Anyone can start a job board these days. Software-wise anyway. The difficult part is having a targeted audience that employers are willing to advertise their job listings to.
So try to avoid making that same mistake. Building a job board without an audience.
To build a successful job board you either need perfect timing (e.g. start a remote job board a few years ago), great marketing that differentiates you, or an existing audience (started as part of BetaList) to promote it to.
Wait, where does you code go if you don't commit it?
On my local machine. With git setup. No commits yet.
I think I’ll commit once the MVP gets done. 🙂
Whoops. Probably because you received an email about it?
Providing a (paid) self-hosted service might be a way to guarantee the service stays around. Especially if it's self-contained, and easy to deploy and maintain.
Thanks, Marc! This is super helpful. Very good point regarding the tendency to keep projects without attention instead of shutting them down.
Regarding the periodic screenshot-ting idea — what is the main purpose of having those screenshots? Is that mostly for sentimental reasons or to use them for some other reason?
I think with a subscription fee it would be possible to make that project profitable and sustainable. Such service can also provide a way to download the archive of all assets at any time. At least that will guarantee that no snapshots/screenshots are lost. Periodic screenshots can also be automatically emailed to the site owner.
I would like an archive of screenshots for all my websites.
But for me there's never a defining moment where I shutdown a site. It's more likely that I stop developing a site and eventually something breaks the page. By that time it's too late to take a screenshot.
So I guess what I'd rather have is something that periodically takes a screenshot of my sites. Then it's even useful when the site is still active. For example I'd love an archive of screenshots of all the iterations the WIP homepage went through. Even when WIP is still alive (and I hope that will be for a long time!), a service like you describe would still be valuable.
Would I pay for it? I think so, but only if I feel certain your service will outlive mine. I think that's the tricky part. You can promise the service will stay around, but that's different from a guarantee.
If you somehow can guarantee it, then yes I'd use a service like this. Especially if it continuously takes screenshots and is clever enough to throw away the near duplicates.
Providing a (paid) self-hosted service might be a way to guarantee the service stays around. Especially if it's self-contained, and easy to deploy and maintain.
Thanks, Marc! This is super helpful. Very good point regarding the tendency to keep projects without attention instead of shutting them down.
Regarding the periodic screenshot-ting idea — what is the main purpose of having those screenshots? Is that mostly for sentimental reasons or to use them for some other reason?
I think with a subscription fee it would be possible to make that project profitable and sustainable. Such service can also provide a way to download the archive of all assets at any time. At least that will guarantee that no snapshots/screenshots are lost. Periodic screenshots can also be automatically emailed to the site owner.
We have something like this already: wip.chat/@emerson/stats
I'm actually in the process of improving it as the current implementation is a bit rough around the edges.
The best way to figure out whether people are willing to pay you, is to ask them to pay you. Anything else is just going to be an approximation with a varying level of reliability.
Even if you don't have a product to sell right now, you can do pre-order. You might need to include a discount, a promise of early access, or something else to incentivise people to pay you now rather than wait. Although depending on your type of customer, you might be able to just tell them: we want to know if we should invest into building this product. Tell us by pre-ordering it.
There are some other strategies as well that will help you gauge whether people are willing to pay. I'll list them below, but I strongly recommend going with the above approach if at all feasible.
Alternative 1: research how people are currently solving similar problems and how much money they are investing. If you can offer a compelling alternative to those solutions, some of that money might be going your way.
Alternative 2: rather than asking for their money right now, ask for another currency. This could be their time (assuming they value it), reputation (assuming they have one), or any other asset they value.
In terms of how much to charge: look at the value you're providing. Look at how much customers are spending on alternative solutions. Even if there's no product that solves the same problem, they are likely solving it somehow. If it's by doing manual work, try to estimate how many hours. And how much they value their time (e.g. how much are they paying for other things that save them time)
It's also a matter of just testing a bunch. I find it easier to start low and keep increasing until you hit diminishing returns.
Doing it the other way around (starting high) tends to be trickier as you'll end up with a bunch of early customers who feel they overpaid.
Thank you Marc! This is really good advice:)