Background

HiringCafe is a job search engine like Indeed and LinkedIn jobs. The main difference is that all of our jobs are scraped directly from employers’ career page sites. We don’t allow people to post jobs. As a result, you’ll come across jobs that aren’t on Indeed or LinkedIn, and you won’t be bombarded with scams and fake jobs.

We grew to 1.3M+ monthly active users and have 68K+ members on our Reddit community. We also got featured on Business Insider, Cornell University, USC, and more. All of the growth so far has been organic - we spent $0 on marketing.

Here’s how it happened.

o to 1 users

The first version of HiringCafe only had one user - me. I absolutely hated Indeed and LinkedIn. Instead of going on job boards which had so many jobs missing (and not to mention scams!), I created a spreadsheet of hundreds of employer websites and applied directly on their career pages. I also used fancy tricks to find additional jobs, such as searching for jobs that are hosted on Greenhouse, Lever, and etc like this:

"job openings" site:greenhouse.io

1 to 100 users

When OpenAI introduced structured schema output for API calls, I realized that I could automate much of what I did with a few cleaver techniques. After building a simple prototype, I decided to launch it. This is where most founders give up. They build something and then fail to launch it. I knew the first few launches would not go anywhere so I had low expectations.

Instead of spraying and praying, I asked myself the following question: where else can I find people like me? People who hate job boards and are sharing spreadsheets of companies that are hiring?

Before launching, I thought hard about who I wanted to initially attract. After days of thinking about my ideal initial users, I finalized it in one clear sentence:

Corporate Sales job seekers who absolutely hate job boards

Everything I did moving forward - from designing the website to picking the right place to launch the prototype - had to somehow serve this group of users. Nothing else mattered. In fact, I didn’t want anyone else to visit HiringCafe. I was so obsessed about this that I deliberately designed the site to shoo away users that didn’t fit this exact description.

After researching about where sales professionals hung out online, I joined a few Slack communities and posted about what I was working on. It was an instant hit.

100 to 10,000 users

After a few successful launches on Slack communities catered to Sales professionals, I took every piece of feedback I received to heart and began improving the product. Instead of blindly adding feature requests, I thought hard about what it was that they actually wanted.

I ignored advice I received from family, friends, and well-wishers and only took feedback from my actual users: people who took their time to actually use HiringCafe for job hunting.

On the product development side of things, I focused on three core things: (1) add more jobs (2) improve filters (3) make the UI ugly for users I didn’t want while making it attractive enough for my target audience.

Once the product became better and better, I gradually expanded to more and more categories - from Marketing to Engineering to Design. All on various Slack communities.

10,000 to 100,000 users

As the product kept improving, subsequent launches became easier and more effective. However, I gradually got distracted along the way. I launched a few SaaS products for employers - like resume screening tools. I even shut down HiringCafe for a few months after someone convinced me that I was working on a solved problem. “Do people really want yet another job site?”.

But for whatever reason, I kept relaunching HiringCafe. Deep inside I knew that people were fed up with Indeed and LinkedIn and really wanted an alternative.

The turning point was when my best friend Hamed (now my co-founder!) gave me a solid advice: “Dude, you should really timebox your thing. If you don’t hit a huge milestone in the next 2 months, you should just pack up and move on.” That made perfect sense to me.

I set an outrageous goal: get 10k MAUs or quit.

Up until this point, I held off on Reddit because I wanted to make my product really good for a smaller group of users. I decided that it was finally time to launch on Reddit (more on this later).

My initial posts on Reddit kept getting flagged. So much so that Reddit banned my account. I kept creating new accounts, but all were getting banned. It was FREAKING FRUSTRATING AND VERY ANNOYING. How the heck do people even launch on Reddit?!!!

Before giving up, I decided to try something different. Instead of posting about HiringCafe randomly in various communities, I decided to pick one community that would resonate with my post. I also made sure that the content of the post was 100% authentic.

So I posted this:

BOOM!

The post went so viral that it made it to the FRONT PAGE of Reddit.

Of course that didn’t last long. As with any viral posts, the initial excitement wears off quickly. You have these massive traffic spikes followed by a trough of sorrow.

Hamed saw my progress and the viral posts and decided to join HiringCafe as a co-founder! The most important event for HiringCafe.

Our biggest priority became clear: scrape every real job in the US. We got rid of all the other ideas and began building up our engine to scrape as many jobs as we possibly could.

100,000 to 1M+

To make something big, you have to start with a small cult of followers. The most effective cults do crazy things and rally behind a clear objective. In our case, we picked a fight with Indeed and announced that we wanted to scrape every job on Earth. It worked.

We pointed users to our Reddit community (r/HiringCafe) and used the community as a platform to make announcements, get critical feedback, and read success stories. We didn’t just use Reddit to make one-off posts, but went all-in to use it as a distribution channel.

I learned about distribution channel from my local Halal butcher shop. They not only sell high quality meat but also have have a small grocery section. I noticed something interesting. Next to high-quality products like Shan Masala packets were trashy products.

How on earth do companies manage to sell crappy products? I realized that it boiled down to one thing: distribution channel. That explains why companies who merely make great products don’t win. That’s just the first step. In order to capture real value, you have to figure out your distribution channel. How are the end-users going to find out about this awesome product you’re building?

