37signals Job Board is closing down

https://jobs.37signals.com/

by neokya • 13 years ago

83 52 13 years ago

jobs.37signals.com

They don't really need the money, of course, but it's still cool to see them truly standing by their principles as set down in REMOTE.

znowi• 13 years ago

Yes, I admire their resolve in staying truly lean as a company with focus on making a great product rather than making a great profit. After more than 10 years, it's still a compact team of 36 people. I wonder what happens when they hit 37 - maybe it's the limit :)

wlll• 13 years ago

We're at 42 now.

zackkitzmiller• 13 years ago

37S really loves job boards, this makes what 3? 4 now?

AdrianRossouw• 13 years ago

I was wondering if it was just deja-vu on my part.

brianbreslin• 13 years ago

wouldn't you? very little overhead, nice cash flow that is effectively gravy on top of their regular operations.

programminggeek• 13 years ago

Job boards are a funny thing, it's a fairly easy thing to program, and yet companies will pay good sums of money to post an ad because it is to hard to find decent help AND companies are already paying money to advertise job openings.

Value created !== programming complexity

karolisd• 13 years ago

Easy to program, but how do you get it off the ground? It has the same chicken and egg problem every two-sided marketplace does. 37Signals can do this because they've built an audience.

interstitial2• 13 years ago

The mall analogy works just fine: You're not paying the high rent for a small space -- you're paying for the foot traffic.

aspir• 13 years ago

Job boards start easily, but you'd be surprised at how much they can spiral into some of the most convoluted code you've ever seen. They're almost the exact definition of a scope creeping CRUD app. This is compounded by the fast that an MVP job board is so low hanging that corners are often cut into oblivion, causing inescapable technical debt :)

I expect "We work remotely" was rooted partially in an attempt to burn down the old job board codebase and start over with more defined and scalable scope.

cmalpeli2• 13 years ago

This.

I started a bunch of niche job boards (pythonjobs.com, bigdatajobs.com, railsjobs.com, etc) using a 3rd party platform - but wasn't happy with the platform so built my own.

Fast forward blood, sweat and tears I now offer the platform as a SaaS offering for other looking to create niche job boards (www.JobBoard.io).

Starts out as simple CRUD - gets much more complex - especially when multi-tenancy is involved.

jorgem• 13 years ago

> Value created !== programming complexity

I don't see why that's so funny. Isn't that the hallmark of all successful software businesses?

Your looking for:

   valueCreated > programmingComplexity

markkanof• 13 years ago

Not really. Your looking for valueCreated > programmingCost. A problem can be complex but still lucrative to solve.

Matt_Mickiewicz• 13 years ago

They are also funny because they don't work...

The number of positions filled through job boards has dropped by more than half in the last decade.

Last year, only 1.3 percent of hires came from Monster.com and 1.2 percent from CareerBuilder... yet Monster.com alone sucked up nearly $1 Billion in revenue from ad postings that are largely ineffective.

For more, see: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/08/ask-the-hea...

spikels• 13 years ago

The News Hours article does not say "only 1.3% of hires came from Monster" but instead says:

"Monster.com was reported by employers as the source of ALL hires only about 1.3 percent of the time." (emphasis added)

So 1.3% of employers on Monster got 100% of hires there and 98.7% got less than 100% of hires, perhaps none, on Monster. If this statistic, from a survey by the way, means anything, it does not mean Monster was responsible 1.3% of US hiring. Ditto for the 1.2% at CareerBuilder.

This is pretty typical of articles on News Hours's business blog - provocative and seemingly informative but generally poorly written and researched and often ideological. You will often know less after reading their articles, or more accurately, know more things that are wrong.

Here's the actual survey from careerXroads that this was based on. I have no idea how reliable it is.

http://www.careerxroads.com/news/SourcesOfHire2013.pdf

jmduke• 13 years ago

Interesting napkin math for We Work Remote:

(131 + 25 + 12 + 12 + 4 + 2 + 2) jobs * $200/mo = 37600 MRR.

scoot• 13 years ago

Monthly Recurring Revenue? Only if the jobs never get filled (and the advertisers list them indefinately), in which case WWR isn't doing it's job.

