

Ask HN: advice for my site, happyjobsearch.com - nonrecursive
http://www.happyjobsearch.com/
Hi everyone,<p>About a year ago I created a web site to help people stay organized when looking for a job. Since then I've refined it to the point where I feel like it's now a viable product. I'm lacking two important  things, however: a) a business model and b) time to market it.<p>My preference is to sell it, and I would greatly appreciate advice on selling a niche site like this. In the meantime I want to try and get some traffic to it, so advice on optimizing the 30 minutes a day I have to do marketing would be awesome.<p>Incidentally, I've been using the site to keep track of some of my marketing efforts. As I search for people to contact regarding the site, I'm storing their information and keeping track of the "next action" - review their site, email, etc. Do any of you feel you'd benefit from using a site like happyjobsearch to keep track of your marketing efforts?<p>A little more about the site: Its main benefit is providing a tool to approach job searching systematically. I got laid off twice in three months last year, and I found that it was very demotivating to approach job seeking in a sloppy, reactive manner. So I tried to take a GTD approach and do things in stages: collect, review, and respond.  The idea with the site is to spend some time collecting job listings each day without spending a lot of time reviewing them, and definitely not spending time responding. Then, to spend time reviewing listings further and taking the time to send a proper cover letter and resume.<p>Separating these different processes and being able to keep track of which stage each job opportunity was in really helped me feel more in control and made me feel like I was actually making progress, because I could see what I'd gotten done. In the end that's what I hope it does for other people - help them with their job search on a practical level, but also help in some way to keep people motivated, because looking for jobs can really suck :D
======
Femur
Hi. I used your site about 9 months ago as my main tool for organizing my job
search. I was the guy who emailed you with the suggestion to have links open
in a new tab versus navigating away from the site (which you implemented a few
hours later!). I am happy to say I am now gainfully employed as an Oracle DBA
at a large company. I have recommended your site to friends and they have used
it as well.

AAA+++ would use again.

~~~
nonrecursive
That's awesome that you've found a good job! Thanks for the good feedback you
gave me, and thanks too for recommending the site. It's very gratifying to
hear that you found it useful enough to tell your friends to use it.

~~~
nonrecursive
p.s. thanks once more but I hope you won't need to use the site again

------
nonrecursive
Hi everyone,

About a year ago I created a web site to help people stay organized when
looking for a job. Since then I've refined it to the point where I feel like
it's now a viable product. I'm lacking two important things, however: a) a
business model and b) time to market it.

My preference is to sell it, and I would greatly appreciate advice on selling
a niche site like this. In the meantime I want to try and get some traffic to
it, so advice on optimizing the 30 minutes a day I have to do marketing would
be awesome.

Incidentally, I've been using the site to keep track of some of my marketing
efforts. As I search for people to contact regarding the site, I'm storing
their information and keeping track of the "next action" - review their site,
email, etc. Do any of you feel you'd benefit from using a site like
happyjobsearch to keep track of your marketing efforts?

A little more about the site: Its main benefit is providing a tool to approach
job searching systematically. I got laid off twice in three months last year,
and I found that it was very demotivating to approach job seeking in a sloppy,
reactive manner. So I tried to take a GTD approach and do things in stages:
collect, review, and respond. The idea with the site is to spend some time
collecting job listings each day without spending a lot of time reviewing
them, and definitely not spending time responding. Then, to spend time
reviewing listings further and taking the time to send a proper cover letter
and resume.

Separating these different processes and being able to keep track of which
stage each job opportunity was in really helped me feel more in control and
made me feel like I was actually making progress, because I could see what I'd
gotten done. In the end that's what I hope it does for other people - help
them with their job search on a practical level, but also help in some way to
keep people motivated, because looking for jobs can really suck :D

~~~
hackoder
Initial impressions are good. Very clean, intuitive, and useful.

You could add more value in the cover letter and interview reminder section,
and also add in a resume section. For example, in the interview section a
person could create a list of stuff they need to look at or study, and then
check them off as they're finished. Similarly, you could create and save
different cover letter and resumes. A user could use special syntax like
[[Edit company name]] to just edit the relevant parts and send the resumes
off.

I can see this working with a very cheap subscription model ($1-2/month) if
there are more features. I dont think have you have enough to sell it right
now, since most job sites have their own job tracking system.

~~~
nonrecursive
Thanks for your suggestions. With resumes, I feel like there are a few good
web sites out there already. For example, I use emurse.com which is free and
does everything I could want it to.

I really like your idea about having multiple cover letters and placeholders
in the cover letters. Something like that would have been helpful for me so I
could see quickly which parts I needed to change. It would also be fun to code
up an interface for it.

