

Show HN: Remote Jobs (our answer to "Who Is Hiring Remote Workers?") - sleight42
http://remote-jobs.com
We're giving away coupon codes for a free month-long posting.  Just email me at evan AT remote DASH jobs DOT com.  The first few folks win!<p>I'm one of the founders of Remote Jobs -- also the same shlub who posted the first "Ask HN: Who Is Hiring Remote Workers?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857051.
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vaksel
charging before you have mass adoption is a recipe for disaster...you should
wait until you have mass adoption then make a premium listing and charge for
that.

As it stands now, you'll have a dozen or so jobs, interest will fade, and
employers will stop posting when they get few resumes

~~~
batasrki
Sorry, I respectfully disagree. If the market will bear it, you can charge for
a service before "mass adoption"

~~~
vaksel
not when the service suffers from a chicken and egg problem.

Why would someone pay money to list their job on a site with no traffic?

Why would someone go to a site like that if you only have a dozen jobs?

This can be something good...but they are shooting it in the leg by being
greedy

~~~
sleight42
To be clear, greed certainly isn't our intent. As Dave (djbrowning) wrote,
we're concerned about the quality of the content on the site.

We're also giving away coupon codes right now (see my post below) to drive job
posters to the site.

~~~
vaksel
If quality was your only concern, you'd just charge a one time $5 fee. So I'd
say greed is at least somewhat involved.

And yes giving away coupon codes is good and well...but then you run into the
quality problem that you use as an excuse to charge from the start.

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with greed...provided it doesn't
cause you to kill your business before it gets the chance to get off the
ground.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Business exist to earn money and the best way to convince others of the value
of your service is to charge for it. You can argue that it isn't good business
sense, but calling it greed is a judgmental call that you have no evidence of.

~~~
robeastham
I think a good strategy is to get your minimum viable product out as soon as
possible and call it a beta. Don't charge for the beta and provide plenty of
warning to existing clients by signalling early on your intention to charge
for some/all features when you are out of beta. After a private beta period,
this is how I'm planning to handle Mighty CV, a resumé building app with
hacker leanings that I've been working on. I'm looking for private beta users
to kick the tyres a bit, so if you feel inclined then you can sign up for the
private beta at <http://www.mightycv.com>.

I always remember being impressed with the way Heroku did things in the early
days. After beta feedback it must have become clear to them that it made sense
for them to rewrite from the ground up. This left them with a beta platform
which they gracefully continued to support, renamed herokugarden, whilst also
rolling out the paid for service. They then provided plenty of info on how
herokugarden users could migrate to the new Heroku platform for free too. I'm
sure they learnt a lot early on about what direction they needed to take the
Heroku platform. Anyone remember the web based code editor? Without the early
feedback from beta users perhaps they would have pushed more in that direction
instead of changing course towards the Heroku we all know and love today.

------
there
as someone said in a previous "who is hiring" thread, there's a reason why
people post their job opportunities on hacker news and not on the dozens of
job board websites (hint: it's not because they don't want to pay $75).

------
sleight42
I'm one of the founders of Remote Jobs -- also the same shlub who posted the
first "Ask HN: Who Is Hiring Remote Workers?"
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857051>.

We're giving away coupon codes for a free month-long posting. Just email me at
evan AT remote DASH jobs DOT com. The first few folks win!

~~~
thibaut_barrere
As a now country-side based programmer, I will definitely use your site :)
Thanks!

~~~
sleight42
Oh? Where are you? Would love to chat about Ruby nerdery sometime when we may
be in the same place.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
I'm in a rural area in west of France :) <http://bit.ly/fEjBxk>

~~~
sleight42
Oops misunderstood your use of "country". You meant "rural" -- like me. ;)

~~~
danssig
He did mean rural. :)

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johnohara
Seems a shame the unhyphenated domain name has been parked for 10 years. The
good news is it expires in August.

The trademark for it is dead as well:
[http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4007:lt...](http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4007:ltdp75.2.1)

The trademark registrant and domain registrant might be related or one in the
same. Both were registered in 2001. Looks like it was intended for a remote
job entry app.

Worth watching.

