Remote work job postings are usually a haven for scammers, commission-only jobs, and MLM. But this looks great so far. I hope this stays as clean and legitimate as it is now. My sister's boyfriend just bought Ferrari with the cash he made working from home, click here!
Our current thesis is that job boards are painful to wade through, especially for experienced devs looking to freelance.
Our current model involves connecting devs to good clients (i.e. people who've done this sort of thing before), who we screen ourselves (and because we've done freelance development ourselves, we know what to look for).
> Lambda is a talent agency for exceptional developers, designers, and technology professionals
This scares me off completely. Not that I doubt that I am good at my job. All morality aside, who are you to know who is? A Rails dev and an investment banker.
It's a fair point. The signal/noise ratio for advertised freelance work is much lower than that for advertised traditional positions.
I think that's mostly down to mismatch: fewer employers advertising for remote positions and more people looking for easy money that can be taken advantage of.
The WeWorkRemotely works really well. I've never had such a response from one of our job postings. 50 or so qualified applicants in the first week, and we hired a perfect match out of that pool. In contrast our stack overflow ads had gotten 3 highly unqualified applicants in 30 days.
I haven't tried WeWorkRemotely, but I can attest that StackOverflow ads were abysmal for us. Our final candidate ended up coming to us organically for the position I just hired for, but we also had some good candidates find us from Indeed.com
May have just been the nature of the position though (Salesforce work)
Depends on your ad stackoverflow has gotten the largest bang for the buck with $1200 in spend I've hired 4 members to my team. There are a lot of jobs there so you need to standout but they definitely have good programmers on it. 37s job board was crap for us tho
Typically job boards allow new jobs to be posted and the old ones that have been filled to be taken down. This might invalidate the OP's napkin, but still gives you a rough idea of revenue.
Job boards are a funny thing, it's a fairly easy thing to program, and yet companies will pay good sums of money to post an ad because it is to hard to find decent help AND companies are already paying money to advertise job openings.
Job boards start easily, but you'd be surprised at how much they can spiral into some of the most convoluted code you've ever seen. They're almost the exact definition of a scope creeping CRUD app. This is compounded by the fast that an MVP job board is so low hanging that corners are often cut into oblivion, causing inescapable technical debt :)
I expect "We work remotely" was rooted partially in an attempt to burn down the old job board codebase and start over with more defined and scalable scope.
I started a bunch of niche job boards (pythonjobs.com, bigdatajobs.com, railsjobs.com, etc) using a 3rd party platform - but wasn't happy with the platform so built my own.
Fast forward blood, sweat and tears I now offer the platform as a SaaS offering for other looking to create niche job boards (www.JobBoard.io).
Starts out as simple CRUD - gets much more complex - especially when multi-tenancy is involved.
Easy to program, but how do you get it off the ground? It has the same chicken and egg problem every two-sided marketplace does. 37Signals can do this because they've built an audience.
The number of positions filled through job boards has dropped by more than half in the last decade.
Last year, only 1.3 percent of hires came from Monster.com and 1.2 percent from CareerBuilder... yet Monster.com alone sucked up nearly $1 Billion in revenue from ad postings that are largely ineffective.
The News Hours article does not say "only 1.3% of hires came from Monster" but instead says:
"Monster.com was reported by employers as the source of ALL hires only about 1.3 percent of the time." (emphasis added)
So 1.3% of employers on Monster got 100% of hires there and 98.7% got less than 100% of hires, perhaps none, on Monster. If this statistic, from a survey by the way, means anything, it does not mean Monster was responsible 1.3% of US hiring. Ditto for the 1.2% at CareerBuilder.
This is pretty typical of articles on News Hours's business blog - provocative and seemingly informative but generally poorly written and researched and often ideological. You will often know less after reading their articles, or more accurately, know more things that are wrong.
Here's the actual survey from careerXroads that this was based on. I have no idea how reliable it is.
Yes, I admire their resolve in staying truly lean as a company with focus on making a great product rather than making a great profit. After more than 10 years, it's still a compact team of 36 people. I wonder what happens when they hit 37 - maybe it's the limit :)
Writeboard, Tada, and Backpack were not shut down, they were sunsetted. That's a fundamentally different thing. What it means is that anyone who used Tada, Writeboard, or Backpack can continue to use these products just as they always have. No one was kicked off, no one has to stop using them. We just aren't selling them anymore to new customers.
Answers... we've tried a variety of customer forums over the years, but we just didn't find them effective. We're no longer trying these.
The Product Blog was basically consolidated into Signal vs. Noise, our blog. We'll be making more changes to how, what, and where we publish next year. I imagine we'll continue to tweak the mix over time.
Breeze we did close down completely. We refunded every customer who paid (which was about 1000 customers) and sent them their subscriber lists.
The podcast wasn't "shut down", we just haven't had time to do another one. I'd like to do more of these when we have some spare time. Some of what was in the podcast has been absorbed by other channels (Twitter, more interviews on other people's podcasts and sites, etc).
Sortfolio was sold and is alive and well at http://sortfolio.com. No one was left hanging here. From what we hear, revenue is up since the sale.
Basecamp Classic was absolutely not shut down. It remains a huge product for us - a significant number of our Basecamp customers happily remain on Classic and we'll support those customers forever. However, we don't sell it anymore - the flavor of Basecamp we sell today is the all new generation of Basecamp at basecamp.com.
That's a really interesting distinction you make between shutting down and sunsetting. Google tends to call their shutdowns as sunsetting their products -- do you think they are abusing the term?
I don't think there's an official definition anywhere, so I think it's fair for companies to call it whatever they want as long as they are clear about what it all means to their customers. The word doesn't really matter, what the word means is what matters.
I feel for jasonfried. If you build a business and stick to it, being careful not to open a new business that might disappoint your customers if you close it, you become fodder for "disruption."
But if you have the courage to try new things in a lean way, you become fodder for criticism that you don't keep your services running.
In the end, that's the price of trying new things. You have to have the iron pants to shrug and keep going even when people are telling you to do what everyone else is doing.
I agree. Sortfolio was a natural fit for a sale. Nice product, consistent revenue stream, easy to separate from the other products, not too expensive for a buyer so lots of potential buyers, etc.
You could make such a list for Volkswagen, Boeing, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, or any successful company. Business evolves, and product lines are a part of that.
In about a year of using Campfire, I never saw a single bug fix or new feature. We've since moved to HipChat, and while it's not perfect, it's so refreshing to pay for a service that gets regular updates (not to mention has decent mobile clients).
This list is a sign of a viable business if anything else. Any company needs to stay forever young by keeping its offerings in line with the demand. Companies that fail are the ones that choose to ignore the reality.
does anyone know of similar quality job boards that are focused more on turnkey projects and less on staff augmentation?
i've had the best experiences with clients who care more about the end product and results, rather than specific languages, frameworks, or even skillsets. nearly all of them have been inbound or referrals, so i'm not sure if a job board (maybe a reverse job board?) would be able to replicate that.
This makes complete sense - We Work Remotely is targeted to the remote work niche, while the past job board was probably facing competition from StackOverflow and a variety of "programming centric" job boards.
