My first product for my 12 products in 12 months challenge is Remote Job Lists. I built it over 10 days in March, and launched on March 15th.
Remote Job Lists is a Job Board for Remote work, subdivided into categories for easy search.
Why build another job board?
There are a few reasons why I decided to build a job board for remote work:
- For my first product, I wanted something that was well defined. In a weird way, the reason I built Remote Job Lists is because I knew there was a market for job boards.
- The entire application can be automated so it doesn’t require much maintainance.
- I know of job boards out there that make a decent amount of money, so it seems like there’s a way to monetize.
- While the traditional job boards like Monster and Indeed are widely used, it’s less clear whether there is a dominant job board for remote work. In addition, remote work seems to be getting more popular amongst the younger generation too.
What made the product unique?
That explains why I built a job board but I still needed a way to differentiate myself from the thousand other job boards that are out there. Again, I decided on a few things here:
- User Interface: I wanted a site that was fast to load, easy to navigate, with great search and filters.
- Smart Categories: I wrote a system that takes jobs and categorizes them into buckets like “Engineering”, “Media”, “Management”, etc. It basically makes it easy to search for jobs since you can combine multiple categories. For example, you could search for Management jobs related to Front-end Development. I haven’t seen this done well with other remote job sites.
- Custom Email Notifications: Now that I have categories, users can subscribe to them. So instead of getting a daily dump of jobs, you only get notified when new jobs related to specific subscribed categories are available.
Launching the Product
The launch actually went pretty well. I put it up on Product Hunt really early (around 4AM EST) and went to sleep. I woke up to find it hovering around the 4th or 5th product of the day.
In the end, I ended up getting 346 upvotes for it. I notice a lot of products fail to get traction on Product Hunt. To gain visibility, I did the following:
- Created a GIF as the logo which changed colors and content to draw the eye.
- Created custom screenshots for the carousel
- Created a simple screen capture showing a user flow in about 15 seconds
Open Sourcing
A few months after launching, I realized my heart wasn’t in maintaining the website. I had moved on to other ideas. I also did not feel like tackling the most common problems that people reached out to me with:
- People want to know expected salary when applying for a remote job.
- People want to know if the company sponsors visas.
- People want to know what countries the remote workers can apply from.
It wasn’t easy to find this data, and therefore there was a catch-22 problem that I didn’t want to solve. I decided the best thing to do was to open source the codebase. Feel free to peruse the code and use it to start up your own job board.
