Show HN: JobBoard.io - SaaS platform for niche job boards

http://www.jobboard.io

by cmalpeli • 14 years ago

45 37 14 years ago

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

Hi everyone - this is my first show HN post.

http://www.jobboard.io is a platform for operating niche job boards that I've bootstrapped as a side project over the last 6 months or so.

My reason for doing so was two-fold:

1. I've run several niche job boards for quite a while, some of them bringing in decent revenue. The 3rd party platform I was using was one where I had to give up 50% of the revenues - not a tenable situation once I began to show signs of success. Since I needed to build something that would support multiple job board sites - I figured why not turn it into a SaaS offering as well. One that does not take a rev share, and charges a flat fixed amount.

2. I wanted to teach myself Ruby on Rails. It's ROR/Heroku/Bootstrap based.

I've been writing code professionally since '99, starting out w/ classic ASP and then moving to .NET. Over my career i've moved into higher and higher management positions (now a VP of Tech @ a media co), and thus moved further and further away from actually building things. This has been a great outlet for me - and allowed me to stay more current and up to date on the technical side of things.

Appreciate any and all feedback. It's been quite a learning experience....

mattdeboard2• 14 years ago

How do you feel about the .jobs TLD?

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

Kinda meh, I suppose. I suspect the primary perceived benefit was for SEO, and with Google Exact Match Domain penalty/update - that benefit is gone.

readme2• 14 years ago

Very nice. I wanted to make some niche job boards but you just killed my dreams. Not a problem though, I have a big list of other ideas people will probably implement before me.

Best of luck on this one! I think this is definitely a lucrative idea.

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

Thanks ;) Sign up for the service - would be happy to give you an extra free month if you still want to run the job boards. email me: info at jobboard.io

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

Oh - and you can see a sample job board here: http://webopsjobs.com

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

An additional job board powered by jobboard.io that may be of interest to this audience http://www.rorjobs.com - focusing on rails opportunities.

jcomis• 14 years ago

Cool side project. Just put of curiosity, do you run all of the current boards linked (rorjobs, webopsjobs and analyticsjobs)?

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

Thanks. Yes - all three featured clients are boards I operate. Hoping to change that over to some of my outside clients - but need permissions, etc.

tucson• 14 years ago

Interesting. Reminds me of a recruiter who runs several jobs board. He blogs at recruitingdomainnames.com about domain names... he might be interested in your solution. I saw him in this very interesting interview which I highly recommend: http://www.domainsherpa.com/jason-davis-slouch-interview/

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

Hey thanks for this - i'll be sure to reach out to him....

tortilla• 14 years ago

Nice job. I taught myself Rails by building a job board too.

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

Thanks - getting all the multi tenant stuff sorted was really interesting.

walshemj• 14 years ago

Well from a pro perspective (I have done a lot of work in analyzing jobs and classified sites) there doesn't appear to be any taxonomy or role/Geo browse structure.

Handling expired jobs and cat/geo pages with no adverts is another tricky area.

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. Search(text and geo) are on the list but lower down. Niche job boards tend to have a smaller number of listings, so the need to do lots of filtering/sorting is not as crucial as larger, less focused sites.

You are absolutely right about expired jobs and empty category/geo pages - they can be a real challenge from an SEO perspective. For now we are handling expired listings by hiding them from the site, but keeping their URLs active w/ an expired message. My hunch is this will keep the page rank for a while but we will eventually drop and 301 them to the sites homepage.

bravura• 14 years ago

I would like to use this, but can I place it on a subdirectory of my domain? It doesn't appear that I can.

If I can't, then it has low SEO value. That feature is very important for me.

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

It supports subdomains and primary domains. I'm not aware of how a hosted platform could work as a subfolder - but if it's possible I'm sure we could support it.

shimms• 14 years ago

Interesting - I was hoping to use this as a way of advertising open positions in our company (ie: "Post Job" should be available only to our company admins).

Looks like this isn't possible at the moment?

