Changed Monetisation Strategy = $650/Month Job Board

Morgan Gao is the founder of EchoJobs, a job board for software engineers 🤓

In a recent interview, he shares…

I had this idea when I was looking for jobs two years ago. I was interested in a specified type of companies, tech stack, etc.

But…

Websites like Indeed, LinkedIn have a lot of jobs but I found it really hard to search and filter through the jobs I want.

💡 That inspired him to start EchoJobs…

I spent about 3 months on the first version. It included scraping jobs from most of the popular application tracking systems, parsing job posts for all kinds of information like title, tech stack, level, location and salary.

By May of 2022, I had a working website and released it to the public the first time.

Morgan adds…

I gained some traffic from posting jobs to Twitter and Reddit and by February 2023, I had about 30k monthly visits.

In a since-deleted Reddit post, he shared EchoJobs and got 2.4K upvotes (which, if you’re not on Reddit, is a pretty big deal 😲)

📈 After seeing the traffic that generated…

I put up a plan so employers can post jobs. I tried to reach out to businesses and companies who are hiring but no one posted jobs on my site.

So I kinda stopped there. I knew I got my first sale about a month or two later… Since then I have got about 5 paid job posts so far.

But it has been a while since I got any paid job post.

So Morgan tried something different…

I pivoted to charging job seekers. I think EchoJobs provides more value to job seekers than employers at this point.

With just 5 dollars a week, they can get a whole list of jobs that match their skills, preferences.

💪 That change has worked out well…

It’s been two months now and I have about 20 active subscribers and a total Monthly Recurring Revenue of roughly $500.

Besides that, I promote Indeed jobs on my site and that brings an additional $150 per month. This is done through the Indeed Trusted Partners Program.

It would have been easy for Morgan to give up on the project when his first attempt at monetization didn’t work out.

Kudos to him for sticking with it and trying another approach 👍

If you’re struggling to get traction with a project of your own, step back and test the assumptions you’ve made along the way.

• Are you targeting the right people?
• Could you monetize in a different way?
• What are your competitors doing differently?

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