How I Sold My Niche Job Board for $13,500
Hello, I'm Andrew, and I'd like to share my journey with InGastro.pl, a job board for finding hospitality jobs in Poland that I built during my spare time and sold for $13,500.
Idea💡
The idea for this project appeared during a brainstorming session with my girlfriend. In the beginning, I was not convinced about it, but after some research, I noticed that it can be a great niche with almost no competitors (at least in Poland).
Building 🏗️
MVP was done in less than a month. After that main focus was put on polishing and improving SEO. Sometimes I was using time after my main job to work on it and sometimes weekends. Spending a few hours per week was more than enough.
Marketing 🥲
My main marketing strategy was based on writing on Facebook groups (a lot of people look for work here) and sending DMs. People were interested in it, because of the value that this job board can bring.
Revenue 🙃
Publishing job offers was free. The only source of income was native ads (which is not a lot of money). I planned on adding “premium” features but also wanted to wait for more traffic. Surprisingly for me, I sold it before adding it.
Selling 💸
Before implementing the premium features, I was contacted on LinkedIn by a person that wanted to build a similar website. He was interested in either working on it together or buying it. Considering that it was only my 3rd indie project and he wanted to buy a website with almost no revenue, it was clear to me that I should sell. Price was evaluated based on the time that I spend building it and some bonus.
Takeaways 👀
You can sell a website with almost no revenue for a good price 💸
You can get lucky. Isn’t it the perfect reason to continue trying new ideas? ✨
Invest in SEO. If my website was not placed on the first pages then no one would find me and buy it 🤷♂️
Protect your momentum like your life depends on It
How do I change my username on Indie Hackers?
Amazing job!
Clearly SEO has done wonders for you. I have seen it work very well in various niches in the Italian market too, there is less competition in local language.
How long did it take for SEO to start working for you?
What are you building next? Already some ideas?
First "100 clicks from Google Search in the past 28 days" were archived after 2 months. Then every next milestone was archived much faster
I thought about building another job board in the Polish market as well. However, I am still in the brainstorming phase and checking different niches every day 👀
Wow, impressive!
Any SEO technique you recommend or that has worked very well for you?
I'm in my first month and struggle to get to the top 10 with my job board (on Data Internships worldwide).
Here is part of the answer: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-sold-my-niche-job-board-for-13-500-046f1aa443?commentId=-NZzzYJRHbSS5F-CwRwu
To sum up I was trying everything starting from basics to more advanced stuff. It is difficult to say what worked or what didn't because nobody really knows how SEO works in the background 😄
Thanks for the tips!
I will try those too!
This is probably going to get me this month of motivation
Thanks for this valuable post
Glad to hear it! Best of luck with your endeavors 💪
How did you improve SEO? Can you share more details?
There were done multiple tiny things that slowly started improving SEO scores eg.:
Distribution to Google for Jobs
More info: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/job-posting
Improving keywords to match how usually people search for job
Correct HTML structure
For example, I noticed that I didn't use heading (h1, h2, ...) tags in proper way
Generate a few hundred pages with mixed criteria [city] + [jobCategory], eg. Waiters in Warsaw, Cookers in Cracow, etc.
Manually submitting some important links via Google Console (not sure if it helped, but I am an optimist)
Footer with job offers links based on city, category, etc.
...
Nothing special, but I believe that every small improvement helped SEO🤞
did you create any educational articles for long-form keywords (like "how to get a job in poland", or just these web pages that were optimized?
Not a very common story, that's an interesting hit. 13,500$ is a whole lot of money for a side project, very nice.
Yeah, it was possible because that person wanted to build it anyway. By building it on his own he would spend the same amount of money (or more) by hiring dev, designer, etc.
As well, it was way easier to explain the price for a person that has a background working in IT
Didn't know that someone will be interested in buying a product with no revenue. Thanks for sharing!
Wow, this is incredible!
Nice! I like your simple but pretty design. My colleague and I just launched ours as well :)
Thank you, good luck with your job board! 😉
Really great! How well did the DMs work?
It was my first time and I was pretty scared at the beginning 🙈
However, the response rate was relatively high ~20%-30% when I encouraged people to post their job offers on my platform
For selling native ads, I sent people screenshots of how their ad could look on the website (sometimes I offered a free trial). The response rate was much lower, but I managed to find a few interested companies
wow that's awesome!
The website look nice! Would you mind to explain a bit the tech stack, how you automated (programmatic SEO?) and how you populate the list jobs. All submitted or third party API?
Maybe you can offer an emty job board as a service, where you set up the technology and founders do the selling and marketing?
Main tech stack is Nextjs + Firebase
Programmatic SEO is implemented via Nextjs and there are multiple cron jobs running that add and remove job offers.
Almost all job offers are from third-party API (or scraped) but it is also possible to submit directly via the platform. Listings submitted this way have higher priority and are pinned to the top.
Job board as a service is a nice idea! I am thinking of starting a new experimental job board and considering making it in a way that can be reused easily
Congrats Andrew! This is really awesome. Your idea reminds me of another platform that my team is using to find talent and post jobs (in Ukraine, mostly) -- Djinni. Upvote, and looking forward to reading about your new endeavors ;)
Thank you, Stephan!
Congrats with the acquisition. I can imagine that it give you a huge motivation to keep indiehacking on the side :-)
Do you mind sharing some stats (visitors, subscriber list, etc?)
Congrats Andrew! Looking forward to see what you build next
Hi, could you share DAU / MAU at the time of sale? And the year the job board was created?
I think marketing is the toughest part. Facebook DMs worked for your project, but each project is going to require a different means to market it, and that's the challenge that needs to be figured out (after building the MVP of course).