[badshar]

Thanks for this! 2 questions:

1. You are now making money off of it. So how is that working? Have you created a separate bank account and pushed all your revenue to that account, for the purpose of making filing taxes on it easier? Or did you go some other way?

2. How quickly were you able to solve the chicken and egg problem of getting employers to post and people to visit? Do employers know how many people view their listing? I'm having a hard time understanding why they would want to spend $50 on your site vs simply posting free of charge on HN and getting a pretty large audience.

[johnwheeler]

1. Yes, separate bank account. Stripe is really nice in that they push funds automatically on a regular basis. I have another business which uses PayPal, and I like Stripe better.

2. I'll be working on the chicken & egg problem for sometime. I don't expect a quick turnaround, but the good news for me is it's fun driving steady traffic with blog posts. I just made IndieHackers today, and I'm working on a piece for SitePoint which will be out on Thursday. Just stuff like that along with my Medium blog https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com

From the IndieHackers post in the OP, you can see my Google Analytics since I started the project (minus a few early days because I didn't have tracking). I get several thousand visits when I'm able to get blog posts promoted, and several hundred in the ensuing days. Mind you, these are people who surf HackerNews, so they're going to be stronger candidates than average although the numbers are nowhere near one of the big tech boards (i.e. Dice) and probably never will be. I'm OK with that. I'm catering to an HN-like audience, and want to go solo as long as possible.

You can't post jobs free on HN afaik, unless you're a YC company.

Thank you!

[badshar]

Thank you for the detailed answer. Final question on the second part: I was referring to the "Who is hiring?" threads for jobs. So the employers who are paying and posting on OGJ are essentially betting that their job postings will be seen by others, right? It doesn't look like they have any way of figuring out if anyone will see their job.

I don't mean to hint at anything, just trying to get a clear picture.

[johnwheeler]

Yes, my intuition tells me employers see the post on HN (or Inc, QZ) and think it's a cheap gamble for highly qualified applicants relative to other outlets.

I haven't put any sort of tracking in place, so they have no way of knowing if anyone will see their job unless people apply and say where they're coming from. Employers often use trackable short urls for this purpose.

I'd imagine they get as good if not better exposure than "who is hiring" because they get promoted to the top of my site and their listing lasts for 45 days, but I don't know.

[badshar]

Thank you! I think a lot of us try building something and hope to get people to use it, but not many succeed. Good job to you!