Is Running A Job Board Really Worth it?

A Deep Dive Into The Job Board Business

A few days ago, a tweet thread by Peter Askew piqued my interest in the job board business.

I was quite interested in it for a few reasons -

• First, job boards are boring — it is not a sexy shiny startup idea like building rockets, but it seems quite profitable.
• Second, building such a thing is not mad science, to an engineer like me.
• Third, it does not seem very time-consuming to run the business.

Now, before I jump to build the business, let’s dig into the details.

How big is the opportunity, a.k.a. profit margin?

After building many things in the past, I learned - never rush to build something without knowing the numbers.

When running Roxy, I found running a hardware business is unexpectedly expensive (I mentioned it in Why Hardware Businesses Are Hard). If you look into the income statement of many public software companies, some of them are also under the water.

Revenue