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

I'm sure I could make this work. Quick hack would be to give you some CSS to hide the Post button/links and you could post via the URL. I can then make that an option (to hide the post links) via the admin panel in the long term and give you a more elegant solution to add jobs via the admin side as well. let me know if interested: info at jobboard.io

petercooper• 14 years ago

I'm intrigued what substantiates rorjobs.com's claim to be "the leading" Rails job board ;-) It certainly looks very nice, though.

ruswick2• 14 years ago

All I can say is that the pricing is egregiously high. At that point, it becomes more lucrative to simply develop one's own board.

readme2• 14 years ago

You must be pretty cheap if you can develop a job board of your own for less than they are charging. For a business plan, it's $99/mo.

To develop a quality job board, you're looking at at least 20-40 hours of work. What is your hourly rate?

Now factor in the cost of hosting and managing the job board.

Yep, the pricing seems about right to me.

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

Thanks. Also keep in mind one of the largest competitors in the space (Jobamatic) takes 50% of your job posting revenues. So selling one $99 job listing is the same as the low end $49/mo plan. Have any degree of success and you are quickly paying 100s (or more) per month. Step up to "enterprise" solutions and you are paying 1000s per month...

ruswick2• 14 years ago

My general rate is $50/hour. However, I'm a full-time student and as such I have very little capacity for employment and have a difficult time locating projects at all, so my time has effectively no intrinsic value. At best, I made what equated to $3.75/hour over the course of the summer.

Undertaking personal projects yields far more value than purchasing a solution when one's time is more or less devoid of monetary value and one's net worth is less than a thousand dolars with unsteady and extremely limited income that arrives in disjunct and infrequent chunks.

I'd love to be in a position to drop thousands of dollars each year on sass. Unfortunately, such options are far beyond my means.

noodle• 14 years ago

In my experience, I've talked to people who have paid many thousands of dollars for mediocre-at-best job board software. You probably overestimate the prospective market's capabilities and/or underestimate their willingness to pay.

caw• 14 years ago

It looks interesting. I was having trouble deciphering your plans though. Why would I need a "standard" versus "business" niche job board? I got to thinking what sort of target customer I'd be if I needed one plan or another:

* Standard - Small/Medium business. They want a personal job board for their postings, and they'll dump everything on one board.

* Business - Recruiters. If a recruiting company is serving a general field (say, oil & gas), they'll have perhaps 2-3 niches that they fill, perhaps engineers & managerial.

* Enterprise - this stays as is, a single large corporation may want to host multiple business groups or departments with their own job boards.

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

Thank you for this - I agree that I need to make a better distinction between the first two tiers.

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

How did you decide to charge a flat monthly rate rather than take a cut of job ad sales?

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

I used to rely on a 3rd party platform (named elsewhere in this thread) - they took a cut (50%) of the job ad sales - and it bothered me. Was fine when I was experimenting of course, but not when I showed any degree of success. I'm not interested in attracting people who want to throw up tons of free sites - i'd rather have customers who perhaps have something a little more established or at least are willing to put a little more of an investment in.

Of course - I could be completely wrong - but had to start somewhere! :)

dkroy2• 14 years ago

Do you have any paying customers for this new payment model of jobboard.io? Has this been less of a pain or an improvement in sales or reduction in support hours?

tajddin2• 14 years ago

How long would you say it took to develop this from day one to completion?

cmalpeli16• 14 years ago

A loooong time. :). 5 months to feel comfortable launching the first sites - but keep in mind this was working nights and weekends only along with juggling kids and family life.

Another 2 months to get it to the point I felt comfortable submitting it to HN.

I don't see it as being complete however. It's been live for two months and I've been constantly adding new features and will for the foreseeable future.

tajddin2• 14 years ago

Thanks for your reply. I'm working on a SaaS as well (http://inqix.com). I'm thinking it'll take me about as long to be ready.

Good luck!

Show HN: JobBoard.io - SaaS platform for niche job boards

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