Two years ago I wrote an article on HackerNoon about building a niche job board in Go.
At the time the site was only a few months old and I had just crossed about 5,000 monthly visitors. I was still figuring out what worked and what didn’t.
Two years later the project is still running and I’ve launched a second job board. Looking back, I’ve learned quite a bit; some of my assumptions were right, and some were completely wrong.
So I thought it would be useful to revisit the topic and explain what I’d do differently if I had to run that race again.
What I Got Right: Niche Beats Broad
One decision I still feel very good about was choosing a tight niche.
My site focuses specifically on software engineering jobs in Dubai, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.
It’s not a huge market compared to global tech job boards, but it’s focused. And that turned out to be extremely helpful.
Today the site:
- regularly ranks in the top three results on Google for lots of my target keywords
- receives over 100,000 page views per month
- has become the largest dedicated job board for software engineers in that region
The interesting thing is that you don’t need to beat the big sites everywhere.
You just need to beat them in one narrow slice of the internet.
Sites like LinkedIn or Indeed have enormous domain authority, but they’re not optimized for specific niches. If you consistently publish relevant content for a tightly defined audience, Google often rewards that focus.
This was probably the most important lesson:
If you choose a niche carefully and keep feeding it relevant content, you can outrank much larger sites.
You don’t need to win the whole internet. You just need to win your corner of it.
What I Got Wrong: Employers Aren’t Always the Customer
The biggest mistake I made was misunderstanding how hiring actually works in the region I targeted.
My original assumption was simple:
Employers are hiring engineers so employers will pay to advertise jobs.
This is how traditional job boards work, so it seemed reasonable.
But the Middle East tech hiring market works a little differently.
A large proportion of hiring is handled by external recruiters. These recruiters are often headhunting candidates directly rather than using job postings to source candidates.
They rely heavily on:
- LinkedIn outreach
- internal candidate databases
- direct networking
In other words, many recruiters don’t actually rely on job boards very much.
After two years of running the site, only about 15 employers have paid to post jobs, despite the site reaching exactly the audience they are trying to hire.
This was a pretty humbling discovery.
Traffic alone doesn’t guarantee employer demand.
Sometimes the hiring ecosystem in your niche simply doesn’t revolve around job boards.
If I were starting again, I would spend much more time understanding how hiring works operationally in a niche, not just whether companies are hiring.
Those are two very different things.
What Surprised Me: Jobseekers Will Pay
Originally, I was strongly against charging job seekers.
In my earlier article I wrote this:
“I like selling products where a positive outcome for my customer is a positive outcome for me… the jobseeker model is at odds with that.”
My thinking was that charging jobseekers felt misaligned. Once they get a job, they leave the platform.
Employers seemed like the more natural customer.
But since employer revenue wasn’t materialising, I eventually experimented with a simple paywall.
Nothing fancy. Just a basic subscription that unlocked the job listings.
I expected maybe a few curious users.
Instead, something interesting happened.
Within two weeks, the site generated over $1,000 from job seekers.
That was the moment I realised I had misunderstood the value proposition.
For job seekers, the value isn’t just “access to jobs”.
It’s access to a curated list of the right jobs.
People who want to relocate to Dubai or Saudi Arabia for work are often highly motivated. Filtering through hundreds of irrelevant listings is frustrating.
If you can consistently surface relevant opportunities, many people are happy to pay a small subscription for that.
Since then, I’ve refined the paywall, and it continues to generate stable income.
This was easily the most surprising lesson from running the site.
Job Boards Are Quietly Good Passive Assets
One thing that surprised me about job boards is how low-maintenance they become once they start ranking.
The early phase is the hard part:
- building the site
- setting up job ingestion
- writing scrapers
- getting indexed by Google
- slowly building authority
That work takes months.
But once Google starts trusting the site as a consistent source of job listings, the maintenance requirements drop dramatically.
New jobs get indexed automatically. Traffic arrives steadily from search.
I might spend a few hours a week maintaining the system now.
That said, I wouldn’t recommend job boards if your goal is to build a million-dollar startup.
Most niche job boards are probably, at best, lifestyle businesses.
They generate steady income, but they rarely explode into massive companies.
Still, as side projects or small online assets, they can be surprisingly nice to own.
What I Would Do Differently in 2026
Recently, I decided to launch a second job board and try to apply some of the lessons from the first one.
The tech stack hasn’t changed much. I’m still using Go, mostly because I already know it well.
But honestly, the tech stack matters very little.
You could build a job board in almost any language — or even start with a spreadsheet.
The things that really matter are data ingestion and niche selection.
For my second site, I chose a niche I already understand reasonably well: remote jobs for lawyers – you can check out the site here.
I’ve worked with several law firms on software projects, so I have some familiarity with how the legal hiring market works.
Two things made this niche attractive to me:
- Law firms regularly pay to post jobs on specialized legal job boards
- Lawyers are already used to paying for professional tools, memberships, and associations
This means there is potential revenue on both sides of the market: employers and jobseekers.
Another major focus for me this time is automated job ingestion.
If your site can reliably publish new jobs every day, Google starts to view it as a trustworthy source of listings.
That signal alone can dramatically improve your chances of ranking.
So my approach is simple:
- Build reliable job ingestion pipelines
- Let the site run for a few months while Google indexes it
- Gradually improve authority through backlinks and community sharing
In many ways job boards reward patience more than anything else.
They’re slow to start, but once momentum builds they can become surprisingly resilient assets.
Final Thoughts
Looking back, the biggest lesson from running a job board is that the market will correct your assumptions very quickly.
Ideas that sound logical in theory don’t always survive contact with reality.
But that’s exactly why side projects are valuable.
You get to test ideas cheaply, learn from the results, and adjust your approach.
If you’re thinking about building a niche job board, my advice is simple:
Pick a narrow niche, build a reliable job data pipeline, and give it time.
You might be surprised what happens after a year or two.