On the money side, I was thinking a one-time payment of around $8 would allow
use of the site for up to a year. A subscription model sounds good too, and
probably the best thing is just to test.

~~~
gcheong
The separate slots for resumes is a good idea. I'd like to track what resume
version I sent where. I think a one-time payment for access sounds like a good
idea. Or maybe even just a donation button for now? The argument there is that
people who find jobs might be willing to donate quite a bit more and also you
never know when you'll need the site again so having the information readily
available would be good.

------
riordan
Brilliant! I've been using Highrise to similarly organize my job search,
however your approach is fantastically elegant and will probably begin using
the two in tandem.

I've found that the networking aspects of jobseeking are not only critical in
breaking past the resume firewall but are also among the hardest parts to
manage, particularly trying to balance several open opportunities and
inquiries.

The approach of systemizing all open opportunities, though, is brilliant. I'd
suggest finding a way to integrate contacts & contact history within the site,
almost making it more CRM-like, to make it a jobsearcher's dashboard.

As to a business model, I'm not sure it's immediately robust enough to begin
as a subscription service and I'm no longer sold on advertising as a
sustainable revenue stream, particularly with niche web apps.

Frankly, partnering with a LinkedIn might be the best outcome, but it's a real
longshot. With the market for unemployed jobseekers outnumbering employed
jobseekers, it's going to be a tough opportunity to make money on.

That said, best of luck - it's really quite brilliant.

------
timcederman
I worked in the job space for a while, and I would recommend shopping this
around to sites like TheLadders, Indeed, SimplyHired, etc, who are all always
looking for competitive features. If they could just buy something rather than
build it in-house, I'm sure they would (speaking as someone who worked at a
startup which got sold to Monster.com for 72.5 million).

~~~
nonrecursive
Something like this is what I have in mind, but I have no idea how to approach
companies to shop my site around. Do you have any advice?

~~~
timcederman
I would use LinkedIn, or if you email me I can put you in touch with a few
folks who might be able to help.

You'd also be surprised at the recipient lists behind the "contact us" forms
on a lot of the major sites. e.g. <http://www.indeed.com/jsp/contactus.jsp>

~~~
nonrecursive
Thank you - I'll send you an email shortly.

One thing I'm wondering about is, should you email them with your price or ask
them for an offer?

~~~
rapind
Why not just build your user base and work to make sure your feature set is
competitive or better? They'll come to you eventually.

~~~
timcederman
You'd be surprised at the number of small-scale acquisitions that occur after
a casual mention or demonstration of a site.

------
nobody_nowhere
This is great! It mirrors the approach I've taken to job hunting in the past
-- but on a webpage instead of a text editor.

Business model options (non-exclusive):

\- Advertising: You have a wide range of options for sponsorship, display or
performance advertising. I could write all day about them. Happy to give you
more info.

\- Subscription/"Freemium": Pay to use. Pay to use certain features. Pay not
to see ads. Tip jars. Tons of options.

\- Leap of faith: Focus on scaling up the user base (with or without other
revenue) and sell it to a monster/dice/etc

Good luck!

~~~
nonrecursive
Thank you!

------
TrevorJ
I think this is a great idea. First impression, I would reconsider the colors.
I think there's something to be said for being playful, however I'd like to
see colors that are a bit more businesslike. The colors say toy, but this is a
tool.

Granted, web 2.0 has proven that a pastel color scheme can work, and I do
think it can work for you too but you either need to pull back on it or take
it a step further and support it with some more stylized design elements.

Specifically, if your site name in the header felt more like a logo and felt a
bit playful, you'd be signaling that this lightweight, airy feel is part of
your brand identity. Right now there's some disconnect there.

The dark blue you are using is nice, I think maybe just making that a bit more
prevalent in your design would serve to ground the overall design a bit more.

------
donw
Several other people have commented on resume functionality, but what I'd like
to see is a targeted resume builder -- one where you can list the sum total of
all your skills and experience, tag each line item with specific job
categories, and then use that to build targeted resumes aimed at specific
markets.

I've never seen a site with that feature.

~~~
nonrecursive
That's a really cool idea, and I'd like something with that too.

~~~
megamark16
I would also like a fast way to 'build' my resume with appropriately specific
pieces from my overall experience and skills.

------
ricardo
Awesome idea and clean execution. I organized my last job search in excel and
retained a lot of the same information.

One suggestion: It would be useful to cache the job listing the user links to.
During my last job search I remember finding a lot of my bookmarks to be
invalid because the original post had expired and the recruiter reposted it.

------
alphageek
THis is something I was hoping to find. It becomes really hard for me to
remember which jobs I applied to and to save jobs that I would like to apply
to later. This is ideal for me. Thank you !!

------
lazyant
Out of curiosity, what language/framework did you use for the site?