Jgrubb• 13 years ago

Typically job boards allow new jobs to be posted and the old ones that have been filled to be taken down. This might invalidate the OP's napkin, but still gives you a rough idea of revenue.

mahyarm• 13 years ago

I think the more accurate term is migrating their job board.

interstitial2• 13 years ago

Remote work job postings are usually a haven for scammers, commission-only jobs, and MLM. But this looks great so far. I hope this stays as clean and legitimate as it is now. My sister's boyfriend just bought Ferrari with the cash he made working from home, click here!

endtwist• 13 years ago

Honestly, did this comment add anything constructive to the conversation or were you more interested in spitting bile?

notahacker• 13 years ago

It's a fair point. The signal/noise ratio for advertised freelance work is much lower than that for advertised traditional positions.

I think that's mostly down to mismatch: fewer employers advertising for remote positions and more people looking for easy money that can be taken advantage of.

sjtgraham• 13 years ago

My bile detector must be on the fritz, here I was thinking that was a particularly jolly comment.

Interesting aside: your own comment is a perfectly reasonable reply to itself.

albedo2• 13 years ago

Our current thesis is that job boards are painful to wade through, especially for experienced devs looking to freelance.

Our current model involves connecting devs to good clients (i.e. people who've done this sort of thing before), who we screen ourselves (and because we've done freelance development ourselves, we know what to look for).

Check out http://getlambda.com if you're interested.

agilebyte• 13 years ago

Do you let in devs that just want to have a look, without freelancing at the moment? And is that just for on site work?

mrottenkolber• 13 years ago

Lambda is a talent agency for exceptional developers, designers, and technology professionals

This scares me off completely. Not that I doubt that I am good at my job. All morality aside, who are you to know who is? A Rails dev and an investment banker.

dusing• 13 years ago

The WeWorkRemotely works really well. I've never had such a response from one of our job postings. 50 or so qualified applicants in the first week, and we hired a perfect match out of that pool. In contrast our stack overflow ads had gotten 3 highly unqualified applicants in 30 days.

nowarninglabel• 13 years ago

I haven't tried WeWorkRemotely, but I can attest that StackOverflow ads were abysmal for us. Our final candidate ended up coming to us organically for the position I just hired for, but we also had some good candidates find us from Indeed.com

May have just been the nature of the position though (Salesforce work)

kanwisher• 13 years ago

Depends on your ad stackoverflow has gotten the largest bang for the buck with $1200 in spend I've hired 4 members to my team. There are a lot of jobs there so you need to standout but they definitely have good programmers on it. 37s job board was crap for us tho

lukethomas• 13 years ago

This makes complete sense - We Work Remotely is targeted to the remote work niche, while the past job board was probably facing competition from StackOverflow and a variety of "programming centric" job boards.

J-H• 13 years ago

Is the We Work Remotely site loading incredibly slow for anyone else? The Chrome Dev Panel says a 1.4 min page load?

josegonzalez• 13 years ago

Weren't they selling one a few months ago? Is it suddenly more profitable to make yet another?

ammmir• 13 years ago

does anyone know of similar quality job boards that are focused more on turnkey projects and less on staff augmentation?

i've had the best experiences with clients who care more about the end product and results, rather than specific languages, frameworks, or even skillsets. nearly all of them have been inbound or referrals, so i'm not sure if a job board (maybe a reverse job board?) would be able to replicate that.

alberth2• 13 years ago

Just to summarize all the services 37signals has shutdown over the years:

- Writeboard [1]

- Tada List [2]

- Answers [3]

- Backpack [4]

- Product Blog [5]

- Job Board [6]

- OpenID support [7]

- Draft [8]

- Breeze [9]

- Softfolio (sold) [10]

- Basecamp Classic (still running but can't signup for new services) [11]

Then some "soft" services the were doing like:

- Podcast (last update was 2011) [12]

- Exit Interviews (last update was in 2011) [13]

Then you have Chalk and Campfire that feel like they are on life support, even though they are still operational.

