Scaling HiringCafe from 0 to 1M+ users
Why you should scare off users, pick a fight with billionaires, and spend 1hr day at your Halal butcher shop.
Heads up - I didn’t have time to edit this so you might come across grammatical or spelling mistakes. I wanted to keep it real so I hope you appreciate it!
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.io1 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.