

Show HN: JobBoard.io - SaaS platform for niche job boards - cmalpeli
http://www.jobboard.io

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cmalpeli
Hi everyone - this is my first show HN post.

<http://www.jobboard.io> is a platform for operating niche job boards that
I've bootstrapped as a side project over the last 6 months or so.

My reason for doing so was two-fold:

1\. I've run several niche job boards for quite a while, some of them bringing
in decent revenue. The 3rd party platform I was using was one where I had to
give up 50% of the revenues - not a tenable situation once I began to show
signs of success. Since I needed to build something that would support
multiple job board sites - I figured why not turn it into a SaaS offering as
well. One that does not take a rev share, and charges a flat fixed amount.

2\. I wanted to teach myself Ruby on Rails. It's ROR/Heroku/Bootstrap based.

I've been writing code professionally since '99, starting out w/ classic ASP
and then moving to .NET. Over my career i've moved into higher and higher
management positions (now a VP of Tech @ a media co), and thus moved further
and further away from actually building things. This has been a great outlet
for me - and allowed me to stay more current and up to date on the technical
side of things.

Appreciate any and all feedback. It's been quite a learning experience....

~~~
readme
Very nice. I wanted to make some niche job boards but you just killed my
dreams. Not a problem though, I have a big list of other ideas people will
probably implement before me.

Best of luck on this one! I think this is definitely a lucrative idea.

~~~
cmalpeli
Thanks ;) Sign up for the service - would be happy to give you an extra free
month if you still want to run the job boards. email me: info at jobboard.io

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caw
It looks interesting. I was having trouble deciphering your plans though. Why
would I need a "standard" versus "business" niche job board? I got to thinking
what sort of target customer I'd be if I needed one plan or another:

* Standard - Small/Medium business. They want a personal job board for their postings, and they'll dump everything on one board.

* Business - Recruiters. If a recruiting company is serving a general field (say, oil & gas), they'll have perhaps 2-3 niches that they fill, perhaps engineers & managerial.

* Enterprise - this stays as is, a single large corporation may want to host multiple business groups or departments with their own job boards.

~~~
cmalpeli
Thank you for this - I agree that I need to make a better distinction between
the first two tiers.

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tucson
Interesting. Reminds me of a recruiter who runs several jobs board. He blogs
at recruitingdomainnames.com about domain names... he might be interested in
your solution. I saw him in this very interesting interview which I highly
recommend: <http://www.domainsherpa.com/jason-davis-slouch-interview/>

~~~
cmalpeli
Hey thanks for this - i'll be sure to reach out to him....

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ruswick
All I can say is that the pricing is egregiously high. At that point, it
becomes more lucrative to simply develop one's own board.

~~~
readme
You must be pretty cheap if you can develop a job board of your own for less
than they are charging. For a business plan, it's $99/mo.

To develop a quality job board, you're looking at at least 20-40 hours of
work. What is your hourly rate?

Now factor in the cost of hosting and managing the job board.

Yep, the pricing seems about right to me.

~~~
ruswick
My general rate is $50/hour. However, I'm a full-time student and as such I
have very little capacity for employment and have a difficult time locating
projects at all, so my time has effectively no intrinsic value. At best, I
made what equated to $3.75/hour over the course of the summer.

Undertaking personal projects yields far more value than purchasing a solution
when one's time is more or less devoid of monetary value and one's net worth
is less than a thousand dolars with unsteady and extremely limited income that
arrives in disjunct and infrequent chunks.

I'd love to be in a position to drop thousands of dollars each year on sass.
Unfortunately, such options are far beyond my means.

~~~
nestlequ1k
Sounds like this solution is not for you. That's ok, even if it were free,
you'd probably still want to build your own (if you even have a need to host a
job board).

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jcomis
Cool side project. Just put of curiosity, do you run all of the current boards
linked (rorjobs, webopsjobs and analyticsjobs)?

~~~
cmalpeli
Thanks. Yes - all three featured clients are boards I operate. Hoping to
change that over to some of my outside clients - but need permissions, etc.

