
Show HN: My weekend project, Remojōbo: a remote job board for web nerds - charliepark
http://remojobo.com
======
redmattred
It's great to see that you're focusing in on specific a niche, since that's
where most of the money is in the job board industry and its the quickest way
for you to attract an audience. The fact that your job list is hand curated
and you are zeroing in on remote work, which is important to many in the tech
community, will go a long way towards building an audience.

Right now, your biggest strength is that you're on the front page of Hacker
News and have a lot of eye balls from a very sought after, hard to recruit
niche. Even if your traffic & mailing list numbers are not high, it doesn't
matter since you control access to a very targeted audience.

I would stop developing and immediately start reaching out to companies with
remote positions listed and succinctly explain:

\- What Hacker News, and why its a big deal for them that you're on the front
page

\- Why this is timely (Yahoo's recent policy change)

\- It costs $100 to post and they should post now before the buzz goes away.
(This is nothing in contrast to a 20-30K agency fee, and the fact that this is
time sensitive will help)

As you continue to build the site, I would look into using an existing turn
key solution for running a job board. They're not built in the sexiest backend
technologies, but you can likely do a lot to skin the front end and have a
clean, modern web design like your site. A few to check out:

\- <http://www.jobamatic.com>

\- <http://jobboardsoftware.com/>

\- <http://www.jobboardbuilder.com/>

~~~
tung92
If you weren't against building site based on WordPress, a nice addition to
the job board software list would be JobEngine:
<http://www.enginethemes.com/themes/jobengine>

I think its design is quite more modern than most of the other players in the
field. Here is the demo site: <http://demo.enginethemes.com/jobengine>

------
BHSPitMonkey
I personally dislike the idea of (further) fragmenting things like job boards
(or real estate listings, or travel fares, etc.) where breadth is critical.
How is this better than a general-purpose job board with an option to filter
by remote-friendliness? Unless people are willing to potentially miss out on
listings that don't happen to be on this particular board, this is just one
more addition to a long list of places the user has to keep track of if they
are job-hunting.

~~~
charliepark
I know ... another example of this: <http://xkcd.com/927/>.

The hope is that, eventually, this would be a place where we could aggregate
the remote jobs featured _at_ the various job boards (at least, the major
ones: Authentic Jobs, GitHub, 37signals, Stack Overflow) in one place.

~~~
sandis
That's what <http://jobmote.com/> does currently.

~~~
charliepark
Sorry. Should have been clearer. What jobmote does (and I wasn't aware of them
before I built Remojobo) is actually aggregate the content. All we'd ever do
would be to link to Authentic Jobs et al. My interest isn't in pulling traffic
away from the existing boards; just helping people _find_ the remote jobs more
easily. And, if companies want to highlight their posts on Remojobo by making
their posts "featured", that's great, too.

------
charliepark
I made this as a way to see remote / telecommuting / anywhere jobs. I'm
posting it now mainly as a way to "force the MVP", and to stop fiddling with
it.

I'd love to know any feedback you guys have. Thanks!

~~~
domodomo
Dude, this is impressively MVP. Google forms for submitting, and just linking
to a 3rd party webpage for actual job details. Awesome.

Are you just manually updating the page by hand when people add jobs? Kinda
concierge style. I would actually respect that all the more.

People talk a big game on MVP, but it's cool to come across where someone
actually gets it.

How did you get your initial inventory? Just manually sifting through HN
posts? I think getting new and quality inventory will be the biggest
challenge, that's harder than getting job seekers.

You've basically created a less crappy and niche focused indeed.com:

[http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=&l=Remote](http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=&l=Remote)

I'm not sure if indeed.com spiders automatically or what, but I'm guessing you
could emulate their approach to getting job openings.

Another option is to try to actively partner with headhunters who often have a
source of inventory you wouldn't normally see on job boards.

As for the UI, ignore the haters. The simplicity reminds me of Startupers
(<http://www.startupers.com/>) which is doing just fine.

~~~
charliepark
Thanks!

I started with raw HTML, but wanted to have an interface that wouldn't require
FTP-ing / SSH-ing, etc., so I played with a Gist as a datastore (example JSON:
<https://gist.github.com/charliepark/5037450>; explanation of how I used it:
<https://gist.github.com/charliepark/5055709>), but realized I wanted a little
more flexibility. So I quickly hacked together a WordPress template so I could
submit entries, where they could be filtered ("featured" and "not featured"),
and they'd get cleaned up automatically (14 days on the page for not-featured
posts, 1 month for featured posts). So maybe not quiiiite as MVP as I could
have gone, but it was a good quick lesson in WordPress hacking. Side note: I'm
happy to report that, with caching, WordPress pages can handle HN levels of
traffic without a problem.

