a pro perspective (I have done a lot of work in analyzing jobs and classified sites) there doesn't appear to be any taxonomy or role/Geo browse structure.

Handling expired jobs and cat/geo pages with no adverts is another tricky area.

Thanks for the feedback. Search(text and geo) are on the list but lower down. Niche job boards tend to have a smaller number of listings, so the need to do lots of filtering/sorting is not as crucial as larger, less focused sites.

You are absolutely right about expired jobs and empty category/geo pages - they can be a real challenge from an SEO perspective. For now we are handling expired listings by hiding them from the site, but keeping their URLs active w/ an expired message. My hunch is this will keep the page rank for a while but we will eventually drop and 301 them to the sites homepage.

An additional job board powered by jobboard.io that may be of interest to this audience http://www.rorjobs.com - focusing on rails opportunities.

Interesting - I was hoping to use this as a way of advertising open positions in our company (ie: "Post Job" should be available only to our company admins).

Looks like this isn't possible at the moment?

I'm sure I could make this work. Quick hack would be to give you some CSS to hide the Post button/links and you could post via the URL. I can then make that an option (to hide the post links) via the admin panel in the long term and give you a more elegant solution to add jobs via the admin side as well. let me know if interested: info at jobboard.io

I would like to use this, but can I place it on a subdirectory of my domain? It doesn't appear that I can.

If I can't, then it has low SEO value. That feature is very important for me.

It supports subdomains and primary domains. I'm not aware of how a hosted platform could work as a subfolder - but if it's possible I'm sure we could support it.

I'm intrigued what substantiates rorjobs.com's claim to be "the leading" Rails job board ;-) It certainly looks very nice, though.

Oh - and you can see a sample job board here: http://webopsjobs.com

How did you decide to charge a flat monthly rate rather than take a cut of job ad sales?

I used to rely on a 3rd party platform (named elsewhere in this thread) - they took a cut (50%) of the job ad sales - and it bothered me. Was fine when I was experimenting of course, but not when I showed any degree of success. I'm not interested in attracting people who want to throw up tons of free sites - i'd rather have customers who perhaps have something a little more established or at least are willing to put a little more of an investment in.

Of course - I could be completely wrong - but had to start somewhere! :)

Do you have any paying customers for this new payment model of jobboard.io? Has this been less of a pain or an improvement in sales or reduction in support hours?

Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear. This is the first and only payment model. I meant that I used to run my own niche job boards with a different provider which took a rev share. I built this platform as a result of wanting to get away from that model as a customer. At the same time I decidd to make the platform a SaaS offering so other could take advantage of it.

Alright, I understand now. Well good luck, I would be interested to hear how successful this SaaS offering ended up being a month or two down the road maybe submit a blog post on HN later on, that definitely would be an interesting read. Good Luck, it looks really polished at first glance.

How long would you say it took to develop this from day one to completion?

A loooong time. :). 5 months to feel comfortable launching the first sites - but keep in mind this was working nights and weekends only along with juggling kids and family life.

Another 2 months to get it to the point I felt comfortable submitting it to HN.

I don't see it as being complete however. It's been live for two months and I've been constantly adding new features and will for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for your reply. I'm working on a SaaS as well (http://inqix.com). I'm thinking it'll take me about as long to be ready.

Good luck!

Nice job. I taught myself Rails by building a job board too.

Thanks - getting all the multi tenant stuff sorted was really interesting.

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