A Show Hacker News Follow Up
Getting JobBoard.io up and running has been an all consuming project over the past six months or so. We feel strongly that the niche job board market is ripe for disruption. We’d had the platform in a soft launch mode w/ little to no advertising or organic traffic coming in, just running our own job boards (Ruby on Rails Jobs, Ad Ops Jobs, and a few others) – essentially working out the platform kinks and dotting as many “i”’s and crossing as many “t”’s as possible.Finally, the time had come to share this initiative with the broader world. As avid readers and admirers of the audience on Hacker News we knew this would be a great first place to get the word out. While not necessarily the intended audience – it was one that had a reputation for honest, direct, insightful (and occasionally brutal) feedback. If there were significant problems to be encountered – better to deal with them up front before any broader marketing efforts began to ramp up.
On the evening of Sunday, Nov 25, we wrote up and submitted our Show HN post. The traffic flow into the site was nearly instantaneous. Slowly but surely the submission move up the ranks, making it onto the homepage (peaking at #14) and staying there for a good six hours or so.
Traffic:
As you can see from the Google Analytics chart below. JobBoard.io went from 17 visits the day before, to 2,300 visits (almost all between 7pm – midnight EST), with an additional 691 the following Monday, dropping to 69 on Tuesday.
This was our first real world traffic spike. We are hosted with Heroku, which performed without missing a beat. We didn’t even need to go beyond our single Dyno, which was great to see as well.
Feedback from the community:
This was frankly the most exciting and interesting bit – getting insights and tips from the broader HN community. While definately nerve wracking to put yourself out there in such a manner, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive and supportive.
We got lots of interesting feedback on the pricing model both as it related to the dollar amount as well as the clarification of the various tiers.
Suggestions also came up regarding features – some folks were interested in using it as a public facing job board for their company – where only administrators can post. This was not something we ever thought about, but it something we are actively exploring.
We also had a surprisingly large number of folks requesting support for Internationalization (Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese and more). As a direct result we’ve already launched support for spanish language job boards – with more to come.
Sign Ups:
There were 26 trials as a result of the link from Hacker News – with a decent number actually converting into paying customers. I’d say we were somewhat surprised by this as we didn’t think this was necessarily our audience – but then again, with so many entrepreneurial minded folks in the HN community, perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
So that’s it – hopefully some of you will find this interesting – keep checking the blog for more news and updates as we continue to grow and evolve the JobBoard.io platform.