~~~
markbao
Check le headers.

    
    
      Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) Phusion_Passenger/2.0.3
      X-Powered-By: Phusion Passenger (mod_rails/mod_rack) 2.0.3
    

Ruby on Rails.

(BTW guys, time to upgrade to Passenger 2.2.5!)

~~~
lazyant
that's leaky and calls for:

ServerSignature Off

ServerTokens Prod

~~~
nonrecursive
Could you tell me why it's a bad thing? All I can think of is that it gives
someone more info so they know where to start when cooking up an exploit

~~~
lincolnq
If someone is scanning for vulnerable sites, it makes it possible to identify
them without attempting the exploit.

------
ulysses
I haven't dug into it yet, will try to tonight, but one thing struck me.

When I run across any sort of site like this normally, one of the first things
I look at is news items (in this case the blog) and the forum. If there aren't
any posts in either in the last couple of months, I usually assume it's been
abandoned, so I don't dig any deeper.

Even a one or two line post every month or two reassures me that some sort of
active maintenance is going on.

~~~
nonrecursive
Thanks for the suggestion. I've added a blog post and will add an update to
the forum as well.

------
natrius
You're getting some porn spam on the demo account. If you're not already, it'd
probably be a good idea to reset it with known good data every couple of
hours.

~~~
nonrecursive
Thanks for the heads up. I was resetting the data every 15 minutes. I've now
simply disabled saving changes by the demo account altogether.

Thanks again!

------
timcederman
Yikes - what's up with the spam here?
<http://www.happyjobsearch.com/opportunities>

~~~
nonrecursive
Dang that sucks. The "demo" account is open so that people can see what the
site's about without having to log in at all. I doubt people will be enticed
by spam for cialis, viagra, etc, though. Looks like I need to install akismet.

~~~
nonrecursive
Thanks for the heads up. I was resetting the data every 15 minutes. I've now
simply disabled saving changes by the demo account altogether. Thanks again!

~~~
megamark16
Another approach is to save all changes made to the demo account to the user's
session state, that way I as a user can see what adding, editing, and deleting
records looks and behaves like but only I can see my changes (based on my
session) and it auto cleans itself when m session ends.

------
JangoSteve
This looks very nice from what I saw in the demo account. Very clean
interface.

I actually have a project I had made initially for B2B sales leads, but there
are certain features of automation that I've been thinking lately could really
be used for job search. Perhaps we should talk?

------
francoisdevlin
Very cool site. One thing I would upgrade.

You have your "interview reminders" section. Very cool. The data is entered in
a * / * * / * * * style, very intuitive for entry. However, I would RENDER the
information in a set of nested ul tags.

Just my $.02

~~~
nonrecursive
Useful feedback that's very easy to implement: thank you very much sir.

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BobN
The name feels odd -- like an unedited Chinese translation. Monster only works
because they could afford a Superbowl ad. Maybe something that highlights the
organizational aspect? MyJobSearchManager.com is open.

~~~
nonrecursive
For some reason the name makes me smile, which is probably a terrible reason
for keeping it. Initially it was After the Pink Slip. I also have
worksearchtool.com .

Another reason I went with Happy Job Search was that initially I was hoping to
add more to the site, so it wouldn't just be about being organized. That's
probably a bad idea though.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
I like the name. It puts a positive spin on what can be a very negative time
in life. It's also memorable. I say keep it.

~~~
heyitsnick
Upvoting in agreement.

------
heyitsnick
Google chrome 3.0.195.21 In the first page of the demo, the tables at the
bottom stretch wider than the fixed width of the design

------
mrfish
I'd like to say that I do this already myself but nope. I'm just too lazy.
Good idea! Not sure how you can monetize it but good idea.

------
numbchuckskills
not to be a negative-nancy, but is this that much better than tracking things
in something like a Google docs spreadsheet with a few tabs?

Seems like a solution to a non-existent problem.

~~~
nonrecursive
I'm sure a spreadsheet works fine for many people, and from the comments you
can see that others have used them for this purpose. Here are some advantages
this site has:

* The data to capture has already been figured out for you. When you're first looking for a job you might not really know what to record about each listing.

* The approach has been figured out for you. I did not follow the GTD-esque approach initially, and I'm sure most other people don't. That in itself is useful, as is the site's ability to facilitate it.

* There is a bookmarklet for adding job listings. This saves you time.

* You can subscribe to an ical feed of your next actions, which you can't do with a spreadsheet.

* You can subscribe to RSS feeds from your favorite job sites so that you can easily review new postings in one place.

If you're ever looking for a job, please do give it a try and decide for
yourself whether it's better than fiddling with a spread sheet :)

