
Old Geek Jobs - johnwheeler
https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/old-geek-jobs
======
mikeleeorg
Thanks for sharing your story! Great interview. I noticed you dropped the
price from $50 to $20. Out of curiosity, why?

Also, any chance you could bump up the font size and/or contrast of the text?
My old geek eyes are having a bit of difficultly reading the site.

Thanks again!

~~~
johnwheeler
I'm still experimenting to find the right price point that maximizes quality
job postings. I've had it at $0 and had to delete a few. One person posted an
ad for what appeared to be a technology cult even (deleted).

I've been asked to bump the font size by a few people and have to defer to
ctrl+ (win) cmd+ (mac) for now. I'm dog fooding this site and 14pt "courier
new" is what I like best.

~~~
mikeleeorg
Any chance this might change your mind?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743628)

~~~
johnwheeler
Yes - that was very helpful. I did not increase the font-size (yet, still not
thrilled about that), but I did make the body text and muted text blacker.
Here's a before and after

[http://imgur.com/a/7Hf4i](http://imgur.com/a/7Hf4i)

The difference is subtle, but it's an improvement in my opinion.

~~~
mikeleeorg
I like it. That, plus some ⌘+'s, have helped. I didn't mention it before, but
I also appreciate the bright yellow hover/active state over job links.

------
yosyp
Looks like as of 2:20PM EST 10/25 there are 2,194 job postings. At $50/post,
that's a pretty successful launch! Congrats!

~~~
johnwheeler
The jobs that aren't highlighted in green were aggregated from StackOverflow.
I mention that on the front page. So far, I've made $1775 total selling job
listings. In the beginning, I was giving them away free.

~~~
adentranter
Congrats on the $1775 milestone. Good work.

------
badshar
Thanks for this! 2 questions:

1\. You are now making money off of it. So how is that working? Have you
created a separate bank account and pushed all your revenue to that account,
for the purpose of making filing taxes on it easier? Or did you go some other
way?

2\. How quickly were you able to solve the chicken and egg problem of getting
employers to post and people to visit? Do employers know how many people view
their listing? I'm having a hard time understanding why they would want to
spend $50 on your site vs simply posting free of charge on HN and getting a
pretty large audience.

~~~
johnwheeler
1\. Yes, separate bank account. Stripe is really nice in that they push funds
automatically on a regular basis. I have another business which uses PayPal,
and I like Stripe better.

2\. I'll be working on the chicken & egg problem for sometime. I don't expect
a quick turnaround, but the good news for me is it's fun driving steady
traffic with blog posts. I just made IndieHackers today, and I'm working on a
piece for SitePoint which will be out on Thursday. Just stuff like that along
with my Medium blog
[https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com](https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com)

From the IndieHackers post in the OP, you can see my Google Analytics since I
started the project (minus a few early days because I didn't have tracking). I
get several thousand visits when I'm able to get blog posts promoted, and
several hundred in the ensuing days. Mind you, these are people who surf
HackerNews, so they're going to be stronger candidates than average although
the numbers are nowhere near one of the big tech boards (i.e. Dice) and
probably never will be. I'm OK with that. I'm catering to an HN-like audience,
and want to go solo as long as possible.

You can't post jobs free on HN afaik, unless you're a YC company.

Thank you!

~~~
badshar
Thank you for the detailed answer. Final question on the second part: I was
referring to the "Who is hiring?" threads for jobs. So the employers who are
paying and posting on OGJ are essentially betting that their job postings will
be seen by others, right? It doesn't look like they have any way of figuring
out if _anyone_ will see their job.

I don't mean to hint at anything, just trying to get a clear picture.

~~~
johnwheeler
Yes, my intuition tells me employers see the post on HN (or Inc, QZ) and think
it's a cheap gamble for highly qualified applicants relative to other outlets.

I haven't put any sort of tracking in place, so they have no way of knowing if
anyone will see their job unless people apply and say where they're coming
from. Employers often use trackable short urls for this purpose.

I'd imagine they get as good if not better exposure than "who is hiring"
because they get promoted to the top of my site and their listing lasts for 45
days, but I don't know.

~~~
badshar
Thank you! I think a lot of us try building something and hope to get people
to use it, but not many succeed. Good job to you!

------
johnwheeler
If you have any questions, feel free to ask. The tougher the questions, the
better.

~~~
anondon
I'm jealous! Yours is literally a fairy tale launch. Just kidding, actually
no, but congrats man! Very inspiring story.

A few questions:

-What did the companies that posted on your site have to say about the quality and quantity of candidates?

-Do they feel it was $50 well spent?

-Did people apply through your site and find jobs so far? Do you have a way of tracking the stats?

-What is your future direction of this site? What features do you plan to add?

-Oh, and how did the $10 Digital Ocean VPS hold up with the sudden spikes of traffic?

~~~
johnwheeler
-What did the companies that posted on your site have to say about the quality and quantity of candidates?

None of them have contacted me.

-Do they feel it was $50 well spent?

I don't know.

-Did people apply through your site and find jobs so far? Do you have a way of tracking the stats?

A few people wrote in to thank me and tell me they applied jobs. I haven't
asked around, and there's no tracking in place.

-What is your future direction of this site? What features do you plan to add?

I want to keep focusing on the UX. Speed and ease of use are the features I
care about most. I want the UI to be so good that people feel comfortable
looking for a tech job no matter how old they are with the site catering to
older geeks as a bonus.

-Oh, and how did the $10 Digital Ocean VPS hold up with the sudden spikes of traffic?

No issues at all. I use Flask-Cache backed by redis, which I'm sure helps a
lot.

------
combatentropy
I like your site. It loads fast, and the user interface is easy to use ---
deceptively simple. I know how hard it is to make things simple.

~~~
johnwheeler
Thank you! Yes - simple is hard! I've gotten a handful of e-mails from people
offering to redo the site for a fee, but I don't want it to be just another
bootstrap site with 700K of assets on the initial page load. The sparse design
is intentional, and I'm deliberate in my use of screen real estate. Your
compliment means a lot!

------
alexgotoi
This may be a newbie question. If a company is asking for a invoice (i know
that most ask to justify the payment in accounting), Stripe has the
possibility to generate one or are you using a 3rd party tool? Thanks