Initial inventory was a combination of seeing posts on other job boards,
poking around at companies I know are remote-friendly, and seeing the "hiring"
thread on HN last week. In terms of inventory, I'm hoping to highlight jobs
that are already posted at other job boards as well as posting original ones.
I'm curious to see how this chicken/egg problem resolves. I have a few
thoughts, but we'll see.

Thanks for the encouragement on the UI. I'll keep fiddling with it to see what
I can do to make it more legible without killing the spirit of the page.

------
jgh
I like how Patio11 is now a job title.

I think the background makes the text a little hard to read though

~~~
vellum
Agreed. I think the OP should change the image or at least use a Gaussian blur
on it.

~~~
charliepark
Just made it darker; hopefully that'll help with the contrast.

~~~
vellum
Just tried it again. I think the problem is more with the fireplace and other
stuff behind the text. The user's eye gaze is caught in a tug-of-war between
the text and the imagery when he's scrolling.

~~~
mnicole
Ditto, for me it's the artifacting mixed with how busy it is. A blur would
resolve both of these.

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nilkn
I've been thinking of going remote in the next few years. Something I'm
curious about is how it affects salary negotiation. To those of you who work
remotely, have you found that companies typically try to pay you less than
their on-site developers because you most likely live in a cheaper area?

------
hackingla
First job I clicked on had this description: "Due to our rapid growth, we now
need an in-house web developer. Initially we are looking to work together on a
contractual basis (a “trial by fire,” if you’d prefer) for"

I like the idea but you should really make sure all of the hobs are "remote".

[edit] it was the Evil Genius post -
[https://jobs.github.com/positions/d11107fe-7bb7-11e2-89f3-8b...](https://jobs.github.com/positions/d11107fe-7bb7-11e2-89f3-8b..).
Also: I have heard from several people that all DevinArt post are BS. They
always post the same thing and I have never found a single person they ever
actually spoke to or interviewed.

~~~
pyre
DeviantART actually interviewed me, but I was unimpressed by their hiring
process. It seemed very make-shift (i.e. "I'll contact you shortly," then next
contact comes 3 weeks later). In the end I was waiting for another interview
(apparently the interviewer was on vacation), but was then dropped because
'the position was filled,' or something similar.

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onassar
Something warm about remote workers helping out others who want to work
remote. I built <http://imnosy.com> to be able to track when webpages are
updated. I'm going to add <http://remojobo.com/> and <http://jobmote.com/> to
it now.

Best of luck Charlie!

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xSwag
$300 in revenue already? Nice job!

~~~
whage
my thoughts too :D

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nopeynoper
Thanks for creating this, now _please_ throw some rgba(0,0,0,0.5) on to the
job listing background-color!

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glazskunrukitis
I prefer <http://jobmote.com> simply because of the interface.

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acampbell28
There are many employment-related hashtags you can be using when you post to
twitter that may increase your audience. I'm sure there are some for working
remotely as well.

Beautiful site - nice work.

~~~
josephhardin
Could you elaborate on this some for those of us that do not use twitter as
much?

~~~
acampbell28
Sure. Twitter hashtags can be found here:

<http://www.hashtags.org/>

Adding a hashtag to a tweet can increase the number of people who see it.
Here's a good overview of why and how to use hashtags:

[http://www.hashtags.org/platforms/twitter/why-use-
hashtags-g...](http://www.hashtags.org/platforms/twitter/why-use-hashtags-
guide-to-the-micro-blogging-universe/)

In this case, it appears that both #remote and #telecommute would be relevant
hashtags to use.

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csense
<http://remojobo.com/feed/> is broken. Error message is:

    
    
       error on line 43 at column 15: xmlParseEntityRef: no name

~~~
charliepark
Thanks. It was a weird encoding issue. I think it's fixed now.

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marcamillion
This is awesome....I would love to see 'contractor gigs' and other, highly
curated, freelance gigs posted here. The good kind, not the crappy Craigslist
variety.

------
zura
Hah, I was thinking to create exactly this, but changed my mind when
StackOverflow Careers site introduced "Only telecommute jobs" flag in their
filter.

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hnwh
very very nice!

------
Buzaga
Suggestion: what do you think of making the poster mark a checkbox for US,
World or Other/"Choose region"..?

anywhere != anywhere in US

~~~
nagoff
Excellent suggestion. I'd use this site if it had some kind of region
filtering...

