JobsQuest is a job aggregator platform serving more than 100,000+ users in 6 months
The Problem
How did we find a Solution to the Problem?
To go from the problem to the final solution at JobsQuest, we followed a clear and thoughtful process:
🔍 Identifying the Problem: We realized that freshers and interns were struggling to find relevant job opportunities in a competitive market filled with established platforms. Through conversations with job seekers, we learned they felt overwhelmed and often missed out on great opportunities
📊 Market Analysis: We explored the job market and identified key players like Naukri and Instahyre. This research revealed that many platforms overlooked the needs of freshers and interns, helping us to identify our niche
👤 Defining User Needs: By talking directly to potential users, we uncovered their main challenges, such as difficulty in finding job postings and a lack of resources for entry-level positions
🛠️ Exploring Solutions: After brainstorming with our team, we decided to create a job aggregator that would bring together listings from various sources. We chose to focus on LinkedIn, as it was already popular among professionals and could help us grow organically
🚀 Getting Started: Initially, our team took the initiative to find job postings for interns and freshers on our own. We began sharing these opportunities on LinkedIn multiple times a day, creating engaging posts to attract attention. This consistent effort helped us draw in a diverse audience, leading to increased engagement and a growing follower base
📈 Scaling and Marketing: Once we had a solid foundation, we focused on marketing our platform through organic channels, especially LinkedIn. We regularly posted job openings and engaged with our audience, which rapidly increased our user base.
🤝🏼 Building Partnerships: We then reached out to companies and universities to form partnerships. These connections not only provided us with access to job postings but also helped us gain visibility in the job-seeking community
💬 User Engagement: As we grew, we kept an eye on user feedback and engagement. This ongoing dialogue allowed us to adapt and enhance the platform, ensuring it met the evolving needs of our users
Through this journey, we successfully built a platform that connected job seekers with the opportunities they needed in a competitive landscape, making the job search process more accessible and user-friendly.
How I scaled the product?
- Personal network already built, hence had a great idea of how to leverage the platform
- ↑ Ease of organic discovery
- ↑ # Job seekers
→
Market research (motivation from 'The Research' section)- Jobs : Data Science, Software, Management, Internships
- 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 :
→
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 four of my friends :
- Jil led efforts for operations and parternships
→
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
