Here's what April at Himalayas looked like at a high-level:
- 🚦 Traffic: 65,210 users (up 24.0% MoM)
- 🌱 Organic traffic: 36,067 users (up 37.1% MoM)
- 📝 Job applications started: 14,581 (up 21.3% MoM)
- 💸 Revenue: $325.68 (down 63.7% MoM)
If you're unaware, Himalayas is a three-person bootstrapped team (Jack, Jordan, and Abi) building a remote job board.
April was an interesting month. We launched on Product Hunt, made it easier for job seekers to find the best employers, and launched our job seeker account waitlist.
Product Hunt launch
We launched Himalayas on Product Hunt on April 7, 2022, ending the day in position #11 with 266 upvotes, 137 comments, and 11 five-star reviews.
While the launch didn't go as well as we hoped, referring 678 users to the site in April, the qualitative feedback we received was fantastic.
The comments and reviews highlight that our feature set and design focus are real differentiators:
- "Been following this for a while, blown away with each addition and refinement - being able to search via timezone is a game changer."
- "Congrats on the launch, flawless design! Nice work on the advice blog as well! Time zone and industry based search are great differentiators."
- "Such a fantastic team and product 💪 Love the timezone search and the gorgeous company profiles."
- "Big fan of Himalayas. I've never come across another remote job board that has clearly had deep thought and consideration put into every single page & pixel. Excited to watch it grow and become a market leader!"
- "Highest quality remote jobs board on the market. LOVE IT."
Helping job seekers find the best companies
In early April, we read Sarah Tavel's series on The Hierarchy of Marketplaces and fell in love with the idea of minimum viable happiness and tipping loops. According to Sarah, scaling a marketplace isn't about size, but happiness:
The marketplace that wins is the marketplace that figures out how to make their buyers and sellers meaningfully happier than any substitute. GMV is irrelevant — a vanity metric that can lead you down the wrong path if you chase it.
We need to grow "Happy GMV" – transactions where the experience was so much better than any substitute that job seekers and/or companies retain. The real light bulb moment for us was realizing job seekers and companies don't really care about how big we are. They care about how happy we make them versus any substitute.
More efficient and stronger matches, better economics, more trust, and a better experience are key. We need to exceed their expectations to create happiness. Happiness – not scale – is the moat.
Given the feedback we got from Product Hunt, we feel like we're on the way and Sarah's advice has definitely helped solidify our roadmap.
We need to create scalable and systematic ways to create better matches between job seekers and companies over time, which means identifying and maximizing loops in our product. We've been focusing on loops from day one, but Sarah's differentiation between growth loops and happiness loops has been helpful:
- Growth loops help drive down the cost of acquisition by leveraging existing companies and job seekers to help us grow. These are the loops we've been focused on from the beginning.
- Happiness loops act as a sorting function for our companies, helping job seekers find the best companies (and avoid the bad ones).
Happiness loops are a novel idea for us, but incredibly powerful, and are something we plan to lean on heavily in the coming months.
We realized we needed to reward companies that we wanted to retain – the companies that are leaning into Himalayas and providing the best experience to our job seekers.
At the same time, we need to make it easier for companies to find relevant job seekers, which should lead to more happiness and higher retention. More on this later...
Happiness loops help us scale without degrading the job seeker experience by sorting companies and candidates by quality. If we can build happiness loops into the product, the bigger we get the happier we'll make both sides of our market.
Our first foray into happiness loops was to make it easier for job seekers to see which companies offered information about their tech stack and employee benefits.
Job seekers looking for remote jobs or researching remote companies on Himalayas can now quickly differentiate between companies that provide tech stack or employee benefits information and those that don't.
We plan to make it even easier to find the best remote employers over the coming months.
Job seeker account waitlist
It's equally important for us to increase the happiness of the companies on our platform, and a big part of that is making it easier to find relevant candidates even if they aren't actively looking for work.
That's why we're building job seeker accounts.
Job seekers will be able to create a free profile to highlight their skills and preferences, then receive personalized job recommendations in their inbox.
Not only will this help job seekers streamline their job search process, but it'll also help companies find relevant candidates.
Job seekers will be able to share their salary expectations as well as their visa and time zone requirements and companies will be able to see which job seekers are actively looking or open to new opportunities.
This is good for companies and job seekers:
- Job seekers can sit back, relax, and let interested companies reach out to them rather than actively browsing jobs.
- Companies can proactively reach out to people who they'd love to hire without having to wait for them to apply.
You can be one of the first to create a profile and claim a premium username by signing up to the waitlist himalayas.app/talent.
Find your next remote job or hire your next remote employee on Himalayas
Himalayas is the best place to find remote jobs and hire remote employees. We're focused on providing a job search and hiring experience with great UX focused on speed and efficiency.
If you're a job seeker: Apply privately to 2,000+ remote jobs and discover 1,700+ remote companies. We make it easy to filter by time zone, visa restrictions, and roles so you can easily find remote companies that want to hire you based on where you live and your desired position.
If you're a remote company: Create a free company profile. Tell your story, build up your remote brand, and recruit the best. Share your culture, tech stack, and employee benefits to get seen by remote candidates looking to make a move. Then post a job and use our sophisticated job listings to specify time zone or visa requirements, and rest easy knowing that qualified candidates will see your job listings.
We'd also love for you to join our free remote work community.
