My Reddit Post Got 540k Views in 24 Hours, What Did I Learn?

What Happened?

I launched my startup EchoJobs on May 30, 2022. It contains over 17,000 software engineering jobs and allows job seekers to search their dream job by location, seniority, tech stack, and industries they wish to work in. It had not gained much traction since its launch because I have not yet done much marketing. Last Thursday night, inspired by @rrmdp, who has posted his website on Reddit and had more than 740k views in 48 hours, I decided to try it myself.

My post was very simple as shown below:

"I created a tech job board and curated over 18,000 software engineering jobs. Each of them is neatly parsed so you can search by tech skills, locations, seniority, and industry."

I secretly hoped, but honestly did not expect it to take off. But 24 hours laters this was the amazing result because of the support of so many wonderful people:

I just want to say thank you so much to everyone who engaged with this post and for the huge support. It means a ton for a small startup creator like me.

What did people say?

There are over 120 comments on my post and here are three main things people asked about my website.

Why another job board?

"How is this different than dozens of other similar sites?"

This question got 154 upvotes and it is a very fair question. The idea of making another job board dedicated for software engineers emerged when I was looking for a job for myself a year ago. I was trying different job boards and wanted to search jobs by skills, location, or even specific industries I wanted to work in. I wanted to search and have as many jobs returned as possible so I did not have to check again and again. I did not find any job boards that provided this kind of functionality. Most of them have one search bar with maybe a location filter, but that is. I would still have to go search for each different skill and hope the search would return with job results I would be interested in. Another big problem I found was a lot of the job boards do not actually have that many jobs. A lot of them may have a couple new jobs each day, so I didn’t have a lot of options. I wished I could find a pool with tens of thousands of jobs where I could do a defined search and get daily updates specific to jobs I was interested in. That experience is what inspired echojobs.io and is why I have indexed almost 20,000 jobs on my site for people to search from.

My answer to that question got almost 100 upvotes. This tells me I am not the only one having this type of frustration when job searching and I hope echojobs.io can help provide people with a better job search tool..

Why is there no salary?

This request is not surprising at all as when I was one of the job seekers I found myself asking questions about salary.. How much is the job paying? Is it worth it for me to even look at this job? The hard part is that salary does not have static value, something filters such as skills and location have. The format companies put salaries in changes constantly, making it hard to parse. This is definitely something high on my priority list, as it is something I know I would appreciate as a job seeker, but it will likely take time to tackle.

Why is the search not working?

Personally, I find great pride in my search filter as I put a lot of work into making it functional. So it is very helpful to get a comment from a user letting me know "it did not work for me".This kind of feedback is exactly what I need because it will help me improve my site and ensure it works correctly for everyone. Through this type of feedback I can learn about issues users may be having with things that are working well on my end, such as inputting and selecting locations. I asked for feedback on exactly what the issue was and this allowed me to improve my site and also avoid making the same mistake in the future.

It is also good to learn that the permanent email subscription box is the most hated thing on the internet. I’d appreciate feedback on whether I should replace it with a subscription to saved searches only, or keep it and do both. Let me know!

Conclusion

I am so thankful that people stopped by and checked out echojobs.io and left honest feedback for me. As a creator, it was so encouraging to know that people were engaging in my creation and helping me improve it. Thank you all for being a part of this journey with me! I hope you all find the job that matches your skills and interests :)