🛠️ Startups Update: January 2024
UX Remotely is growing...
🌐 UX Remotely (Link)
Subscribers
It’s been a bit over 1 month since I launched this project. Got to 187 free subscribers and 7 paid. Only 6 are real paying people, 1 person got a paid subscription for free for referring subscribers. I turned off this feature for now, I don’t think it makes sense for my situation.
From the initial 5 paid subscribers, 1 unsubscribed within the first month - not enough value for a person in Asia. True. I don’t find as many jobs posted for the APAC region, mostly for North America and Europe. So, it makes sense. 2 new subscribers joined, which makes it a total of 6 paying subscribers.
The Platform
Initial Substack Post
As the MVP, I started with a single substack page with a list of jobs and links. This proved to be very difficult to manage and keep updating.
Airtable
So, I migrated it over to Airtable (I love how they allow multi-select cell data format, which is perfect for jobs that support more than 1 remote location.
No-code Website
After a couple of weeks on Airtable, I found it difficult to maintain the access level for the paid subscribers.
So, I decided to move it over to a webpage with a proper searchable and filterable job board. I still maintain and update the full list on Airtable, and as a no-code platform, I went with Softr.io. It’s quite limited but does the basics.
Also, decided to finally buy the domain. I resisted for 2 months, which is unheard of 🤩 - UXRemotely.com →.
Free vs Paid Differences
I experimented and thought a lot about the dilemma of the free vs paid offering. From the very beginning, I intended to create a resource with a high value and more value than anything else out there.
Granted, this value is tailored for a very specific target audience - UX and Product Designers who are interested in fully remote jobs.
For me to deliver on this vision, I spend a lot of time compiling and updating this content. I think it’s fair to offer this value for a small fee.
On the other hand, I empathize with the situation job seekers may be in - being without a job.
Ideally, I’d prefer that the companies pay to keep this resource running. However, I don’t know what value I can provide to the companies to motivate them to pay. This is still one of the open questions on my (endless) list.
In the beginning, free subscribers were getting only 1 weekly digest email with 3-4 featured jobs.
When I launched the newest version of the job board (on Softr), I made the latest 20 jobs visible to everyone, and the full list - only for paid subscribers. In addition to this unlimited access, the paid subscribers also get email notifications with a list of newly added jobs (on average, 3 times a week).
Now, I decided to make these new jobs email notifications available to free subscribers, too. But… 3 days later. So, the paid subscribers are notified of the new jobs earlier increasing their chances. Let’s see how this structure converts.
Also, added a quarterly discounted subscription plan, instead of annual. 12 months for a job search doesn’t seem too plausible. 3 months is more likely.
More price and value proposition experiments are to come.
Automation
The very big question.
I’ve been trying to optimize small things here and there:
Sending new jobs email notifications automatically through Airtable - didn’t like it, a very limited format of the emails, basically just emails the whole table.
Scraping webpages of some companies’ jobs lists - haven’t found a good tool/logic to make the results high quality and clean from irrelevant stuff.
Auto converting of the jobs list to make it better formatted for pasting on substack or LinkedIn - found a decent process, but frankly, it’s a workaround with a workaround. Not great, but it makes it faster to post new jobs on Substack and LinkedIn. More room for improvement, will look into this a little later.
The whole question of automated scraping of the companies’ websites is an intriguing mystery. Even though I have not found a great worthy solution, my gut feeling is that there must be a better way. I am going to dig deeper into this soon.
More value ideas
I surveyed a few people to get their feedback on some of the ideas I have for how to grow and evolve this project (e.g. launching a community, more content ideas, etc.)
11 people responded with some interesting thoughts. I am going to look into this in more detail a little later. For now, my main focus is on compiling all the job postings that are available today and publish on the job board.
Currently, there are 310 jobs, and I am about halfway through the list of my sources I am manually reviewing and selecting the relevant jobs. This is slow, but it’s moving.
Adios 🤙