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walshemj
Well from a pro perspective (I have done a lot of work in analyzing jobs and
classified sites) there doesn't appear to be any taxonomy or role/Geo browse
structure.

Handling expired jobs and cat/geo pages with no adverts is another tricky
area.

~~~
cmalpeli
Thanks for the feedback. Search(text and geo) are on the list but lower down.
Niche job boards tend to have a smaller number of listings, so the need to do
lots of filtering/sorting is not as crucial as larger, less focused sites.

You are absolutely right about expired jobs and empty category/geo pages -
they can be a real challenge from an SEO perspective. For now we are handling
expired listings by hiding them from the site, but keeping their URLs active
w/ an expired message. My hunch is this will keep the page rank for a while
but we will eventually drop and 301 them to the sites homepage.

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shimms
Interesting - I was hoping to use this as a way of advertising open positions
in our company (ie: "Post Job" should be available only to our company
admins).

Looks like this isn't possible at the moment?

~~~
cmalpeli
I'm sure I could make this work. Quick hack would be to give you some CSS to
hide the Post button/links and you could post via the URL. I can then make
that an option (to hide the post links) via the admin panel in the long term
and give you a more elegant solution to add jobs via the admin side as well.
let me know if interested: info at jobboard.io

------
cmalpeli
An additional job board powered by jobboard.io that may be of interest to this
audience <http://www.rorjobs.com> \- focusing on rails opportunities.

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bravura
I would like to use this, but can I place it on a subdirectory of my domain?
It doesn't appear that I can.

If I can't, then it has low SEO value. That feature is very important for me.

~~~
cmalpeli
It supports subdomains and primary domains. I'm not aware of how a hosted
platform could work as a subfolder - but if it's possible I'm sure we could
support it.

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petercooper
I'm intrigued what substantiates rorjobs.com's claim to be "the leading" Rails
job board ;-) It certainly looks very nice, though.

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cmalpeli
Oh - and you can see a sample job board here: <http://webopsjobs.com>

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tlrobinson
How did you decide to charge a flat monthly rate rather than take a cut of job
ad sales?

~~~
cmalpeli
I used to rely on a 3rd party platform (named elsewhere in this thread) - they
took a cut (50%) of the job ad sales - and it bothered me. Was fine when I was
experimenting of course, but not when I showed any degree of success. I'm not
interested in attracting people who want to throw up tons of free sites - i'd
rather have customers who perhaps have something a little more established or
at least are willing to put a little more of an investment in.

Of course - I could be completely wrong - but had to start somewhere! :)

~~~
dkroy
Do you have any paying customers for this new payment model of jobboard.io?
Has this been less of a pain or an improvement in sales or reduction in
support hours?

~~~
cmalpeli
Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear. This is the first and only payment model. I
meant that I used to run my own niche job boards with a different provider
which took a rev share. I built this platform as a result of wanting to get
away from that model as a customer. At the same time I decidd to make the
platform a SaaS offering so other could take advantage of it.

~~~
dkroy
Alright, I understand now. Well good luck, I would be interested to hear how
successful this SaaS offering ended up being a month or two down the road
maybe submit a blog post on HN later on, that definitely would be an
interesting read. Good Luck, it looks really polished at first glance.

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tajddin
How long would you say it took to develop this from day one to completion?

~~~
cmalpeli
A loooong time. :). 5 months to feel comfortable launching the first sites -
but keep in mind this was working nights and weekends only along with juggling
kids and family life.

Another 2 months to get it to the point I felt comfortable submitting it to
HN.

I don't see it as being complete however. It's been live for two months and
I've been constantly adding new features and will for the foreseeable future.

~~~
tajddin
Thanks for your reply. I'm working on a SaaS as well (<http://inqix.com>). I'm
thinking it'll take me about as long to be ready.

Good luck!

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tortilla
Nice job. I taught myself Rails by building a job board too.

~~~
cmalpeli
Thanks - getting all the multi tenant stuff sorted was really interesting.

