Show HN: Remote Jobs (our answer to "Who Is Hiring Remote Workers?")

It's definitely a chicken and egg problem. Allowing free ads might help get the ball rolling, but I've resisted that since I'm concerned it will lead to low quality, which is one of the problems I have with other job sites. I don't want to hurt the site's reputation right out of the gate.

Moderation is one way to address that, but one of the core ideas of my site, which I think sets it apart from a lot of other job sites, is to require advertisers to include rate of compensation in their ads, and encourage accuracy by basing the fee for posting the ad on the advertised rate.

Trying to charge for something like this right off the bat without a lot of traffic is a difficult proposition, in my experience. But people seem to be willing to use mediocre web services and job sites, so allowing free ads to begin with, even if it results in low quality ads, might be a more realistic way to get something like this started.

So far I haven't compromised any of the original ideas for my site, but it hasn't gotten any traction either. I hoped that offering a money back guarantee would encourage a few advertisers to give it a shot and get the ball rolling, but so far that hasn't been enough. It's also difficult to figure out where / how to advertise something like this to even reach the right audience and make potential advertisers aware of it, at least without spending a ton.

If I'd known that all it takes to get people to start advertising jobs is to post the site on Hacker News, I would have done that months ago! I suspect that the activity on remote-jobs.com also has to do with the coupon offer though.

I'm considering making some changes to my site to get the ball rolling and then start charging or return to the original ideas for the site if and when there's enough traffic, as some have suggested. I don't think there's anything greedy about charging for such a service. If people are willing to pay it right off the bat, great, if not, that's another story. It might be more realistic to not charge or charge a small fee at first, and I agree that even charging a small fee would help to weed out the worst kind of posters who have free reign on some other sites.

I have problems with all of the job sites I've seen and the goal of my site is also to provide a better venue for finding remote jobs, and to try to level the playing field for job seekers, e.g. by requiring rate information in ads, backing that up with the fee structure, limiting the time ads are displayed moreso than most sites to reduce the opportunity for lazy or busy advertisers to waste job seekers' time with stale ads, etc.

I disagree that it would be wise in general to invest a lot of time in "expanding the core tech and business". I would have started working on http://WheresTheRemote.com/ sooner if I hadn't put it off waiting until I had time to build the application I envisioned in between client projects. Eventually I realized that the hard part was going to be attracting users / advertisers and that I could launch the site and just moderate and update it manually or semi-manually until / unless I had the welcome problem, as vaksel mentioned, of having too many ad submissions to keep up with. (Welcome if there are enough legit submissions, anyway.)

In any case, remote jobs are a niche market. There's an implied limitation on the number of ads that will be in play, so it probably makes sense to pace work on the technology according to the amount of interest / activity / revenue the site actually generates. In the beginning it might be most practical to just manually moderate submissions, and maybe implement something like CAPTCHA.