Here's what March at Himalayas looked like at a high-level:
- 🚦 Traffic: 52,596 users (up 183.6% MoM)
- 🌱 Organic traffic: 26,307 (up 159.4% MoM)
- 📝 Job applications started: 12,025 (up 435.4% MoM)
- 💸 Revenue: $897.11 (up 71.7% MoM)
If you're unaware, Himalayas is a three-person bootstrapped team (Jack, Jordan, and Abi) building a remote job board.
March was another month focused on pushing our flywheel forward by enhancing our search functionality and ability to handle more concurrent users.
Compounding growth never happens in one fell swoop. Instead, it resembles pushing a giant heavy flywheel in one direction, building momentum until a point of breakthrough.
As we mapped out in November, attracting more job seekers makes us more attractive to companies who are then more likely to post jobs and share insider information, which again makes us more attractive to job seekers.
Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort. A thousand times faster, then ten thousand, then a hundred thousand. The huge heavy disk flies forward, with almost unstoppable momentum. – Jim Collins, Good to Great
In short, the value realized by job seekers and companies increases as our userbase increases.
New filters for job and company searches
In the first half of March, we added more filters to our remote job search and remote company database.
As you may know, our remote company profiles have information about which markets a company operates in, their tech stack, and employee benefits. We designed these profiles to give job seekers access to more information and to help remote companies tell their story and connect with remote-ready talent.
We realized job seekers could use this information to tailor their job search further. For example, you may be an experienced Marketing Manager who wants to work at a B2B SaaS company with healthcare benefits.
Prior to these improvements, you couldn't easily find companies that match your criteria. Now you can search for Marketing Manager jobs in the B2B SaaS market with healthcare benefits.
This information can also help you find remote companies that match your needs. Suppose you're a full-stack engineer who wants to work at a remote company that offers equity benefits and uses React, Go, and AWS.
It's as simple as searching the following in our remote company database:
As we said in December, a big part of our thesis is that there is too much information asymmetry between talent and companies.
Making this information searchable helps reduce the asymmetry while benefiting companies and job seekers. Companies attract more relevant and engaged candidates, and talent can find the roles and companies that match their needs.
Autoscaling, caching, and image optimizations
As we said in January, speed remains a top priority for us. Great design goes beyond looks and includes how things function and feel, and a big part of how things feel on the Internet depends on load time.
In March, we had a few issues responding to traffic bursts, which led to slower load times, worse Core Web Vitals, and a poor customer experience. To stop this from happening in the future, we spent the back half of March improving our ability to support more concurrent users.
We now use Render's autoscaling feature to increase or decrease the number of services we run based on average CPU and/or memory utilization.
Autoscaling means we can handle increased load automatically without overprovisioning services during periods of lower demand. As instances increase, Render evenly distributes network request traffic to the various services to ensure a faster and more consistent experience.
Another critical piece of work was leveraging Redis for caching. Redis is a fast, open-source, in-memory, key-value data store.
Redis data resides in memory, enabling low latency and high throughput data access. Unlike traditional databases, in-memory data stores don't require a trip to disk, reducing engine latency to microseconds.
Redis helps us support an order of magnitude more operations and faster response times for users. We use Render's Managed Redis product.
In addition to autoscaling and Redis, we invested in Cloudflare Pro to improve how we serve images. We use Cloudflare Polish for lossless image optimization and Cloudflare Mirage to accelerate image loading by:
- Automatically resizing images using Javascript by analyzing visitor connection and device type
- Virtualizing images, so visitors on poor connections get a smaller version at a lower resolution until they can access a higher bandwidth connection
- Streamlining image requests so visitors see optimized images immediately
- Acting as a lazy loader, turning all images into load on demand
This work results in faster load times and a more consistent experience for everyone.
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.
