Show HN: My weekend project, Remojōbo: a remote job board for web nerds | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My weekend project, Remojōbo: a remote job board for web nerds

remojobo.com

150 pointscharliepark42 comments

It's great to see that you're focusing in on specific a niche, since that's where most of the money is in the job board industry and its the quickest way for you to attract an audience. The fact that your job list is hand curated and you are zeroing in on remote work, which is important to many in the tech community, will go a long way towards building an audience.

Right now, your biggest strength is that you're on the front page of Hacker News and have a lot of eye balls from a very sought after, hard to recruit niche. Even if your traffic & mailing list numbers are not high, it doesn't matter since you control access to a very targeted audience.

I would stop developing and immediately start reaching out to companies with remote positions listed and succinctly explain:

- What Hacker News, and why its a big deal for them that you're on the front page

- Why this is timely (Yahoo's recent policy change)

- It costs $100 to post and they should post now before the buzz goes away. (This is nothing in contrast to a 20-30K agency fee, and the fact that this is time sensitive will help)

As you continue to build the site, I would look into using an existing turn key solution for running a job board. They're not built in the sexiest backend technologies, but you can likely do a lot to skin the front end and have a clean, modern web design like your site. A few to check out:

- http://www.jobamatic.com

- http://jobboardsoftware.com/

- http://www.jobboardbuilder.com/

If you weren't against building site based on WordPress, a nice addition to the job board software list would be JobEngine: http://www.enginethemes.com/themes/jobengine

I think its design is quite more modern than most of the other players in the field. Here is the demo site: http://demo.enginethemes.com/jobengine

I personally dislike the idea of (further) fragmenting things like job boards (or real estate listings, or travel fares, etc.) where breadth is critical. How is this better than a general-purpose job board with an option to filter by remote-friendliness? Unless people are willing to potentially miss out on listings that don't happen to be on this particular board, this is just one more addition to a long list of places the user has to keep track of if they are job-hunting.

I know ... another example of this: http://xkcd.com/927/.

The hope is that, eventually, this would be a place where we could aggregate the remote jobs featured at the various job boards (at least, the major ones: Authentic Jobs, GitHub, 37signals, Stack Overflow) in one place.

That's what http://jobmote.com/ does currently.

Sorry. Should have been clearer. What jobmote does (and I wasn't aware of them before I built Remojobo) is actually aggregate the content. All we'd ever do would be to link to Authentic Jobs et al. My interest isn't in pulling traffic away from the existing boards; just helping people find the remote jobs more easily. And, if companies want to highlight their posts on Remojobo by making their posts "featured", that's great, too.

That's true in many ways and partly explains why Indeed.com (aggregation) is the largest source of online hires. The question of do 'niche job boards' have a future is interesting and I would argue yes (in the same way specialty stores still have a future).

I do see the value in true "niche" boards based around a community (HN, StackOverflow, a subreddit, whatever) since it's a way of people within the confines of that community to connect with one another. This board doesn't even seem to offer that, though; It's just based around one particular hard attribute a job listing could have. (Not that I'm trying to contradict anything you've said.)

I made this as a way to see remote / telecommuting / anywhere jobs. I'm posting it now mainly as a way to "force the MVP", and to stop fiddling with it.

I'd love to know any feedback you guys have. Thanks!

Dude, this is impressively MVP. Google forms for submitting, and just linking to a 3rd party webpage for actual job details. Awesome.

Are you just manually updating the page by hand when people add jobs? Kinda concierge style. I would actually respect that all the more.

People talk a big game on MVP, but it's cool to come across where someone actually gets it.

How did you get your initial inventory? Just manually sifting through HN posts? I think getting new and quality inventory will be the biggest challenge, that's harder than getting job seekers.

You've basically created a less crappy and niche focused indeed.com:

http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=&l=Remote

I'm not sure if indeed.com spiders automatically or what, but I'm guessing you could emulate their approach to getting job openings.

Another option is to try to actively partner with headhunters who often have a source of inventory you wouldn't normally see on job boards.

As for the UI, ignore the haters. The simplicity reminds me of Startupers (http://www.startupers.com/) which is doing just fine.

Thanks!

I started with raw HTML, but wanted to have an interface that wouldn't require FTP-ing / SSH-ing, etc., so I played with a Gist as a datastore (example JSON: https://gist.github.com/charliepark/5037450; explanation of how I used it: https://gist.github.com/charliepark/5055709), but realized I wanted a little more flexibility. So I quickly hacked together a WordPress template so I could submit entries, where they could be filtered ("featured" and "not featured"), and they'd get cleaned up automatically (14 days on the page for not-featured posts, 1 month for featured posts). So maybe not quiiiite as MVP as I could have gone, but it was a good quick lesson in WordPress hacking. Side note: I'm happy to report that, with caching, WordPress pages can handle HN levels of traffic without a problem.