~~~
sleight42
Awesome research thank you!!!!

~~~
ohashi
Except it's owned by Marchex, one of the largest domain holders in the world.
They aren't letting it expire. They do sell domains though.

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soulclap
Maybe it's just me but I think it'd be great to see where the company is based
(the country) in the initial list. At least that'd be handy if you get more
job offers. As I am in Europe, I'd prefer jobs where I can call someone up
during Euro working hours. (Then again, my sleeping patterns are way off
anyway.)

Just a suggestion though, the site looks sweet!

~~~
sleight42
Good idea.

I also tend to prefer work that is not too many time zones distant.

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pchristensen
Site looks nice. Right now there aren't a lot of jobs, so a good feature to
attract seekers is some way to track jobs as they come in - email/sms/mobile
updates, or even a simple RSS feed of jobs. This works well for other
infrequent job sites like Top Ruby Jobs.

~~~
djbrowning
RSS feed is now added, thanks for the suggestion!

~~~
pchristensen
Great! Bonus points for generating a custom feed for a saved search (not much
of an issue until you have tons of jobs).

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dylanrw
Finally, I hate the stigma people have with remote workers. I have made 90% of
my income over the past 10 years this way, but it is tough to find people
willing to work like this.

~~~
mkramlich
similar here, for last 3 years. commutes are a thing of the past. highway rush
hour. cubicles. enterprise meetings and Watercooler Bob the Chitchat Parasite
(TM), the whole nine yards. all gone. now, just work (mostly) and money
(mostly). heaven.

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sjmulder
Really nice site. Any chance of EU-based jobs on there in the future, or is it
strictly USA?

~~~
sleight42
We'll look into it. I believe our job posting editor and credit card info form
may prevent it right now.

Good feature request. Thanks!

~~~
codeglomeration
EU based jobs would be highly appreciated.

------
ndaugherty18
<http://telesaur.com> is another telecommute job board.

~~~
kouiskas
Looks nice, but who would bother creating an account to see if there are any
job offers on that site? What's the point of forcing candidate registration if
access is free?

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Groxx
> _1-3_ on the front-page display for <http://remote-
> jobs.com/jobs/32_NLP___ML___Python_contractor>

1-3 what? Hours per day? Years? Months? Fortnights? Somewhere / somehow, you
should inform what unit you're using. Add it on the end, or maybe a mouse-
over. Or, if there were enough listings to make it clear (ie, a 4-5h/day
entry), it'd be fine-ish the way it is.

Similarly, I notice that the Mobile Developer falls into a second line - trim
it, inform it's been trimmed (...), and a mouse-over would be useful.

All in all, looks quite nice, and fast to use from a consumer standpoint. I'll
have to keep an eye on it!

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ditojim
how many qualified individuals visit that site? i can pay about 2x as much and
get a listing on linkedin for 30 days, which is, well, better..give me the
value prop for this site and if it is good, i will post several jobs.

~~~
sleight42
We're here to serve a previously under-served market: remote workers. LI will
case a (very) wide net.

However, how many talented folks still use LI? You can call me biased but,
seriously, I've hardly used LI since a good friend of mine there left the
company about a year ago. I don't find value in it. Therefore, when looking
for a hire, you'd never reach me.

I've heard similar anecdotes from several other people in my "cohort" of
Ruby/Rails nerds.

 _EDIT_ : We're probably reaching a _different_ audience. If it's an audience
that interests you, we may be able to help you. If not, then perhaps not. We
serve a niche.

------
doki_pen
It would be great if you required companies to post pay ranges. Some jobs that
I may not find interesting might become interesting if the pay is right.
Without pay, it's very hard to determine which are worth pursuing.

~~~
jmcc
I agree. That has been a core policy / goal of <http://WheresTheRemote.com/>
(although the site has not really gotten off the ground yet). As a
professional I don't want to waste my time reading and replying to ads that
aren't worth my while, that don't offer appropriate compensation for example,
so I want to know what the advertiser is willing to pay. One of the principles
of WheresTheRemote.com has been to require advertisers to provide a rate or
range and pay a fee based on the highest advertised rate, to encourage
accuracy. In my experience, requiring advertisers to include rate information
is not a common feature of job sites.

