HACKER Q&A
📣 techsin101

Another job board? Need feedback on the idea


So It's not ready yet, but I'm creating a new job board for developers. I'm looking to get feedback on idea itself....

So my hypothesis is that as a dev, I'd love to do some gigs on the side. But I'm not really in the mood to search for them, apply to 1000s of them and do all back and forth.

I literally want small jobs, that I can knock out in a day or two, and get paid $100-$1k.

Another extension to this idea I've thought about is, to have an expert dev on call.

Got stuck in your day to day work? Call in expert. The expert does screen share, fixes the problem hopefully. But it could be like a service that companies could subscribe for monthly N hours. (SQL expert, Wordpress, React, etc)

Which one do you think has more potential?


  👤 monological Accepted Answer ✓
I made https://www.nanojob.com, which is a job board for devs focusing on, well, nano jobs. I struggled to get people to use it. My advice to you is don't waste your time. Getting a marketplace off the ground is notoriously difficult due to the chicken and egg problem. Secondly, competition in this space is fierce. Unless you have some next level product differentiation, it'll most likely fail to achieve critical mass.

👤 manx
I like the idea of earning money by people calling me and helping them with the topics where I consider myself to be an expert.

The other way round is probably als true. Got an algorithm design problem where you're stuck? Call a computer scientist.


👤 codegeek
I have this idea for a while. I even got the domain name experthours.com (since 2015) where I wanted ppl to find and talk to tech experts. Say u r looking for an expert in kubernetes and want to hire them for a 3 hour consulting project . Later on may be expand to other fields.

The challenge is how to ensure someone really is an expert. Barrier to entry needs to be high otherwise it will attract wannabes. But then how do u get enough experts ?

Just never got to it :) May be I should. U wanna partner up ?


👤 gus_massa
Pleas change the title to "Ask HN: Another job board? Need feedback on the idea". For a "Show HN" you need a minimal implementation or something equivalent. Rea the details in https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

It looks like a job board for freelancers and consulting instead of permanent job positions.


👤 cpach
Both ideas are interesting! The first one might be more bang for the book in terms of profits vs. effort to implement.

FWIW, you might want to read this book before proceeding: http://momtestbook.com/

Best of luck!


👤 readonthegoapp
i generally dig both.

i think i like the expert one better. in theory, because it is _much_ more focussed.

like, the problem space is just so well-defined, or should be.

kind of like how Fivvr started, and Amazon, Tesla, etc. just offer one well-defined thing, then try to be successful with it. then expand over time.