Comment by m52go | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m52go | Hacker News Reader

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I appreciate your thoughts.

The market I'm targeting is college students. The site functions as the missing guidance/career counselor to guide them through school in the area of their choosing.

The edge is that it's a somewhat scaleable form of mentorship because mentors don't have to repeatedly spend time to have influence once they're on the site.

Example: students looking to major and work in software engineering follow the software engineering 'channel' where they see all the top books, videos, resources, etc. that top software engineers found critical to their own formal + informal education.

The goal is to be a powerhouse for this type of content, and the job board is an ancillary benefit that might help visitors. Traditional ads aren't an option. Hence my curiosity in other options.

Anyway, I imagine the people on this site would be highly qualified.

Great point about charging little to nothing and then building from there. Kind of obvious, in hindsight, but in never occurred to me!

I ran a company in the college employment space for 7+ years. I recently shut it down. At our peak we had 150-200k unique visits per month and an email list around 10k. I was scraping by and making a living, but we weren't selling job postings directly for the most part. I've watched many dozens of startups in the space die. Although I learned a lot and helped a lot of people find jobs, I realize now that it's an exceptionally difficult space.

What was your differentiator?

I wrote the company profiles myself. I found all kinds of companies with jobs that weren't posted on any other job boards. Growing an initial audience was the easy part for me because my site was very different from other job sites. Monetizing while continuing to grow the site was what killed me. I relied too much on SEO, and one of Google's whims essentially put me out of business. Most of the startups in the space that I saw fail couldn't even get an initial user base.

that's the key - you need a differentiator. Not everyone has one at all; among job boards, it's quite common for them to be aggregators that just scrape other job boards. I don't find them to be useful.

Yeah. That's why I think a site bringing unique value that happens to have jobs listed might have a fighting chance, whereas a site intended to be a job board that tries to make itself uniquely valuable will struggle.

I'm aiming for the former.

I have some bad news for you.

My own site is your direct competitor:

http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/

I don't intend to make money from my job board, rather I hope to find a job myself, in part because the job board will help my SEO if it gets organic links, and in part because some of those who get jobs through my site, might one day hire me, or retain me as a consultant.

As for your own job board, it would be helpful were you to post technical articles for the CS students. Not so many people visit job boards unless they're actually looking for a job, but lots of people like to read articles. Once they're at your site, then they'll notice your job board at the same site.

One thing I don't understand is about Indeed.com. I think (not sure) that it was an aggregator. 2 points: 1) was/is that legal - to just scrape other sites and use it? 2) it supposedly sold to recruiter.com for $1B. Can anyone confirm that? I was told it by someone.

Yes, that's true. I was actually surprised that they didn't exit for more. Ask question 1 again and replace Indeed with Google.

He he, I thought of that just before clicking submit, but was also interested in your reply.

Never underestimate the power of junk mail. Er... direct mail.

Send paper posters around to the departmental offices at as many schools as you can. It would not be hard to compile the postal addresses yourself, however you can rent such mailing lists quite cheaply. A "tested" list, which is regarded as high-value, rents for ten cents per name or so, but a "compiled" list, as this would be, is much cheaper, like one cent per name.

However if you have specific contacts at a school, and can address a cover letter to the contact by name, they're more likely to actually help you out by putting your poster up in a visible location.

Also consider advertising in student newspapers, student radio stations, as well as radio stations that while not run by students, are in the communities where schools are located.

Sometimes you can get free advertising just by sending around a thoughtfully-worded press release.

Hehe, true about direct mail. A scrappy approach is clever. I've reached out to my alma mater and they're generally not too difficult about posting items around campus.

Thanks a bunch for the tips!

Is your alma mater prestigious?

At least in the UK, major graduate recruiters that focus their efforts on particular schools are willing to spend on brand-building for surprisingly low-eyeball audiences (sponsoring specific student societies). You can then pitch a low traffic site with emphasis on the "set up by former and current XX students" angle to at least get badges on the site.

If your site is targeting current students, there's likely more revenue in brand-building "sponsored content" from major graduate recruiters than a pure jobs board since students, almost by definition, aren't actively looking for a job for most of the year. That doesn't make your revenue model easier...

In the US, it's uncommon for recruiters to focus on specific schools. I do see it done from time to time - specifically for Stanford, MIT and Berkeley - but it is uncommon.

Also they don't target specific schools that are just as good, if not better, like Caltech or Carnegie-Mellon, nor schools in other countries - like Cambridge or Oxford!

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