Ya, I spent a month building a pretty complex scraper system that targets ~75-100K companies around the world and manually scrapes their career pages. It was just a fun thing for me to do and it morphed into something useful for others. I had never built a scraping system from the ground up and I really enjoyed it.
Would you mind sharing some monetisation stats? :-)
I have been on jobsearch lately and it was a very bad experience - it was so frustrating that I thought about building a modern/fresh jobsearch site for my region (EU), somehow crawler-powered but in the end I gave up because of all the scraping problems :-/
I've actually been thinking that I should be putting out a monthly report that shows costs, revenue, and profit margin. It's negative right now, but I'm hoping to turn it around within the next six months.
The scraping problems were medium hard and at least I learned some cool stuff along the way. All in all, it's been a pretty fun experience building the whole thing.
Have you thought of using the technology to make a spin off for branche-specific job boards and then looking to direct contact to some crops?
(ie.g. "www.agriculture.jobs" as example)
From my experience, lot of companies are willing to pay small amount of subscription if they have a "corp/niche specific" usergroup. (and this was actualy what my idea was about)
And if you are branch specific, it worth to curate the site, have some customer calls etc. - this would give you two winners: Companies looking clearly only for one set of applicants, and applicants who can be sure that the site content is valid.
Though, IIRC expeteer.com tried to deploy this "dating approach" onto job boards, but I do not know how they are doing these days
I haven't considered this. I'm just one guy and juggling a bunch of different brands would be a lot of technical and marketing overhead I'm just not set up for right now. Probably worth thinking about though. Thanks for the idea.
