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Should I charge for this tool I've built?
TLDR: I've built a bot that can help people find gigs and jobs on Twitter: https://findmegigs.com/ A lot of people like the idea, but I'm not sure if the best to do with it is offering it for free or try to charge for it. What would you do?
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I definitely like the idea! If the leads are good why wouldn't you charge money for it? Just out of curiosity, is there some additional logic you apply or the search is just for the keywords that the subscriber provides?
Glad you liked it Michael, I saw you subscribed as well (thanks!). I add some keywords to the search that make the tweets more likely to be about jobs. It's still improving and I keep modifying it make it better. The main goals are
- exclude tweets from accounts that are to spammy
- not exclude tweets that are jobs
- exclude tweets that are not actual jobs
For example, for someone whose search term is 'remote javascript', the search would be this one: twitter.com/search?q=(%22look…
Did you get an email this morning? If yes, were the results relevant?
Cheers!
Hi!
Ah I see clever, I think the value proposition is indeed in the preprocessing. I did get an e-mail this morning so that worked like a charm. It did have only one item in it, but that probably has to do with my search query. Suggestions for keywords would be a very helpful feature I think. I will try to optimize my keywords a bit and see tge results tommorow! If you want me to test some more things just drop me a line :)
Awesome. I changed your query from 'C#, saas, microservices' to 'C# AND (saas OR microservices)', I think it may bring more results. The original search is equivalent to 'C# AND saas AND microservices', so tweets would have to have all those words in them, less likely.
I'm happy to change it back to the original one tho
Here are the results for the 2 queries:
C# AND (saas OR microservices)
C#, saas, microservices
Clever idea. I can see this being useful for more than just job listings. Being able to created a saved Twitter search and getting a daily/weekly recap of matches can be useful for all kinds of things. But it's good to start off in one vertical like you do now.
As for the revenue model, I think the real money is on the other side of the equation. Companies who are hiring tend to pay $300+ to post a job listing.
So to get let's say $1,000 in monthly revenue, you either need to grow to 180 paying subscribers or find 3-4 companies posting a job listing each month. The latter requires a decent sized audience, but once you have that I think you'll make significantly more money.
Therefore I'd lean towards making it free of charge (or perhaps "pay-with-a-tweet", that sort of thing), and building up your user base of job seekers. Or at least experiment a bit with a free option to see how fast you can grow it, if you were to go that route.
Perhaps you can run an experiment with a freemium option.
Free gets you some/all the job posts, but a week later.
Paid gets you all of the job posts the same day.
That allows you to grow your userbase, but still charge those people who are willing to pay.
Thanks for the detailed reply, Marc!!
I agree, the money is in the other side of the table. Maybe if I get enough people subscribed I can end up charging companies to include their jobs tailored for specific searches (like JS, marketing, etc)
I agree with you also on the freemium model. I was thinking of having something like 3 tiers:
- Basic (Free forever) - You get 3 jobs per day
- Freelancer - You get 10 jobs per day
- Agency - You get all of the jobs
But I like also the model you propose, where you get the jobs 1 week in advance
Cheers Marc!
Let us know how it goes!