Bootstrapping a job board to $5K

I was going to write a blog post on this, but I like writing over here better :smile:

Anyway, some of you may know that we’ve created a job board for Laravel, PHP, support, ops, other tech stuff over at https://larajobs.com

So far in the first month since Launch we’ve done just over $5,000 in sales. It took us about 2 weeks to build it from scratch. We did most of the marketing in that time as well.

I think it’s interesting for a few reasons. First, we’ve partnered with a bunch of people we know in the Laravel community by splitting all job posts they send to us 50/50. This has a few wonderful effects.

Obviously, it encourages them to link to us and makes it worthwhile for them to do so. This provides both job posters and people looking for jobs. It’s also a way for us to help generate revenue for community sites that are doing great work often for little or no money.

We also partner with some of the worldwide Laravel meetups trading links for stickers. It’s hard to tell the impact there, but it’s a fun thing to do and people love getting stickers :slight_smile:

Right now we’re just getting ready to start telling our customers about LaraJobs as many of them will be able to benefit from it as well. It’s interesting to try and cross-sell something, we’ve never done that before. We’ll see how that goes.

I also decided to build a community site of our own to promote Laravel consultants with the side benefit of exposing Larajobs to business owners and people who need to build and maintain Laravel/PHP applications long term.

So far that’s gone even better than I’d hoped, at least in terms of the site itself. With over 100 consulting companies listed and tons of interest. Not much from that yet on creating actual job posts but we’ll see. We’ve already gotten several reports of consultants getting work from the list so it’s great that it’s already had a positive impact in it’s intended purpose.

I’m not sure LaraJobs is an actual self sustaining business, but it’s nice to see if off to a decent start. I really wanted to build it because people ask me all the time for where they can find Laravel/PHP developers and having a place to send them is so much easier than telling them to hang out in IRC, etc.

There’s also been several jobs filled in non-developer roles which is fantastic. I’m hoping over time the site continues to be a great place to find all types of employees who need a technical bent but aren’t developers (support, operations people, managers, etc).

It’s been fun building out a project over a short timeline and shipping it. Very different from our other products. We’ll see if it has the same staying power as them!

9 Likes

Congrats Ian, I had a feeling it’ll be a success since the first announcement… Keep up the good work and motivating the rest of us :wink:

Thanks for posting this and congrats!

What’d you build it with? (Just kidding.)

Congrats.

Ian,
Huge congratulations on a great start! Your post here inspired me to join Bootstrapped. I’ve never seen a forum with such authentic and meaningful content.

We’re going through a similar process getting our new real estate site off the ground. Right now we’re working on creating a way for developers and property managers to submit a datafeed of their listings to us. Any insight you have into this would be greatly appreciated. Ie. What’s the most efficient way to find companies / websites with the capability to export their listings in a feed?

Thanks,
Dave

Ian, congrats on this great projects. It’s so nice to have a place to check out for PHP Developers, especially for Laravel, jobs.

Thanks

Congrats! Really awesome! I also created a jobboard (the new version is now with Laravel :wink: ). It focusses on corporate responsibility, non-governmental organisation and environmental jobs in Germany. After about 2,5 years it gets in about 2.000 US$ in sales each month. Not awesome, but it’s decent.

And there’s a newsletter which now goes out to about 8.000 people (with decent open and click rates). Currently I’m doing a lot of conversion testing & A/B-testing, and ramping up the SEO.

If you still check this thread: Why would you not think your jobboard is not a self-sustaining one?