JobsQuest is a job aggregator platform serving more than 100,000+ users in 6 months
The Problem
How I scaled the product?
→
Market research (motivation from 'The Research' section)- jobs : data science, software, interships
- jobs locations : banglore, mumbai, chennai, delhi, pune
- types of jobs : internships, fresher, experienced, research, freelancing
- competitors : naukri, instahyre, hirect, monster
- Doubled down on internships and fresher jobs (since were the most relevant to me from personal experience and user research)
→
Launching the MVP - wanted to set up an online presence via different channels : instagram, linkedin, emails
- launched a job aggregrator page on linkedin
- focused highly on linkedin due to :
- ↑ # job seekers
- ↑ ease of organic discovery
- Personal network already built, hence had a great idea of how to leverage the platform
→
User Journey- Checkout job opening
- Click on the link provided
- Navigate to the original job posting site
- Apply directly
→
The First 1000 Users - Focsed on posting openings at top companies across data and engineering
- Posted regularly at relevant times
- Acquired them in 1 week since launch, completely organically! 🚀
Goals - Set a goal of acquiring 5000 users in 2 months (acquisition)
- Sponsoring college festivals and collaborating with other websites (awareness, acquistion)
- Build our own platform and a P2P community for jobs and mentoring (activation, retention, referrals)
- Set up partnerships with companies (revenue)
Solutions, Prioritisation, Requirements→ Solutions we worked/working on building :
- Job board
- Quiz portal
- Resume analysis tool
- Mentoring platform
- Individual portfolios
→ Needs/ Requirements :
- Building a website
- front-end : gatsby js
- back-end : node js
- database : mongo db
- Collaboration tools : slack
- Running newsletters : email based job notifications/ updates
Team & Journey
Built a team of 20+ where we worked across design, engineering, market research, content management, graphic desgin, parternships & data science
Core team consisted of three of my friends :
- Jil led efforts for operations and parternships
- Maitri assisted with operating the social handles
→
Community & Content : - Scaled the linkedin page to 100k+ followers with a highest MAV’s of 150k+ in 6 months
- Generated 50mn+ impressions, with an engagement rate of 13.92%
- Built a community on slack of 1800+ : discussing about user problems and potential solutions to them
- Mentoring and assiting people
- The traction and engagement has been completely organic, $0 have been spent
→
Design : - Designed figma wireframes for the homepage and job listing page
- Brainstormed about how the user journey would look like through the website
→
Engineering : - Worked on reducing the loading time of images on the website using lazyloading to facilitate faster loading of the website
- Used logos/images available in the public cloud instead of storing them in our database (helped us reduce memory consumption and reduce costs)
- Our infra runs at $0!
- Hosted the frontend on Netlfiy & backend on Heroku
→
Business Partnerships : - Parterned and invited companies to publicise their opportunities/ company via our platform
- Drove revenue via an adverstiment based model (promotions)
- Parterned with 100+ companies including Byjus, Great Learning, Angel Broking
- Partnered with Somaiya, NM College as their "Connectivity" & "Social Media" Partner
→
Data Science : - Working on building a tool for candidate recommedation to recruiters and obtaining feedback for candidates
- Employing CV, NLP techniques to build the tool
Learnings from the journey!
→ What I did well?
- Stakeholder management & Communication : worked across multiple teams driving multiple initiatives in parellel, conveying requirements and deveploments clearly across the teams
- Project management : setting timelines and milestones, following an agile methodology
- User research : talking to customers, understanding what they like/ don’t like about the product, their expectations
- Market research : doing the marketing sizing, planning the GTM, competitior analysis
- Tech knowledge : learnt more about building web based products and how integrations work
- Driving acquisiton & retention : how to acquire new users & keep the returning users enganged
- Prioritasation : depending on availbility of resources learnt how to prioritise and build a vertical from stratch
→ What I could have done better?
- lauchning a community on discord instead of slack (free usage + more popular in gen z)
- launching an application on playstore (80% of the Indian community uses mobile phones)
- monetizing the business via adverstiments/ subscriptions
Things I am proud of
- Led & managed a team of 20+, driving the growth of product by acquiring users, building communities & partnerships.
- Overlooked the product, including market analysis, user interviews, creating user personas & roadmaps, building websites. Set up GTM strategy spotting trends & patterns, setting goals, distribution channels, pricing & branding
- Successfully built an audience of 100k+ with $0 spent in infrastructure & marketing, partnered with 100+ companies like Byjus, Great Learning, scaling to 150k+ MAV, generating 50mn+ impressions, with an engagement rate of 11.29%
- Partnered with IIM Indore, IIT Guwhati, Somaiya, NM College as their "Connectivity" & "Social Media" Partner
- Conducted 5+ workshops on resume building and cover letter writing, further showcasing the importance of building a strong community and network to more than 500+ students