[1] http://37signals.com/writeboard-retired

[2] http://37signals.com/tadalist-retired

[3] http://37signals.com/answers-retired

[4] http://37signals.com/backpack-retired

[5] http://reorg.co/breaking-37signals-retires-product-blog-2011...

[6] https://jobs.37signals.com/

[7] http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2011/01/well-be-retiring...

[8] https://twitter.com/37signals/statuses/208575895101902848

[9] https://basecamp.com/breeze

[10] http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/05/10/37signals-lists-web...

[11] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3114-basecamp-next-becoming-b...

[12] http://37signals.com/podcast

[13] http://37signals.com/exit

Edit: formating & added applications to the list

colinbartlett• 13 years ago

Is Campfire shutting down, too? I think that was the last 37s service I stopped using, about 6 months ago.

alberth2• 13 years ago

No, the campfire comment was me just making an editorial comment that it feels like that product is being neglected.

deafbybeheading• 13 years ago

In about a year of using Campfire, I never saw a single bug fix or new feature. We've since moved to HipChat, and while it's not perfect, it's so refreshing to pay for a service that gets regular updates (not to mention has decent mobile clients).

jasonfried3• 13 years ago

Some clarification on a few of these...

Writeboard, Tada, and Backpack were not shut down, they were sunsetted. That's a fundamentally different thing. What it means is that anyone who used Tada, Writeboard, or Backpack can continue to use these products just as they always have. No one was kicked off, no one has to stop using them. We just aren't selling them anymore to new customers.

Answers... we've tried a variety of customer forums over the years, but we just didn't find them effective. We're no longer trying these.

The Product Blog was basically consolidated into Signal vs. Noise, our blog. We'll be making more changes to how, what, and where we publish next year. I imagine we'll continue to tweak the mix over time.

Breeze we did close down completely. We refunded every customer who paid (which was about 1000 customers) and sent them their subscriber lists.

The podcast wasn't "shut down", we just haven't had time to do another one. I'd like to do more of these when we have some spare time. Some of what was in the podcast has been absorbed by other channels (Twitter, more interviews on other people's podcasts and sites, etc).

Sortfolio was sold and is alive and well at http://sortfolio.com. No one was left hanging here. From what we hear, revenue is up since the sale.

Basecamp Classic was absolutely not shut down. It remains a huge product for us - a significant number of our Basecamp customers happily remain on Classic and we'll support those customers forever. However, we don't sell it anymore - the flavor of Basecamp we sell today is the all new generation of Basecamp at basecamp.com.

Hope that helps clear a few things up.

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

That's a really interesting distinction you make between shutting down and sunsetting. Google tends to call their shutdowns as sunsetting their products -- do you think they are abusing the term?

raganwald• 13 years ago

I feel for jasonfried. If you build a business and stick to it, being careful not to open a new business that might disappoint your customers if you close it, you become fodder for "disruption."

But if you have the courage to try new things in a lean way, you become fodder for criticism that you don't keep your services running.

In the end, that's the price of trying new things. You have to have the iron pants to shrug and keep going even when people are telling you to do what everyone else is doing.

derefr• 13 years ago

I would think that the Sortfolio sale represents a nice middle-road that could be taken more often.

AVTizzle• 13 years ago

Their business, their experiment. Besides "...we're all in a perpetual state of figuring shit out."

runako• 13 years ago

You could make such a list for Volkswagen, Boeing, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, or any successful company. Business evolves, and product lines are a part of that.

Unosolo• 13 years ago

This list is a sign of a viable business if anything else. Any company needs to stay forever young by keeping its offerings in line with the demand. Companies that fail are the ones that choose to ignore the reality.

artpop• 13 years ago

Got my first job from that board sniff

sciurus• 13 years ago

Interesting that they're competing with Work From Home, which is free.

https://www.wfh.io/jobs/

37signals Job Board is closing down

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