A New Project: Remote Rocketship 🚀

In my last post, I talked about how I going about searching for a new idea to work on. I’ve now landed on Remote Rocketship, a job board for remote roles. In this post, I’ll talk about how I got there, what I’ve been up to and how I’m thinking about moving forward.

Briefly Looking at Customer Feedback Analytics

Before working on Remote Rocketship, I spent two weeks briefly looking into Customer Feedback Analytics for SaaS companies with many users. My hypothesis was that these companies receive tons of feedback from their users (from places like customer support tickets and f app store reviews) and have no effective way to extract insights from this. There are existing solutions, like Chattermill and Thematic, but these are expensive with prices starting at around $2k/month for 2000 data points.

After building a quick prototype and getting feedback from a few potential customers, I decided not to continue with this idea due the following reasons:

• For the companies I spoke to, the problem was a not major pain point for them having a solution to it is more of a “nice to have”. The reasons for this seem to fall into two major buckets:

  1. The insights aren't that useful because they're things the teams already know

  2. For larger companies, it’s difficult to encourage product teams to take action or change their roadmaps based on the insights.

• Perhaps most importantly, I realized I’m not that interested in the space.

That said, I still think there’s an opportunity in the space to build a cheaper alternative. Chattermill recently announced a $26M Series B, which is good signal that interest in the space is growing.

Working on Remote Rocketship

After discarding the previous idea, I found myself at a dead-end. By this point, I’d been exploring different startup ideas for about 8 months and felt that I’d tried all the different methods for finding an idea. I wasn’t coming up with any new problem spaces to explore and was finding myself unable to find new sources where I could search for them either. Feeling demotivated and unproductive, I decided to spend my time building a project which would be fun to build and bring my energy up (even though it may not be one in which I have the strongest conviction). Hence I started working on Remote Rocketship.

The idea is that most existing job boards don't have enough jobs because companies need to pay to list their openings, or they don't have good information on the companies listed and a good way to filter through them. To solve this, I scrape recruiting sites like Workable, Greenhouse and Lever where most job openings are hosted. I then parse them for useful information such as salaries and hiring locations. I then combine this with more useful information I scrape online about the companies e.g. funding, company size.

To monetize it, once I have enough job seekers using the platform, I will charge companies to claim their profiles, add their own listings and prioritize their listings in rankings (Otta has a similar business model). My intuition tells me that acquiring businesses to monetize will be the easy part and that acquiring job seekers will be the difficult part. The reason is that outside of SEO, I cannot think of a sustainable way to acquire users onto the platform.

SEO for job seekers is also already very competitive, so I need to come up with a unique and compelling strategy. To do this, I’ve been consuming AHRefs SEO courses and YouTube content (highly recommended for anyone new to SEO). I still haven’t figured out what my SEO angle will be, although right now I’m leaning towards in-depth interview prep for Big Tech since this is something on which I have a lot of insight.

The other problem with SEO is that it can take up to six months to begin seeing results, which is a big chunk of time to wait and see if my strategy is correct. I need to have a strong conviction in my SEO strategy to be willing to spend six months of my time and money on it. I don’t yet have this conviction, but it’s something I’m trying to work towards.

These concerns are the reason I put off working on Remote Rocketship initially and why I was looking at other ideas first (despite it being a lot of fun to build!). However, now I’ve run out of other ideas and so I’m building it.

My ask to you as the reader is: Do you know anyone who I could talk to about SEO or any resources I should look into, so that I can devise an SEO strategy that I have strong conviction in?