My adventures in job board startups - advice for the curious!

Hey everyone! I'm writing this post to let the community know how my endeavours are going in the jobs board industry. Last year I was running a good side-hustle-ish jobs-newsletter and managed to sell it for about 4x ARR (5 digits). With that money, I decided to step it up and try to go after crypto jobs industry. The Plan: I decided to go after this industry because it was growing quickly with little competition. I knew my experience would help me grow the product quickly, but didn't realise how much engineering would be involved. Engineering: My first endeavour was smart in hindsight - the product was finite and personalised, so it didn't need much investment. A personalised email of the best jobs will undoubtedly remove search frictions, unlike a website. You first need to drag people to the website, and then have a seamless user experience to help people (who are indecisive) find what they actually like (which changes). Being a dynamic problem means you have to simplify/remove constraints along the way - that's what's taken the most time. Building a nice website/telegram groups and twitter followings aren't impossible, but knowing where to allocate engineering time is often quite difficult. Pivoting: Crypto is an unstable industry, and going down this niche was always going to come with the issue of the industry going bad. We're probably heading into that phase now, but there are still an insane number of organisations. More importantly, if you can't monetise the job adverts, there are numerous ways to monetise. Monetisation: I've stayed away from tackling this too far because as I felt in my previous endeavour - the most important thing to achieve is traction. Once you get about 10K views on your product per month, you can slowly start to create/test/iterate products and see how they get on. Once these get 1/2/3% return ratios, you can really ramp up investment. Any less then that, any information is statistically less reliable - so quite tricky to trust! Anyways, we'll get their soon! Coding/Marketing balancing act: I'm trained in AI & I work full-time. So having coding weeks and marketing weeks helps keeps my thoughts organised. I'm definitely better at engineering, but forcing yourself to sit down and solve the marketing problem (no distractions, as its marketing week) allows you to focus and isolate deterministic issues. One at a time (and their ridiculous issues normally), you solve the problem and make a small step forward. Anyways, there's a lot more to do and learn. We're on 1100 twitter followers, 1000 views per month and $0 revenue, however, we're forming partnerships with recruitment companies & we'll begin reaching out to companies once we hit 10K views per month. No fear, patience, organisation and tenacity. Let's go! - - - - - - If you're curious, you can see what I've created on www.degencryptojobs.com. Enjoy!