Initial inventory was a combination of seeing posts on other job boards, poking around at companies I know are remote-friendly, and seeing the "hiring" thread on HN last week. In terms of inventory, I'm hoping to highlight jobs that are already posted at other job boards as well as posting original ones. I'm curious to see how this chicken/egg problem resolves. I have a few thoughts, but we'll see.

Thanks for the encouragement on the UI. I'll keep fiddling with it to see what I can do to make it more legible without killing the spirit of the page.

The background makes the site almost unusable, at least for me. Using a background like the one on the box at the bottom would make the whole page a lot more readable.

I think this is just fantastic. Does it gather job listings automatically, or do people have to post them?

At the moment (and for the foreseeable future) it's all manual, though I've set up a number of IFTT feeds that help collect some of the jobs into my inbox.

I like how Patio11 is now a job title.

I think the background makes the text a little hard to read though

Agreed. I think the OP should change the image or at least use a Gaussian blur on it.

Just made it darker; hopefully that'll help with the contrast.

Just tried it again. I think the problem is more with the fireplace and other stuff behind the text. The user's eye gaze is caught in a tug-of-war between the text and the imagery when he's scrolling.

Ditto, for me it's the artifacting mixed with how busy it is. A blur would resolve both of these.

pardon my ignorance, what is "patio11-style marketing engineers"?

patio11 is Patrick MacKenzie: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11

He's minorly famous for his essays on how engineers can be better at marketing. A lot of it is about, but not limited to, how to properly A/B test your product.

A patio11-style would do some of the tasks mentioned here ( scroll down to paragraph that starts with "“What is it you do, exactly?” ): http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator-and-o...

thanks

I mean, you can't claim the guy doesn't take his own advice (specifically, his encouragement to "Carve out a niche of one").

I've been thinking of going remote in the next few years. Something I'm curious about is how it affects salary negotiation. To those of you who work remotely, have you found that companies typically try to pay you less than their on-site developers because you most likely live in a cheaper area?

First job I clicked on had this description: "Due to our rapid growth, we now need an in-house web developer. Initially we are looking to work together on a contractual basis (a “trial by fire,” if you’d prefer) for"

I like the idea but you should really make sure all of the hobs are "remote".

[edit] it was the Evil Genius post - https://jobs.github.com/positions/d11107fe-7bb7-11e2-89f3-8b.... Also: I have heard from several people that all DevinArt post are BS. They always post the same thing and I have never found a single person they ever actually spoke to or interviewed.

DeviantART actually interviewed me, but I was unimpressed by their hiring process. It seemed very make-shift (i.e. "I'll contact you shortly," then next contact comes 3 weeks later). In the end I was waiting for another interview (apparently the interviewer was on vacation), but was then dropped because 'the position was filled,' or something similar.

That's a good point. They note that it's a "remote" job at the top of the post, but it's not totally clear from the post itself that that's the case. I'll remove that one.

Something warm about remote workers helping out others who want to work remote. I built http://imnosy.com to be able to track when webpages are updated. I'm going to add http://remojobo.com/ and http://jobmote.com/ to it now.

Best of luck Charlie!

$300 in revenue already? Nice job!

my thoughts too :D

Thanks for creating this, now please throw some rgba(0,0,0,0.5) on to the job listing background-color!

I prefer http://jobmote.com simply because of the interface.

There are many employment-related hashtags you can be using when you post to twitter that may increase your audience. I'm sure there are some for working remotely as well.

Beautiful site - nice work.

Could you elaborate on this some for those of us that do not use twitter as much?

Sure. Twitter hashtags can be found here:

http://www.hashtags.org/

Adding a hashtag to a tweet can increase the number of people who see it. Here's a good overview of why and how to use hashtags:

http://www.hashtags.org/platforms/twitter/why-use-hashtags-g...

In this case, it appears that both #remote and #telecommute would be relevant hashtags to use.

http://remojobo.com/feed/ is broken. Error message is:

   error on line 43 at column 15: xmlParseEntityRef: no name

Thanks. It was a weird encoding issue. I think it's fixed now.

This is awesome....I would love to see 'contractor gigs' and other, highly curated, freelance gigs posted here. The good kind, not the crappy Craigslist variety.

Hah, I was thinking to create exactly this, but changed my mind when StackOverflow Careers site introduced "Only telecommute jobs" flag in their filter.

very very nice!

Suggestion: what do you think of making the poster mark a checkbox for US, World or Other/"Choose region"..?

anywhere != anywhere in US

Excellent suggestion. I'd use this site if it had some kind of region filtering...

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