charging before you have mass adoption is a recipe for disaster...you should wait until you have mass adoption then make a premium listing and charge for that.
As it stands now, you'll have a dozen or so jobs, interest will fade, and employers will stop posting when they get few resumes
If quality was your only concern, you'd just charge a one time $5 fee. So I'd say greed is at least somewhat involved.
And yes giving away coupon codes is good and well...but then you run into the quality problem that you use as an excuse to charge from the start.
Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with greed...provided it doesn't cause you to kill your business before it gets the chance to get off the ground.
Business exist to earn money and the best way to convince others of the value of your service is to charge for it. You can argue that it isn't good business sense, but calling it greed is a judgmental call that you have no evidence of.
I think a good strategy is to get your minimum viable product out as soon as possible and call it a beta. Don't charge for the beta and provide plenty of warning to existing clients by signalling early on your intention to charge for some/all features when you are out of beta. After a private beta period, this is how I'm planning to handle Mighty CV, a resumé building app with hacker leanings that I've been working on. I'm looking for private beta users to kick the tyres a bit, so if you feel inclined then you can sign up for the private beta at http://www.mightycv.com.
I always remember being impressed with the way Heroku did things in the early days. After beta feedback it must have become clear to them that it made sense for them to rewrite from the ground up. This left them with a beta platform which they gracefully continued to support, renamed herokugarden, whilst also rolling out the paid for service. They then provided plenty of info on how herokugarden users could migrate to the new Heroku platform for free too. I'm sure they learnt a lot early on about what direction they needed to take the Heroku platform. Anyone remember the web based code editor? Without the early feedback from beta users perhaps they would have pushed more in that direction instead of changing course towards the Heroku we all know and love today.
It's not greedy, it's just not a good idea to try and capitalize on a service that isn't running on all cylinders yet. Having said that, definitely a chicken and egg problem. I would worry about getting users before starting to charge for the service. Once a larger number of members has been obtained thinkings of ways to monetize it should be fairly straightforward.
The typical employer expects to pay to post a job listing. Yes more traffic is better, but I bet this site will start getting major traffic within a month. Being a specific niche I also predict it will get some major google SEO juice before to long. So that egg better start running or the chicken will catch up!
I don't think the chicken/egg problem applies here. It applies to e.g. dating sites because there are other options (e.g. other dating sites, bars, etc.). In this case, a ton of people want to work remotely and there is no central place to find that. Now I know of one place, so I'll definitely be checking it often.
I doubt running this site costs so many resources that they NEED to be charging right now.
another option would be to leave the charge now link and go out to craigslist, dice, etc and be like hey! want to have your job listed on our site for free?
They might seem a lot more expensive, but when you're looking to hire a new employee (an expense on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars), the difference between $75 and $500 to advertise the position isn't really that significant.
In addition to what csomar said, for a small business or someone looking to hire an independent contractor, I think many advertisers would consider $425 to be a huge difference. But, I think a lot of potential advertisers would consider $75 significant in the first place.
But for me, charging advertisers a significant fee is valuable to establish that they're serious about hiring. That's the rationale behind the fee structure on my site http://WheresTheRemote.com/ . To me, an advertiser paying a fee of something like 1x or 2x the hourly rate they're advertising (for an independent contractor or employee, respectively) is a token of their sincerity about wanting to hire and pay the rate they advertise, which the site requires them to include in the ad. Conversely, unwillingness to pay such a fee makes me concerned that they would just waste the time of the job seekers visiting my site and I don't want to publish the ad, since quality is an important goal for my project. Of course, having a decent amount of traffic would help establish the value proposition for advertisers to pay such a fee.
You are here assuming that this source will bring enough traffic to be your only source? Otherwise, you'll need to advertise in many sites and at that time the price makes a difference.
for now you can easily moderate postings yourself.
I would suggest using Turk or finding another resource that can do the manual moderating, you need to be expanding the core tech and business. Getting bogged down in these kind of tasks can kill your momentum.
I don't know how much Turk costs or how well it works, so I don't know if it would be a wise expenditure if you're not making any money. Again, it's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Not charging would invite more spam submissions, but deprive you of a revenue stream to fund outsourcing of moderation. But if payment is required before you even have to moderate submissions, that would minimize the amount of spam you'd even have to see.
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.
"Remote jobs" may be a larger niche than these discussions seem to assume.
"Remote technical jobs" is a niche that interests me (I found my current remote development job via HN) but "remote jobs" in general makes me think of all the spam email I get to get rich working from home (stuffing envelopes or jebus-knows-what-else). There's a huge difference between the high-powered developer who wants to live someplace beautiful and the out-of-work grocery store clerk who's reading the spam about "make thosandds from the comfort of you're own home" (and the "employers" targeting these people...).
With WheresTheRemote you're possibly shooting yourself in the foot a bit with the name; I wouldn't look to a site seemingly television-related for a technical job (to post one, or to find one). If you're actually looking for remote jobs of the sort that unskilled people can do while watching TV, you'll probably need to make it pretty cheap to post a listing (and regardless, certainly do something to get the ball rolling -- from the text on the front page, it seems like you don't have a single posting).
remote-jobs has some hints on the targeted niche based on the categories on the home page (seems closer to the HN remote listings, though it might help to explain your niche more explicitly).