------
bdclimber14
A related question, but slightly off topic: People who have worked on or built
job boards, what do you think of a Shopify for job boards?

It seems that all job board shares 90% of the functionality, but the best
choice is still to develop one from scratch. You'd never think of developing
an online store from scratch anymore, but I don't think job boards should be
any different. Then you'll get all the customization and metrics that Shopify
gives you for products. I'm in the process of validating this idea.

------
stephen
Looks cool. RSS feeds would be nice.

~~~
djbrowning
Great suggestion, we just added RSS!

------
bdclimber14
Question related to charging: Did you charge for the initial posts on there
now?

I think the best strategy is to publicly advertise that you charge $75 for a
post, but to get content up (and it looks like you have) give it away for free
strategically (again, sounds like you're doing this).

Also, to make sales, tell potential posters that you'll put in an inordinate
amount of advertising for their job to drive overall traffic.

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pdenya
Love the design and the idea.

~~~
pluies
Agreed, the design is gorgeous.

As said above though, the pricing might be a bit high for a brand new site
without a large userbase.

~~~
angelbob
Maybe. He's competing with headhunters, often at $30k+ per developer found.

His charges look pretty modest if he has even a minimal success rate.

------
JohnTitus
I like it, and think it's a great idea. Site looks pretty nice. One general
design comment: The search bar is a bit hard to notice.

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Groxx
Down? I'd love to check it out, but I'm getting a "We're sorry, but something
went wrong." message every time.

~~~
sleight42
TL;DR: Fixed and happy again.

Our sluggified SEO friendly job posting URLs choked on a more interesting job
post.

------
br41n
tip: add an "operations" category, for sysadmins and so on

~~~
sleight42
I dig it.

------
jmcc
Interesting discussion here. I've also been working on a remote jobs website:
<http://WheresTheRemote.com/>. I've had the idea for years, but it "opened for
business" last year. I've considered many of the issues raised here.

It's definitely a chicken and egg problem. Allowing free ads might help get
the ball rolling, but I've resisted that since I'm concerned it will lead to
low quality, which is one of the problems I have with other job sites. I don't
want to hurt the site's reputation right out of the gate.

Moderation is one way to address that, but one of the core ideas of my site,
which I think sets it apart from a lot of other job sites, is to require
advertisers to include rate of compensation in their ads, and encourage
accuracy by basing the fee for posting the ad on the advertised rate.

Trying to charge for something like this right off the bat without a lot of
traffic is a difficult proposition, in my experience. But people seem to be
willing to use mediocre web services and job sites, so allowing free ads to
begin with, even if it results in low quality ads, might be a more realistic
way to get something like this started.

So far I haven't compromised any of the original ideas for my site, but it
hasn't gotten any traction either. I hoped that offering a money back
guarantee would encourage a few advertisers to give it a shot and get the ball
rolling, but so far that hasn't been enough. It's also difficult to figure out
where / how to advertise something like this to even reach the right audience
and make potential advertisers aware of it, at least without spending a ton.

If I'd known that all it takes to get people to start advertising jobs is to
post the site on Hacker News, I would have done that months ago! I suspect
that the activity on remote-jobs.com also has to do with the coupon offer
though.

I'm considering making some changes to my site to get the ball rolling and
then start charging or return to the original ideas for the site if and when
there's enough traffic, as some have suggested. I don't think there's anything
greedy about charging for such a service. If people are willing to pay it
right off the bat, great, if not, that's another story. It might be more
realistic to not charge or charge a small fee at first, and I agree that even
charging a small fee would help to weed out the worst kind of posters who have
free reign on some other sites.

I have problems with all of the job sites I've seen and the goal of my site is
also to provide a better venue for finding remote jobs, and to try to level
the playing field for job seekers, e.g. by requiring rate information in ads,
backing that up with the fee structure, limiting the time ads are displayed
moreso than most sites to reduce the opportunity for lazy or busy advertisers
to waste job seekers' time with stale ads, etc.

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duck
Great idea! Whenever I include the "Who is Hiring" posts in my Hacker
Newsletter it always has a high click rate. Another great resource to send
people to now if you can keep it going.

------
shimi
Love your work guys!

