🦄 First User Fridays Issue #3 - How Yogesh grew a niche job board to 1,600+ users
The Story of how Yogesh was inspired to build Remote3, a niche remote job board, and how he found its first users.
Hey all! 👋
Welcome, glad to have you!
A lot happened this past week in tech:
Seems like other companies are in trouble cause’ of FTX’ bullshit. Folks are eyeing DCG and Genesis to be the next ones in line to fall.
So if you think this is the bottom and you’re eyeing to get into crypto any time soon, hold off a few months before you do.
Meanwhile Elon might be looking to pick a fight with Apple. Elon’s looking to make more money via subscriptions and the moves he’s making might not follow the Apple app store guidelines.
In the overall macro-environment, a Sequoia Capital partner thinks that this downturn isn’t done yet.
Now let’s kick it off! 🔥
First, just for an introductory thing for readers, can you tell us a little about yourself? 😁
Yogesh: I’m Yogesh from Nepal. I’m a product designer building internet products in public with NoCode tools like Bubble, Webflow etc.
Currently building Remote3, a web3 job board. Product Designer at @Zebec_HQ and Bubble Dev @startsmalldev.
Apart from work, I’m 20 and I like traveling, and capturing travel videos. I sing and play guitar. I try writing original songs. Few are on YouTube. I do a little of boxing, helps me stay fit and gives me a reason to eat healthy.
What is the product you want to talk about today?
Yogesh: Remote3 which has been my main side project since last year. It’s a job board to find remote jobs in web3.
Talents can create their profile and get their own portfolio page. This will also help them reach to web3 companies and they will reach out to talents if they see you are fit for them. We also publish content around web3, blockchain, crypto, NFTs , career, remote work.
How did you come up with this product idea?
Yogesh: I saw a web3 job board in product hunt. Being a remote worker myself I wanted to build one in remote niche.
But at that time I had no idea how to build products and thought it would be just like my other ideas which I would just design and nothing happens next.
Dante: Were you pleasantly surprised when you gained traction with Remote3?
Yogesh: A lot of web3 startups were starting at that time.
Twitter was full of web3 related stuffs, everybody were doing something related to web3 and developers were learning solidity and other languages and building products.
It was a perfect time to surf the wave.
Just like how AI is right now. It was surprising. It’s always surprising and interesting to see somebody like and use something that you built.
Dante: Yeah hahaha I remember that time, I'm still in the crypto twitter space too actually.
How did you find your first customers?
Yogesh: I posted a lot of jobs manually.
I could have used web scrappers but I wanted to maintain a certain quality in the job posts so I decided to find and fill up the forms myself.
Initially I tried reaching out to companies but nobody was interested in posting the job. It didn’t workout.
All of our customers come through search engine. We rank top 3-5 in Google worldwide for web3 job keywords.
I was also promoting on discord servers, slack channels, twitter and everywhere I could. So I’m not sure about how the 1st customer found us.
Actually, the 1st customer had incomplete payment. So I reached out to them on email and telegram. Got replies on telegram, talked and understood why they didn’t complete the payment.
They wanted to post in premium plan, had some issues with credit card and also wanted to post multiple jobs. I offered an alternative payment method and discount for multiple listing.
Dante: Were you able to land that customer then after talking to them?
Yogesh: Yes.
Dante: So do you agree that what you did kind of falls under doing things that don't scale?
Yogesh: Yeah can’t scale like that. Would have been outreaching forever if I followed that.
How do you find your customers today?
Yogesh: These days customers find us through Google. We have 17,700+ visitors and 59,700+ views in the last 30 days with major traffic coming from Google
Dante: Do you have suggestions for those looking to grow via SEO too?
Yogesh: Here’re some tips:
1. Focus on a Niche with less competition and growing market.
2. Do keyword research, publish content on easy to rank keywords.
3. Include keywords you want to rank for on meta title, description and page. Do internal linking.
4. Learn programmatic SEO and see how you can apply it to your site.
5. Get backlinks.
Dante: Do you have specific tools that you use for SEO, Yogesh?
Yogesh: UberSuggest is all I can afford for now. 😂
Dante: I'll check that out too! hahah same here for me.
Yogesh: I also use Google search console to check my Google impressions, visits and page rankings. And Ahref free keyword tool to cross check the data from UberSuggest.
Dante: Oh you have that set up too? As of now I only use Google analytics, might need to do that also..
Yogesh: Yes google search console is the 1st thing you need to setup and submit a site map in it.
Dante: Thanks man! Will check those out, I know zilch about SEO, it sounds like voodoo to me tbh.
Yogesh: I also don’t understand much about SEO. Got to learn a few basics while growing Remote3.
Oh and I also use Fathom to check my analytics, here’s a referral link if you want to get a $10 credit and check it out. 😂
I moved away from google analytics when it became illegal in Europe.
Dante: Oh shit I didn't know about that, thanks for the heads up.
Can you share an approximate of how many users you currently have?
Yogesh: We currently have ~1600 users.
We didn’t have a clear way to create accounts earlier so the growth was slow. I’m expecting to get ~500 users /mo from now on, a bit conservative because we got 640+ just 25 days ago.
Dante: Nice nice dude that's a lot!
Can you share some current revenue numbers?
Yogesh: Revenue isn’t consistent. This month ~$600 as of today.
Dante: Thanks for being transparent man, there are still builders out there trying to reach that point, me included!
Lastly, do you have some other insights that you can give founders who are just starting to look for their first users? 💡
Yogesh: Share your product among your circle, places where your target users hang out and build in public.
That’s what I’m doing with my new product. I’m also figuring out these things, I think I haven’t built and grown enough products or at scale.
Dante: Thanks for the time and insights Yogesh!
Where can we go to learn more about you and your projects?
Yogesh: You can visit my website yogesharc.com, Twitter @yogesharc, and of course Remote3.
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Update:
1. Removal of the “Google” answer under “how did you find your first users” section, it was irrelevant as per Yogesh and he was confused with the question at first.
2. “1,600+” users changed to “640+”, Yogesh wanted to reflect Remote3’s users in the past 25 days.
That’s it thanks for reading everyone! See you next week! 👍