Building a profitable niche job board in a weekend with no code
This is the story of how I built EthHole.com in a weekend without any code. I was able to create a large list of jobs in a very specific topic (Ethereum development), figure out a value adding way to engage users, start an email list, & make a bit of profit.
Made with these free no-code tools Airtable, table2sheet, mailchimp, IFTTT, Google Slides, Domains.Google, Medium. Please show some love on ProductHunt.
When I was learning the programming language of solidity and starting my journey towards being an Ethereum developer I struggled getting past “hello world” and basic intro tutorials. There was so much noise and I wasn’t sure what the next steps were, it took a lot of effort to figure out what resources I needed to get to the next step, and which were too advanced and should be tackled later. Later when I was looking for jobs in the space I found a ton of low quality get-rich-quick projects looking for Solidity devs cluttering job posts on reddit, community forums, and every place anyone can post jobs. So I decided to create an extremely curated job list with only the best companies and projects. In order to stand out and offer value to users I also included a list of learning resources that were most helpful for me when I was getting started.
The minimum viable product is a list of jobs. That’s it. I spent a few hours researching the best way to do this with no-code tools. I didn’t want to pay more than $15 a month for hosting or some kind of whitelabel solution. Ultimatelely, the top two tools that I found to build this fast with no code are Sheet2Site and Table2Site. I chose to built on Table2Site since I prefer Airtable. What these tools allow no-code builders to do it create interactive websites with lists of information that are generated from the content in a spreadsheet. So by copying their example job boards in airtable and connecting the tool I was off to the races.
I also bought the domain EthHole.com on domains.google.com. This was $12 a year. I thought about chooser a longer name more descriptive of a jobs board, but this was short, available, and I chose not to spend weeks of time thinking of the perfect name. If I find another domain which will work better, I will move it. To ship fast you have to get over the idea that everything needs to be perfect in order to be successful. You don’t need that, you deliver the most value you can as soon as possible. Spending more than an hour with names, colors, themes, etc. is not adding the most value to your product per time spent.
I also setup a free mailing list with Mailchimp (table2site has an integration for this) and created a notification for myself for when someone submits the “Post Job” form using IFTTT.
Now that my site is live, it’s time to add some data. Maybe in the future I will create fancy web scraper tools that use AI to scour the web in thousands of sites and rank each by blah blah blah. Not today, we’re putting them in manually over several hours. I set an arbitrary goal of 50 jobs at launch. I found that the fastest way to open a bunch of jobs links from different places at the best companies was the go through the sponsors at the best events in the space, like ETHDenver and ETHWaterloo.
So the majority of the jobs are from sponsors at those events, which I know are the best quality and I am familiar with. Don’t just copy jobs from other jobs board because then you aren’t adding value with aggregation. I cranked this out in about 5 hours and added the entries to Airtable.
To receive more clicks I need to add some value beyond a simple jobs page. I created a list of my top 9 resources that beginners should use, a small list for sure, but less overwhelming than huge ones that are more popular. I also added a section for practice challenges since coming up with those were extremely helpful for me when I was learning Solidity.
I needed some marketing materials and images for social sharing/posting on product hunt. Don’t mess around with photo editing software like photoshop or gimp. Keep it simple and be done in less than an hour. What I did for my graphics is create a presentation on Google Drive, then arrange screenshots and text boxes, and export as .png.
I have no email list yet for this product. So I posted about it on reddit in developer focused communities, Ethereum communities, and everywhere it overlapped. I posted in #random on 12 related slack communities. I made a post on product hunt. And I wrote this article on what it was like to build this. Coming up with the right copy and messaging people took most of a day.
The key word on my jobs board posting is “curated”. So not just anyone can post here. As of yesterday, we have had several companies use the submission form (created with airtable on the free-plan) to try and post jobs. Of that, 1 company agreed to pay a small fee of about $250 to have their job added. Total cost was $10 for Table2Site and $12 for the domain, plus 1 weekend of time. We’re in the green!
Go into the world. Ship. Ship fast.
Thanks for reading about my productive weekend. I hope someone will find this useful. If you want to chat more about building with no-code, ethereum development, shipping a million miles a minute, or anything else find me on twitter.
Published at Thu, 24 Oct 2019 14:06:17 +0000
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