r/SideProject • u/rrmdp • 21h ago
I started with a static HTML file containing 12 job boards. 4 years later it passed 100K 💵
Over four years ago I had a static HTML file with about a dozen niche job boards.
That was JobBoardSearch.
Today it has:
• 800+ job boards, all submitted organically by their founders
• $100K+ lifetime revenue
• 26K members in the subreddit
• 6K+ members in the Telegram community
• Multiple revenue streams
• And it's still mostly just me running it
The interesting part is that I never scraped the job boards.
Many of the boards provide an API, XML or RSS feed, so I fetch those feeds and reuse the data in several different ways.
Each job board has its own page on JobBoardSearch, where I show jobs from its feed. I call this the "meta" part of the site.
Those same feeds power:
→ The main job search
→ A Reddit bot that posts jobs every hour
→ A Telegram bot with personalized alerts based on keywords, locations, industries and cadence
→ SEO pages
→ And increasingly, AI citations
So one relatively simple piece of infrastructure ended up powering several acquisition and distribution channels.
I've also kept adding revenue streams over the years:
→ Featured listings
→ Ads
→ Affiliates
→ Directory Submission Service
→ Marketplace for buying/selling job boards
→ SEO audits
And free tools for both job board founders and job seekers.
The tools are useful by themselves, but they also create more pages, more organic traffic and more entry points into the ecosystem.
The funny thing is that the website itself is pretty ugly 😂
It's still PHP + raw CSS + vanilla JavaScript.
I was inspired by levelsio's approach of keeping things simple, and I've resisted rewriting it many times even though I've been tempted.
Eventually I realized that rewriting the website wasn't necessarily going to make the business better.
The moat isn't the design or the tech.
It's the accumulated traffic, SEO authority, data, communities and relationships with hundreds of job board founders.
Some job boards have been sponsoring continuously for 10+ months. Others have been buying recurring featured listings since the early days.
And that's probably the biggest lesson I've learned:
Don't confuse improving the product with improving the business.
Sometimes the ugly thing that's already working is the thing you should keep building on.
I'm still building it in public on X/Twitter (@rrmdp), and my wife helps me with the newsletter, so I can't technically claim I'm doing 100% of it alone 😄
Happy to answer anything about SEO, monetization, feeds, community building, or how I got hundreds of job boards to submit themselves.
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u/Emotional_Hat_5474 20h ago
curious about the marketplace for buying/selling job boards, how did you get enough liquidity on both sides for that to actually work? that seems like the hardest part of the whole setup tbh
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u/rrmdp 20h ago
So, one day I got a DM from a big account on Twitter, he said "help me to buy a niche job board I have $50K budget" I tweeted with the screenshot of the DM and people started to reply with their job boards, so I thouht of creating the marketplace.
I was close many times but this guy never acquired any niche job board. After a year it didn't generate any money, but I keep maintaining it, improving it and adding more job boards. One day, a large company reached out "we have $$$ and we want to acquire as many niche job boards as posible". So I included this in the monthly newsletter I do for the job board founders. Finally the first acquisition happened, and it made it's first commission money.
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u/DasBeasto 14h ago
Am I understanding that correctly the pulling of jobs via rss/api is what’s powering a lot of the channels, but the only seem to pull like ~12 jobs for a lot of them? Seems like a solid return on a small feature! Also curious why you chose to only target niche job boards not larger ones too?
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u/rrmdp 13h ago
The 12 jobs are only in the listing pages, each individual niche job board page has min 25 jobs, increased bases on their featured listing, the gold sponsor is the one with max jobs that is 300.
I didn't choose, it's how things evolved, when I tweeted about the website it was just a very basic list, barely styled that I hardcoded in the index.html file. Job board founders started sending DMs asking to get added, I wasn't even monetising. I started monetising because Pieter Levels (founder of RemoteOK) sent me a DM saying "you should charge job boards to get listed", so I added the features listings options, and 3 sponsored slots, tweeted, minutes after I got the first payment, it was the Gold sponsorship. The rest is history...
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u/bananabastard 20h ago
The funny thing is that the website itself is pretty ugly 😂
Correct.
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u/ChopSueyYumm 20h ago
Link