Derek runs a successful bootstrapped remote job board making $6k a month in revenue. While lots of people may think that the market for remote job boards is saturated, Derek has shown it's still possible to make a business in this niche. I talked to him about growing a successful job board and building his Daily UI newsletter business. Read on for an exclusive interview packed with great insights and advice.
Can you tell us what you’ve achieved with Remote Jobs?
Remote Jobs is just over 18 months old and has grown to over 100,000 users and averages $6k/month right now.
Why did you create Remote Jobs?
I had an existing newsletter and rather than keep selling ad space to other brands, I wanted to promote my own products.
At first I wanted to start a job board just for designers, but eventually decided to go into the bigger broader remote market. I also travel a lot (over 150+ days per year) so it fits with my lifestyle.
What’s been your biggest mistake with Remote Jobs and how did you recover?
One mistake was limiting the posts to only public salaries. Currently, there aren't too many jobs because a salary range is required. The purpose is to give job seekers an idea of what type of compensation they can expect (something I would want when applying to a job).
When polling my audience, 95% of people said seeing a salary range makes them trust an employer more and that it makes the experience better.
However, that reduces the number of posts by about 75% because most employers won't share the salary range. The easy fix is to remove that restriction, but I've been slow to do that because I'm going to roll out a full design along the way.
Another "mistake" was featuring jobs on the homepage and then "hiding" them from the homepage after 30 days. The pages are still live, but there's no way to find it if you don't have the link. That was a major usability tradeoff to make the site cleaner, but it makes it feel empty depending on which filters are selected.
Daily UI looks cool! Can you talk about how it works and why people should sign up?
Daily UI is a design challenge meant to help designers build their portfolio and get exposure for their work. There are currently over 450,000 subscribers and it's growing by 10k subscribers per month. Averaging $20k/month in revenue!
What have been the best marketing channels for growing Remote Jobs?
I’ve mostly used my existing newsletter to cross promote Remotejobs.com. The second biggest channel is Twitter @remotejobs
I’ve never done any paid ads or sponsored influencers so it’s been all organic.
Can you talk about what your stack is?
Current version is a react renderer with Notion on the backend (pros and cons to this model) but I’ve got a new version in progress built with Ruby on Rails. I’m currently using AWS, GitHub, Postmark, Vercel, Cloudflare, and Stripe.
The new site will be a fresh start and it’ll be easier to manage and build new features down the road.
Who are your favorite founders that inspire you?
I've been following Ryan Kulp and Greg Isenberg. Different types of content, but great insights from each. I don't really follow too many competitors because I like to stay focused and not worry about what they're up to.
What’s your top tip for people who want to make a job board?
The market is really saturated and being unique is more important than ever. Most job boards have terrible brands and are forgotten just as quickly as they're launched.
Remotejobs.com is super simple and perfectly reflects exactly what it is. Even without visiting the website, the domain name is so descriptive that people already know what to expect.
I'd suggest building an audience and then investing in your brand before trying to monetize something. Consider how you’ll attract BOTH sides of the marketplace: job seekers and brands hiring. I already have ~250k email subscribers and dozens of sponsors before considering starting a job board.
What does an average day look like for you?
I don't have a set routine, but tend to do calls with sponsors for Daily UI and Remote Jobs at least once or twice per week. I just had one meeting today and I'll have another tomorrow. In between, I'm usually designing new product ideas or looking for new projects to acquire. I’m working on revamping a digital download product (pixelkit.com). I also recently acquired NotionPack.co and plan to integrate ads for it within my emails.
Alongside redesigning my websites, I'm planning to release a job board just for freelance work (gigs.co) because nobody has paid to post a freelance job on Remotejobs.com. So, I've decided to make a dedicated free site for that. This should be launched within the next month or so once a few details are ironed out.
Where can people find out more about you?
I can be found on kolstad.co which links to my X profile. Once I start a personal blog, that'll be the home for it too 😀
Thanks for the interview!
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