In our case (job search engine), Reddit was a perfect distribution channel. Reddit consistently scores #1 on SEO, has thousands of communities created around professional careers and locations, and best of all - doesn’t have a job board! Despite our lack of experience with Reddit, we went all-in and invested a lot of our time to use it as an effective distribution channel.

And it paid off. Our traffic gradually grew from a hundred thousand MAUs to 1.3M+ last month!

What’s next?

No idea!

I guess you’ll find out in a few months haha.

1. Charging candidates

What do you do when you start gaining meaningful traction from job seekers? How long should you keep growing your candidate base without earning a dime? It seems impossible to charge employers because you’re a nobody. So you do what everyone else eventually does when you have traction and are desperate for revenue: charge candidates and turn it into a lifestyle business.

RIP

You can never build a massive outcome by charging job seekers. People who land jobs won’t care about you for the next few years until they’re in the market again. That can’t be sustainable if your pricing is too low. You can’t increase pricing because job seekers simply won’t buy it.

2. Going too niche

This is my favorite one. You listen to advice from well-intentioned VCs who tell you to narrow your focus and go niche. So you build a job site for dog lovers and advertise your site as “Top Companies Who Love Dogs”. Haha!

Another cute one is “Ruby on Rails Jobs” or “Top Product Design Jobs”.

You’re going to die fast.

Here’s the thing: people are in the job market every few years. You won’t have sufficient traffic flow to keep your job board popular.

Going a bit broad from early-on has many benefits. People talk about you, you get steady traction, and so on. But you can’t go too broad or you’ll turn into Indeed. Defining borders is really hard. But startups are hard!

3. Ignoring employers

Candidates have a massive pain point: filling application forms. People hate lengthy forms. So you build a Google Chrome extension and BOOM. You’ve successfully attracted hundreds of thousands of people to your job site.

But then you run into a problem: Employers don’t see value in the free candidates your website is giving them. Because it attracted a ton of interns and new grads and people with little to no experience.

But that’s ok, because your next big idea is: Lets turn this into a career advice site, similar to what Credit Karma with finance and….

Uh oh…

4. Manufacturing differentiation

You wanna stand out from the crowd because after all this is a red ocean. So you put on your thinking cap and start brainstorming different ways your site can be different from the big guys.

You start thinking of really cool features that will help you stand out.

And then you die.

Job seekers don’t care about your strategies. They’re like sharks (as Paul Graham describes). They either want your product or simply ignore you. And they definitely don’t want to change their patterns and behaviors if your site doesn’t actually solve their pain points.

I learned this lesson the hard way: Differentiation is for losers.

Differentiation is a gift that gets handed down to you once you do the hard work of building on a unique insight you have about something that everyone else is ignoring.

Once you do that, your product may look more or less like the competition, but the value prop will be very clear to your end users.

You can’t just manufacture product differentiation for the sake of differentiation. That’s the fastest way to die.

5. Revenue

Silicon Valley has a big problem now. Back then, it was cool to build consumer products and not worry about revenue. It was uncool to think about TAM, market segmentation, MRR, BRR, GRR, and all the grand-pa MBA 101 bullshit.

The pendulum has swung to the other side.

These days, even the brightest kids out of Harvard are thinking about XRR and GRR from day one. How sad and pathetic.

Sometimes innovation requires you to stay hyper-focused on user growth and retention. Thinking about revenue too early can kill your big vision.

But it’s really, really, really difficult to ignore revenue these days, especially when building a job site. Because traditionally a job site is supposed to generate revenue from day one.

But focusing on revenue too early can cause your startup to make other dumb mistakes… like renting traffic.

6. Renting traffic

Traffic renting is a very common problem with job sites. Simply put, it’s when a job site publishes their jobs on other job sites to attract sufficient candidate traffic. Doing this will turn you into a lifestyle business because you have nothing interesting to offer. It’s literally just an arbitrage. You might as well buy potato peelers from Walmart and sell them on Amazon.

This is also a terrible way to growth hack, because organic candidate flow is critical to build an everlasting, sustainable job board. If you rely on traffic from other job sites today, you’ll most likely rely on it in the future.

Side note: one of the reasons why job boards suck so much is because too many job boards are renting traffic.

7. Focusing on one side way too much

Map out the entire journey of a job seeker - from the moment they’re in the market to the moment they land a job. There’s a gazzilion steps along the way, with each step having multiple sub-steps and lots and lots of pain points. It can be very tempting to just focus on one thing.

For example, a job site that automates application process. Or a job site that lets you stay organized and track all your job applications in place. And so on.

The problem with this approach is that job seekers have too many options. The market is flooded with fragmented tools. Suddenly you learn about the concept of compound startups and start building a ton of tools for job seekers. All of a sudden, you’ve created an all-in-one platform for job seekers.

Here’s the problem though: you’ll eventually start charging job seekers a subscription fee because you’ve focused so much on one side that if you start focusing on employers you might end up hurting the user experience on the job seeker side.

But as I’ve said earlier, depending on revenue from job seekers is a sure way to die. It’s a painful death because it happens very slowly.

Ok I’m done I have to go back to work now.