It’s been a busy week - but before I say anything else I just wanted to start this post off by saying that we’ve had our first few students hired through Jobzle.com. We also had our first couple of sales, even if they were small sales.
In terms of traffic and growth I’ve found I’ve had to pull myself away from watching the metrics and stressing over day to day numbers. It seems that our numbers rise and fall rapidly depending on the day, depending on the coverage we’ve received etc. I should mention, however, that our numbers on days without any sort of press coverage or public mention are rising slowly but steadily — Indicating expanded continued use. We also a very low bounce rate despite a large number of new visitors… which is good to see.
The article in the Boston Globe went out, you can find it here: http://www.boston.com/news/local/rhode_island/articles/2009/09/12/brown_students_launch_new_job_service_for_students/ and here: http://www.boston.com/jobs/bighelp2009/september/articles/frustrated_brown_student_creates_job_site_for_part_time_work/
We were also on a few local TV networks regarding student employment - which was cool. Some of the stations clicked through the actual site showing how it worked, others just quoted the AP article. Along with the great xconomy.com article and the RINexus mention, It’s good to see the site gaining a (small) following and a little support.
Next step? Work with universities and convince them Jobzle is a good platform to list their jobs on. If Jobzle is truely to be a complete platform we need to have every student job listing on the site, by aggregating/scraping them. Eventually though, we hope that Universities will sign on for co-branded pages on Jobzle where they can quickly and easily list their jobs.
What about the Techcrunch50 mention? Well, we weren’t IN the program - but we did feature in the presentation of Sprowtt - an awesome new idea for funding startups by crowd sourcing them. Take a look here, I recommend it highly: http://bit.ly/4mvsq .
That’s my news for the week - I’ve also been working closely with another startup called HygeaShare which shows some great promise. I don’t want to get into details, but look for a beta in the next couple of weeks.
Someone asked me a great question yesterday: “Isn’t this a crazy time to start a job website?”. They were talking about unemployment being through the roof and businesses and families around the country struggling for money… Who would hire a student right now? Who would hire anyone?
He’s right, it’s a crazy time to start a job website… but it’s the perfect time to start a student job website. I would argue that now, more than ever, part-time / full-time employers will be looking to young, driven and ambitious students to fill the gaps. Why hire someone with no real vertical ambition or drive when you could pick up a student temp at half the price? A student who is driven, ambitious and adaptable offers more benefits than a traditional out of school employee.
For families, odd jobs still need to get done. Someone still needs to shovel the drive,babysit, move furniture or pick up groceries. Students are always going to be the most reliable source for those time of small gigs - and, ideally, Jobzle will be their to simplify the process.
While no one is completely recession proof - Jobzle stands in a pretty good position.
This post was a little bit of a wandering rant, hopefully it made some sense.
We’re now one week into the launch of Jobzle.com - a website for student employment in Providence RI - and it’s been pretty hectic. We’re really trying to keep the website geared towards students and employers and not play into the whole “big business” marketing side of things - but we’re running into a sort of play on the “chicken and egg” question… We want to grow by word of mouth not traditional media but how do you get students to sign up when there are no jobs? And how do you get businesses to post jobs when there are no students?
Because of that, we have chosen to do some traditional advertising around town, once we get the initial seed rolling we hope word of mouth will spread and get our name out there. We hope that we can continue to advance student employment in Providence, and just generally college jobs in Rhode Island.
In terms of pure stats since Sept 1st:
We’ve had over 5,000 page hits, 1,600 unique visitors, over 80 student sign up and over 60 job listings posted. We think they are okay numbers given that we’re only open in Providence and that our marketing budget is about what most people spend on groceries in a week. We owe a ton of that to Scott Turner who manages the Brown.edu homepage for featuring us twice in one week.
Here are some cool things coming up in the next couple weeks:
- Street chalking around Providence with massive 6ftx6ft Jobzle logos…
- Coating schools in flyers and posters
- Going door to door to businesses and families and giving them the Jobzle run down
- Just did an interview with the Ray Henry with Southern New England Associated Press, article goes out this w/e.
When I first conceptualized Jobzle - I was convinced that I could get it done in less than a summer. I put together some pretty awful looks mockups, and started posting ads for programmers. Two months later my hopes were pretty trampled and things seemed to be falling apart. It became clear to me that there was a huge gap between my pre-conceived perception of what it took to launch a company and the actual effort required.
Instead of focusing on putting together strong design I was stuck dealing with drama and angst in the team, and trying to bring in the big bucks from investors - all the while holding down my summer internship at Sling Media. Just when it seemed like Jobzle was completely lost, I got some great advice from the people around me.
- Don’t build a product that’s going to cost millions and take over the world. Build something quick and cheap, and get it out to the market - it’s about what the user needs, not what you think they want. Iterate, iterate, iterate. A service that stops evolving is a dead service. Delegate. Don’t pretend you can handle everything, you can’t. Build a service that at least one person can’t live without. If you focus on the money, the money will never come. Solve a problem or pain, and the rest will follow.
I rebuilt Jobzle on those collective words, and I’m still thankful to the group of individuals who collectively inspired me. Who knows whether Jobzle will sink or swim, but it’s been a learning experience regardless.
Check out some of the original mockups, pretty funny to think back to how excited we were about these:
Web 2.0 overload?
Jobzle Iteration 3
Now that’s what I call a visually interesting design.
As I’ve been pushing the development team towards our early September release date, I’ve begun to realize how powerful and useful the wide availabilty of APIs has become. We use a huge amount of integrated interfaces to improve and streamline Jobzle. On the large scale, Google maps API allows us to tap location based searching adding a whole new component - Facebook Connect allows potential users to sign up and have their Jobzle profile auto-populated by information they’ve already written on their Facebook pages, as well as letting their friends know they’ve signed up for our service - and finally, Recaptcha automates the human verification process and goes towards a great cause (digitalizing books).
APIs slash development cost and time, and provide access to powerful, proven feature.
T-minus three months until launch and I got to say, this is a far more stressful project than I could have imagined… Hopefully it will all be worth it when the site goes live but right now the endless testing and re-designs are just annoying. That said here’s what’s going on with development:
- There’s a brand new homepage design, we felt the old one didn’t real utilize its space or feel very inviting to the user, we hope the integration of the social network aspects + a bigger welcome banner will change that.
- The user testers have officially dug into the project… They’re doing a great job turning up problems we didn’t even think about.
- The designs… are… complete. Finally. No more Photoshop grind.
That’s about it for now. I’ll try and keep this blog updated.
