I had a chat with Phil who had made a job board just for 4dayweek jobs! He's grown it with SEO and now gets 200,000 monthly visitors to his website. I interviewed him about why he's bullish on companies having a 4 day week, his wins and mistakes and how his job board makes money.
Can you tell us what you’ve achieved with 4dayweek?
4dayweek gets around 200k visitors each month. About 50% come from Google with the other half coming from my newsletter (130k subscribers), social media, direct etc. Since launching in December 2020, 400k job seekers have signed up. Although I’ve cleaned my list since then, so there are 130,000 active subscribers now.
As for revenue, I’m not totally transparent but the business makes enough to support me and my family (😇)... although I'm re-investing most back into the business, focusing on SEO, blog posts, social media content etc.
Why are you bullish on 4-day weeks becoming more normal?
I'm bullish about the four-day workweek soon becoming the norm because it’s the natural progression.
- 1700s: 7 day week
- 1800s: 6 day week
- 1900s: 5 day week
- 2000s: ?
We’re also at a pivotal point in human history with AI imo - something that technically should give us all more free time.
In the future we'll look back at ~2022 and see the exact moment where AI caused productivity to skyrocket, much like the steam engine in the 1800s.
The pandemic is another reason. In 2015, the phrase “working from home” was taboo, it was almost a euphemism for being lazy.
“Yeah, *air quotes* ‘working from home’...”
The four-day workweek in 2024 is similar to “remote work” in 2015. Perceived as lazy, but growing in popularity for various reasons. One of these reasons is talent attraction.
Companies used to offer remote work as an amazing workplace benefit, but since the pandemic made it commonplace, companies will look to offer other benefits to attract top talent - with the 4 day work week being one of them.
How does 4dayweek make money?
The job board makes money from various sources (in no order):
- Premium job ads
- Commission only recruiting services (e.g. “no hire, no fee” job posts)
- Resume reviews (I get affiliate revenue from WriteSea)
- Newsletter adverts
- Affiliate deals (any software relevant for job seekers)
- SparkLoop (recommend other newsletters when they sign up for mine)
- CPC jobs
You’d expect job ads to make up the majority of revenue, but it definitely doesn’t. It’s a really tough market for job boards atm!
What have been the best marketing channels for growing it?
SEO has been the most effective marketing channel for 4dayweek.io - the website is now #1 for “4 day week jobs” on Google. I think for 99% of job boards, SEO is the most important channel. People are looking for a specific type of job, you need to serve it to them.
Apart from job categories, our blog has been a great acquisition channel. When I launched the website I started by publishing numerous blog posts myself, eventually outsourcing this to an agency. Now we have a small team creating content for our blog and social channels.
Depending on the niche, I think shorts (e.g. Tiktok / Youtube) can also drive a huge amount of traffic. For example, 4dayweek.io has gone viral on these platforms a few times and the amount of traffic can be overwhelming… e.g. videos like this one have driven 10k’s of users to the site.
If you’re playing the long game though, SEO SEO SEO p.s. If you’re just getting started with SEO, watch the Ahrefs YouTube - it’s where I learned everything, for free! Long story short: create webpages tailored for the (exact) things people search for.
What’s a big mistake you made and how did you recover?
I've made tons of mistakes with 4dayweek.io (e.g. not going all in on SEO from the beginning) but most of my mistakes happened with my earlier projects.
This is probably the twentieth project I've built, and it's by far the most successful. Before that it was ~15 fails and only a few minor successes (if you can call them that). Here’s some examples:
- A poker app for the Blackberry tablet (I’m showing my age here) - small win
- An app to find “breaking news, before it breaks” on Twitter - fail
- A CMS for vehicle sales companies - small win
- A tool to analyse football betting data - small win
- An app to make it easier to tip at restaurants when you don’t have coins - fail
- A tool to send emails from postgreSQL… lol - fail
- And a ton more…
The mistakes I made were the usual suspects: not researching the market, building something that no-one actually wants, perfectionism, launching too late, not engaging with customers etc.
Who are your favorite bootstrappers that inspire you?
Too many to name tbh… but Courtland Allen of the Indie Hackers podcast was the 1 person who inspired me to “go it on my own” - so I’ll give all the inspo credit to him.
Any advice on running a job board?
SEO your site from day #1, scrape jobs from day #2, publish content from day #3. And repeat.
p.s. be patient.
Where can people find out more about you?
I’m https://x.com/philostar on Twitter. And for 4 day week jobs: 4dayweek.io