Another thought on getting the ball rolling (for either site): what you really want is a set of really plum job listings in your niche that you can feature on the front page, and convince job seekers that there are good opportunities here (and job advertisers that they're on a site that is/will be attracting serious prospects). Maybe ask the employers with those great listings to self-select and contact you directly, and you'll post their positions for free?
Just because they dont manage every post does not mean they cannot check post to see the nature of their business intelligence. Just as PG does not read ever one of the articles and lets the user flag articles that are spam so can they use individuals to weed through the crap, by the nature of the job the person will be getting rid of the crap and only leaving legitimate posts, there is no value in weeding through the crap themselves unless they are going to pivot into a link spam software company. You are mixing the idea of the job of eliminating spam with business insight, the two are not linked and I still contend that wading through spam for a developer or owner is an absolute waste of resources for a start-up. Especially when a hire could do it for a 3rd of a developers costs.
as someone said in a previous "who is hiring" thread, there's a reason why people post their job opportunities on hacker news and not on the dozens of job board websites (hint: it's not because they don't want to pay $75).
The trademark registrant and domain registrant might be related or one in the same. Both were registered in 2001. Looks like it was intended for a remote job entry app.
Maybe it's just me but I think it'd be great to see where the company is based (the country) in the initial list. At least that'd be handy if you get more job offers. As I am in Europe, I'd prefer jobs where I can call someone up during Euro working hours. (Then again, my sleeping patterns are way off anyway.)
Site looks nice. Right now there aren't a lot of jobs, so a good feature to attract seekers is some way to track jobs as they come in - email/sms/mobile updates, or even a simple RSS feed of jobs. This works well for other infrequent job sites like Top Ruby Jobs.
Finally, I hate the stigma people have with remote workers. I have made 90% of my income over the past 10 years this way, but it is tough to find people willing to work like this.
similar here, for last 3 years. commutes are a thing of the past. highway rush hour. cubicles. enterprise meetings and Watercooler Bob the Chitchat Parasite (TM), the whole nine yards. all gone. now, just work (mostly) and money (mostly). heaven.
From the link at the bottom of the listing: "This is an on-site position, based in Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire. Only applicants who are authorized to work in the UK will be considered."
I thought the website was called "Remote Jobs"? If I go to this website, I expect all openings to be for remote workers.
Looks nice, but who would bother creating an account to see if there are any job offers on that site? What's the point of forcing candidate registration if access is free?
1-3 what? Hours per day? Years? Months? Fortnights? Somewhere / somehow, you should inform what unit you're using. Add it on the end, or maybe a mouse-over. Or, if there were enough listings to make it clear (ie, a 4-5h/day entry), it'd be fine-ish the way it is.
Similarly, I notice that the Mobile Developer falls into a second line - trim it, inform it's been trimmed (...), and a mouse-over would be useful.
All in all, looks quite nice, and fast to use from a consumer standpoint. I'll have to keep an eye on it!
how many qualified individuals visit that site? i can pay about 2x as much and get a listing on linkedin for 30 days, which is, well, better..give me the value prop for this site and if it is good, i will post several jobs.
We're here to serve a previously under-served market: remote workers. LI will case a (very) wide net.
However, how many talented folks still use LI? You can call me biased but, seriously, I've hardly used LI since a good friend of mine there left the company about a year ago. I don't find value in it. Therefore, when looking for a hire, you'd never reach me.
I've heard similar anecdotes from several other people in my "cohort" of Ruby/Rails nerds.
EDIT: We're probably reaching a different audience. If it's an audience that interests you, we may be able to help you. If not, then perhaps not. We serve a niche.
Can I just say, I think the question above is probably the best question/comment here. It should/will make you think about your actual proposition. Nail it down to a few bullet points, and a story or two. You should be able to answer this question smoothly, and very convincingly.
It would be great if you required companies to post pay ranges. Some jobs that I may not find interesting might become interesting if the pay is right. Without pay, it's very hard to determine which are worth pursuing.
I agree. That has been a core policy / goal of http://WheresTheRemote.com/ (although the site has not really gotten off the ground yet). As a professional I don't want to waste my time reading and replying to ads that aren't worth my while, that don't offer appropriate compensation for example, so I want to know what the advertiser is willing to pay. One of the principles of WheresTheRemote.com has been to require advertisers to provide a rate or range and pay a fee based on the highest advertised rate, to encourage accuracy. In my experience, requiring advertisers to include rate information is not a common feature of job sites.
A related question, but slightly off topic: People who have worked on or built job boards, what do you think of a Shopify for job boards?
It seems that all job board shares 90% of the functionality, but the best choice is still to develop one from scratch. You'd never think of developing an online store from scratch anymore, but I don't think job boards should be any different. Then you'll get all the customization and metrics that Shopify gives you for products. I'm in the process of validating this idea.
Question related to charging: Did you charge for the initial posts on there now?
I think the best strategy is to publicly advertise that you charge $75 for a post, but to get content up (and it looks like you have) give it away for free strategically (again, sounds like you're doing this).
Also, to make sales, tell potential posters that you'll put in an inordinate amount of advertising for their job to drive overall traffic.
Interesting discussion here. I've also been working on a remote jobs website: http://WheresTheRemote.com/. I've had the idea for years, but it "opened for business" last year. I've considered many of the issues raised here.
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.
Great idea! Whenever I include the "Who is Hiring" posts in my Hacker Newsletter it always has a high click rate. Another great resource to send people to now if you can keep it going.
As it stands now, you'll have a dozen or so jobs, interest will fade, and employers will stop posting when they get few resumes