Making $20k from a job board directory

Rod is a founder who has successfully monetized a directory showing websites for finding a job. He has made $20k from his Job Board Search site and also runs a successful villas website in Mallorca. Read his interview for Rod's tips for founders, how he has made money from his directory site and his journey building in public on Twitter.

Can you introduce yourself?

I’m Rod, I live in Mallorca, Spain and started coding at early age of 12 years old to learn Clipper and quickly realised that programming was what I wanted so when finished the High School I started studying ‘Computer Systems Engineering’ at university where all the programming classes were based on C++, after 4 years I quit (Uni wasn’t for me, I was only interested in coding classes and being behind the screen with my IDE) and I started travelling. In 2008 I got back to coding focused on web development.

Back in 2010 I had the chance to make and direct bookings project as a freelancer. After I launched the website custom development requests started to come up frequently, so I founded Jomres Plugins & Development agency, and I haven't stopped since. I joined multiple start ups in the hospitality industry, always as a contractor or fractional full-stack developer, like Handiscover and later Quirkyaccom which is a known British accommodation portal with around 3M yearly visitors.

I never used Twitter or any social networks (which I regret) until after the pandemic I discovered the build in public community and Pieter Levels account which was super inspiring

Can you tell us what you’ve achieved with JobBoardSearch?

I don’t know the exact number right now but surely I’m close to $20K in revenue, coming from around 70 paid users or job boards. In May JobBoardSearch.com had 44.8K unique sessions and 92K pageviews. Also I’m trying to grow other channels:

• Job seekers newsletter: 5,000 members

• Subreddit /r/jobboardsearch: 3412 members

• Twitter @jobboardsrch: 903 followers

Not long ago I added “topics” to categorize job posts on the Telegram Group, and improved the bot that posts the jobs with a better layout and details. Before that it was stuck on 23 members for 6 months but a few days ago I passed 3500 members!

Why did you create JobBoardSearch?

It was thanks to Twitter. I was scrolling on my phone and a Pieter Levels’ tweet about Stack Overflow Jobs shutting down came to my feed. Under the tweet a lot of folks where asking about alternatives and I thought “I can build a list just for fun”. I was actually brushing my teeth on a late Saturday before going bed and right away I registered https://stackoverflowjobsalternatives.com/ and went to bed.

The next Sunday morning I woke up at 7AM, made the MVP in 5 hours (Following his style of raw PHP in a single index.php file with no frameworks, just HTML, CSS and JavaScript with some jQuery ) and then went to the skate park with my daughter, when I came back added 10/15 job boards to the list and posted it under the Pieter’s tweet, he liked it and RTd. The next day he sent me a DM saying he would help me a bit to promote if I put RemoteOK on 1st place, it was a blast for me 😀 A lot of job board founders started DMing me or replying to get included in the list, there was a lot of interest.

I never thought about monetizing it but again, a few months later, Pieter in a DM suggested adding premium listings with highlight, custom brand color, and sticky features. He also told me to rebrand, and who dares to not follow his advice? He even helped me to pick the domain among 3 available, so https://JobBoardSearch.com was the one. I also decided to include the 3 Sponsored slots, Gold, Silver and Bronze, which generates most of the revenue.

I tweeted about the paid options and almost immediately Phil from 4 day week job board acquired a sponsored slot and became the 1st premium job board ever (and he is still sponsoring the site). Minutes later another founder paid and the next morning the 3rd payment came. I couldn’t believe it and realized that I was onto something. A week later I posted on Reddit and it went viral, the post had 790K views in 24 hours, and JobBoardSearch.com passed 48k unique visitors.

A few days later I commented under an Indie Hackers post and a platform moderator replied that if I write a post about JobBoardSearch he would feature it on the home page and newsletter. Here’s the post. Also, I received a solid offer of $20K to acquire the website but I declined.

What have been the best marketing channels for growing it?