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Show HN: My weekend project, Remojōbo: a remote job board for web nerds

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Re: Show HN: My weekend project, Remojōbo: a remote job board for web nerds

#22

Post by charliepark »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #11

I personally dislike the idea of (further) fragmenting things like job boards (or real estate listings, or travel fares, etc.) where breadth is critical. How is this better than a general-purpose job board with an option to filter by remote-friendliness? Unless people are willing to potentially miss out on listings that don't happen to be on this particular board, this is just one more addition to a long list of plac…

I know ... another example of this: http://xkcd.com/927/.

The hope is that, eventually, this would be a place where we could aggregate the remote jobs featured at the various job boards (at least, the major ones: Authentic Jobs, GitHub, 37signals, Stack Overflow) in one place.

Re: Show HN: My weekend project, Remojōbo: a remote job board for web nerds

#23

Post by charliepark »

bambax wrote: post #13
charliepark wrote: post #2

I made this as a way to see remote / telecommuting / anywhere jobs. I'm posting it now mainly as a way to "force the MVP", and to stop fiddling with it. I'd love to know any feedback you guys have. Thanks!

I think this is just fantastic. Does it gather job listings automatically, or do people have to post them?

At the moment (and for the foreseeable future) it's all manual, though I've set up a number of IFTT feeds that help collect some of the jobs into my inbox.

Re: Show HN: My weekend project, Remojōbo: a remote job board for web nerds

#24

Post by vellum »

gbaygon wrote: post #19
jgh wrote: post #3

I like how Patio11 is now a job title. I think the background makes the text a little hard to read though

pardon my ignorance, what is "patio11-style marketing engineers"?

patio11 is Patrick MacKenzie: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11

He's minorly famous for his essays on how engineers can be better at marketing. A lot of it is about, but not limited to, how to properly A/B test your product.

A patio11-style would do some of the tasks mentioned here ( scroll down to paragraph that starts with "“What is it you do, exactly?” ): http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator-and-o...

Re: Show HN: My weekend project, Remojōbo: a remote job board for web nerds

#26

Post by charliepark »

domodomo wrote: post #12
charliepark wrote: post #2

I made this as a way to see remote / telecommuting / anywhere jobs. I'm posting it now mainly as a way to "force the MVP", and to stop fiddling with it. I'd love to know any feedback you guys have. Thanks!

Dude, this is impressively MVP. Google forms for submitting, and just linking to a 3rd party webpage for actual job details. Awesome. Are you just manually updating the page by hand when people add jobs? Kinda concierge style. I would actually respect that all the more. People talk a big game on MVP, but it's cool to come across where someone actually gets it. How did you get your initial inventory? Just manually sif…

Thanks!

I started with raw HTML, but wanted to have an interface that wouldn't require FTP-ing / SSH-ing, etc., so I played with a Gist as a datastore (example JSON: https://gist.github.com/charliepark/5037450; explanation of how I used it: https://gist.github.com/charliepark/5055709), but realized I wanted a little more flexibility. So I quickly hacked together a WordPress template so I could submit entries, where they could be filtered ("featured" and "not featured"), and they'd get cleaned up automatically (14 days on the page for not-featured posts, 1 month for featured posts). So maybe not quiiiite as MVP as I could have gone, but it was a good quick lesson in WordPress hacking. Side note: I'm happy to report that, with caching, WordPress pages can handle HN levels of traffic without a problem.

Initial inventory was a combination of seeing posts on other job boards, poking around at companies I know are remote-friendly, and seeing the "hiring" thread on HN last week. In terms of inventory, I'm hoping to highlight jobs that are already posted at other job boards as well as posting original ones. I'm curious to see how this chicken/egg problem resolves. I have a few thoughts, but we'll see.

Thanks for the encouragement on the UI. I'll keep fiddling with it to see what I can do to make it more legible without killing the spirit of the page.

Re: Show HN: My weekend project, Remojōbo: a remote job board for web nerds

#27

Post by redmattred »

It's great to see that you're focusing in on specific a niche, since that's where most of the money is in the job board industry and its the quickest way for you to attract an audience. The fact that your job list is hand curated and you are zeroing in on remote work, which is important to many in the tech community, will go a long way towards building an audience.

Right now, your biggest strength is that you're on the front page of Hacker News and have a lot of eye balls from a very sought after, hard to recruit niche. Even if your traffic & mailing list numbers are not high, it doesn't matter since you control access to a very targeted audience.

I would stop developing and immediately start reaching out to companies with remote positions listed and succinctly explain:

- What Hacker News, and why its a big deal for them that you're on the front page

- Why this is timely (Yahoo's recent policy change)

- It costs $100 to post and they should post now before the buzz goes away. (This is nothing in contrast to a 20-30K agency fee, and the fact that this is time sensitive will help)

As you continue to build the site, I would look into using an existing turn key solution for running a job board. They're not built in the sexiest backend technologies, but you can likely do a lot to skin the front end and have a clean, modern web design like your site. A few to check out:

- http://www.jobamatic.com

- http://jobboardsoftware.com/

- http://www.jobboardbuilder.com/

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