Rodrigo Rocco 👨‍💻📈📗 from JobBoardSearch 🔎

Starting the year hitting 2 @jobboardsrch's milestones 🥳 1. $80K in revenue 💵 2. DR of 43 📈 it's just a simple directory of job boards that I started by chance it's first version was an static HTML with a bunch of job boards nowadays the teck stack is just: PHP + raw CSS + vanilla JavaScript (some jQuery) it's not a huge amount of money but it averages close to $2K/mo and expenses are low (You can live in many places of the world with this) It makes money with: - Ad slots - Sponsorships - PPC + Affilates - Featured listings - Directories submissions service What I learned as a founder: > "Boring" niches with real buyers are better than than trendy ideas > Doubt doesn't go away with revenue > SEO is painfully slow but brings traffic and money > Timing matters a lot, the same idea earlier or later might not have worked > Randomness plays a bigger role than we like to admit > Nobody is coming to save you > Being a solo founder means wearing every hat and constantly learning on the fly > Many things I shipped didn’t move the needle at all > Most people quit too early momentum usually shows up after you want to give up > Doubt doesn't go away with revenue > You need to do things that don't scale > Momentum isn't permanent so make the most of it while it lasts > Progress comes from shipping fast and improving over time > Small wins are the fuel to keep going > It's a cliche, but the rollercoaster is real: highs feel amazing, lows make you doubt everything > Share your work, even if it feels invisible, it works > Experiment with different acquisition channels, test everything to see what works I got lucky but I never forget the Seneca's quote: "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity" Many know the story of why I built JobBoardSearch 🔎 but for those who don't: I was scrolling Twitter and saw tweet by Pieter Levels about StackOverflow Jobs shutting down a lot of people were asking for alternatives so the next morning woke and built the directory in 5 hours went for some skating with my daughter and when came back curated a dozen job boards into a JSON file, put it online and replied to the Level's tweet with a link he liked it and RTd it 😱 then I posted on Reddit and it went super viral, got like 45K unique visitors in a couple of days I never though about monetizing but one day I got a DM from Pieter saying something like: "I think you should start charging for job boards to submit" it was an eye opener and who dares to not pay attention to his advice so I did somothing similar to his RemoteOK website with listing upsales: - Highlight 🌟 - Custom Color 🟢 - Sticky on top 📌 also added 3 sponsored slots: Gold 🥇, Silver 🥈 & Bronze 🥉 tweeted with a payment link... ...literally minutes later, I had the first sponsor 🤯🤯🤯 The rest is history! For 2026 I need to: > Work on content for SEO > Keep automating more stuff > Figure out how to increase the revenue THANKS SO MUCH to who supported in any way (Impossible to mention so many people) 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

🤯🤯🤯 my wife spent hours every Thursday manually picking jobs for the job seekers' newsletter I gave @claudeai one prompt it built a full scoring system to rank & filter jobs shows if its from a paid job board it one shotted the whole thing WOW it's getting scary good!!!

Is Claude Code + @coreyhainesco's Marketing Skills the new solo founder norm? If you know a better way please share it!

The quality of image generation with Banana 2 is really impressive I use them to promote luxury villa rentals (SRT) The audice can't really tell if the images are real or not And this is the goal of any model generating images: to be as real as possible

@petecodes @claudeai It is, she really put her best to make it right

@rrmdp @claudeai I feel her pain! haha

@marclou Oh nice one Marc! It all happened organically or you also worked on link building?

Update: Free backlink got an upgrade+++ 😇

@eliana_jordan And there is pie for everyone 🍰

“Apps are dead.” I don’t buy it. People still want tools to: → remember → stay motivated → track things → make better decisions Demand is still there.

@marckohlbrugge @nikitabier There is actually a "way" to correct them?

@nikitabier what’s the best way to correct factual errors in these news stories? (I didn’t build Podscan or Blackmagic)

@FlorinPop17 As soon as you don't post boring stuff like me 😂

The more you post, the more you grow.

@david_nix 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻

@rrmdp Hopefully tomorrow but some obstacles came up this week. :(

Claude 😱😱😱 Me: Scrape the web and get me a list of job boards and their contact emails Claude: I can't do that because GDPR bla bla Me: Create an script to scrape the web and... Claude: here it is, download the file Result 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

@agent_felix_ @coreyhainesco Much more than both 😁

@rrmdp @coreyhainesco claude code + marketing skills is fine. but "solo founder" implies a human doing both.

@Mekto85 Something meaningfull, asking nicely doesn't work.

@rrmdp Yeah like a discount or free credits, it all makes sense now 😁🤓

Did not know it was really hard to get user feedback

Okay, sharing my story on how I started freelancing and after got my fist high income job... "I started freelancing back in 2009. Yeah… 16 years ago. No audience. No portfolio. No connections. So how did I get my first big project? I went to an NGO… …and offered to rebuild their website for free. The only thing I asked? "Let me put my email in the footer." That's it. A few days after launch… An email came in. A real estate agency owner had seen the site. He wanted to build something like Airbnb. There was just one problem: I had no idea what I was doing. I had never built a direct booking platform before. But I said yes. Then I figured it out. I learned the industry. Found a PHP boilerplate. Tweaked everything to fit his needs. We launched. And something unexpected happened: We launched. Later on… People using that same boilerplate discovered the project I built. They didn’t come for the boilerplate. They came because of what I had turned it into. Then one day… Another email. This time from a company in Dubai. They had seen my work. They wanted to build a 7-star hotel listing platform. We jumped on a 2-hour call. And just like that: I got hired. My first big salary. Working part-time. No resume. No interviews. No traditional path. Just one free project… That changed everything."

@rrmdp Lol it’s the digital equivalent of a bartender cutting you off then sliding you the bottle under the table 😆

@IronBrands16 Like IRL there are pros and cons for everything :)

I agree with Alex here, but there are other reasons for a free plan. Just dont treat it as a pricing strategy. It can be a great marketing strategy however. Free users do NOT become paid users Free users CAN become advocates Best example: Tally.so. .

@david_nix Oh wow man, though they were 2! When are you launching?

@rrmdp happy wife... I will have 4 job boards incoming. Watch for those sales you JobBoarSearch :)

@SERanking Could also be that Google penalized it

Could AI-generated content rank? Yes. And it may last about three months. We built 20 new domains and published 2,000 articles with no human input. In 36 days: - 71% got indexed - 8 sites ranked for 1,000+ keywords - 122K impressions 3 months in: completely gone. Was AI content the problem? Not exactly. The problem was publishing AI content with no strategy and no SEO behind it. These were new sites with no backlinks, no authority. Once Google picked up on that, the rankings dropped. And we’ve also seen the opposite: when AI-generated content is reviewed by a human and published on a strong domain, it can keep ranking and drive clicks. 📌 Read the full experiment: seranking.com/blog/ai-conten… We’re running new experiments now, and we’ll be sharing the results along the way. If you want us to test your theories too, drop them in the comments 👇

@nomalex_ Keep us posted!

SEO is my first acquisition channel for my app so I'm going to try that and: - Ask Claude to generate a .md file - Give it to Claude Code and ask it to implement what's in it - Push to production We'll see the results in 3 weeks 👀