Ask HN: Why signup rate is so low? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why signup rate is so low?

5 pointsrk056714 comments

I'm getting 3k+ page views per month for http://railyo.com, a private job board for Ruby on Rails freelancers. The signup rate is extremely low (around ZERO) for client/company, (it is somewhat ok for freelancers) while most of the visitors come from Google Search.

What am I doing wrong ? Is it a bad idea ? Should I just focus on other projects ? Any suggestion ?

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A few things that jump out;

1. There's no obvious call to action. What should I do next on that screen is a text link. That's not clear enough. There needs to be two clear, bold buttons - one for developers and one for jobs.

2. Calling the site a "private job board" is very closed language to anyone wanting to post jobs. Saying it's "kind of a private network" makes it sound like a clique or a club that I'm not a member of.

3. It's not obvious why a Rails dev vetted by Railyo is better than any other. Why would I trust Railyo? Who are you? You're telling me why you're not eLance etc, but not telling me who you actually are.

4. People who commission projects are generally visually-driven, market-minded people. Your site is, frankly, not very pretty. Your market probably doesn't like it.

5. Paying $100 up front is a very different business model to the freelancing sites you're competing with. Those sites are almost always catering for the lowest-possible-price crowd rather than people wanting quality (which is who you're marketing to). Are you simply charging too much? That'd be trivial to split-test.

Thanks a lot, I'd try to fix those issues.

It's interesting to me that #5 indicates the price was $100. I look at the site 4 hours later and the price has dropped to $49, with little to no indication that this is an introductory price, more like a permanent price drop.

This affects me in two negative ways, in addition to the others that onion2k mentions. One is that you haven't properly vetted what someone is willing to pay for your services and two, you don't give a shit about your paying customers.

Say on the off-chance I signed up for your service 5 hours ago at the $100 rate and 5 hours later, you change the rate to $49, would you automatically refund me 50% of what I paid you? Would you hope I didn't notice? Would I be shit out of luck? Would I have to bring it to your attention?

you're right! I'm fixing it in next push (few minutes). I had few paying customers a month ago, so I think the idea/payment model may work. Suddenly, the signup rate dropped to almost zero (this month) while the organic visitors has increased, so I was trying to figure out the possible reasons.

I run hackerjobs.co.uk and for the last year or so we've been providing free job listings. Despite that, we only get employers sign up as and when they need to post a job.

We get relatively decent traffic considering we haven't paid a penny for marketing or advertising and ultimately, our most successful technique to get new employers to sign up is to personally email them directly when I see them advertising elsewhere.

One of our biggest traffic sources come from aggregated job boards such as indeed.com and we find twitter to be surprisingly effective when we post new blogs or tweet about new jobs.

All that said and done, onion2k's 5 points are very valid too.

I think it would also be beneficial if you could browse job listings. I normally don't sign up for a site if I can't see any 'action' on the site. Not only would this probably attract a lot more freelancers, but employers would feel more comfortable listing (and paying for) their posting.

Thanks, I've been thinking about something like this but initially I called it a "private job board", so I couldn't do it.

Honestly the user interface and visual design could use a lot of work, and I think improving this would make thie biggest difference in your results. At least for me, poor design of a page makes me assume that A. Relatively little time and effort has been put into its creation B. It may not be widely used C. It may not even be actively maintained

In short, for better or for worse, for me UI is an instant indicator of how seriously I should take a site and how much time I should invest in it (when there are plenty other options to check out in that space)

thanks, I'm a developer, so I should get a designer.

Spelling errors don't inspire confidence. This is a particularly egregious violation:

(All Job offers: receive all job offers by email, Based on your Location: recevie job offers oly from that (or near-by) location, None: do not receive job offers by email, (note: you can always checkout latest job offers, by logging in here))

That is from http://railyo.com/sign_up/developer

I'm making a huge leap here and assuming that English isn't your first language based on grammatical and other types of errors throughout the site. It would really be to your advantage to have a native English speaker make recommendations on better sentence structure, punctuation and spelling.

Thanks for pointing that out. English isn't my first language but I usually don't make this kind of sloppy mistakes.

It's probably because of some recent experiments with my development environment (e.g moving from GUI editor to vim+screen+bash, and I realize I had not enabled the spell checker yet, some lagging/rendering problem when using bash in 'full screen mode' on Ubuntu)

I recorded my thoughts while browsing your site.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26816257/railyo.mov

Vow! That was a great help. Thanks :)

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