Comment by domodomo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by domodomo | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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