Here's what May at Himalayas looked like at a high-level:
- 🚦 Traffic: 86,125 (up 32.0% MoM)
- 🌱 Organic traffic: 41,158 (up 14.1% MoM)
- 📝 Job applications started: 16,646 (up 14.2% MoM)
- 💸 Revenue: $3,870 (up 1,088.28% MoM)
If you're unaware, Himalayas is a three-person bootstrapped team (Jack, Jordan, and Abi) building a remote job board.
May was a great month for growth, but most of it was driven by one-off events rather than repeatable processes, so we are likely to see some mean reversion in June. While these one-off spikes are good for morale (and generating user feedback), we continue to focus the bulk of our efforts on developing repeatable growth loops.
With that in mind, we're hard at work on Himalayas for job seekers which should provide a new lever for consistent growth going forward.
Show HN
We shared Himalayas on Hacker News on May 11, 2022, and ended up at the top of HN for a few hours which resulted in our biggest day of traffic, more than 17k visitors, according to Google Analytics.
The influx of traffic was a great test of the work we did in March to improve the scalability of the platform. By most accounts, it was a success.
Render's autoscaling feature and Redis caching meant the site didn't crash under the load, unlike other traffic spikes that we've had in the past.
However, some users experienced slower load times during the peak periods which is obviously not an ideal user experience, particularly when we think of speed as a feature. As always, there is more work for us to do here to ensure a consistent and fast user experience.
In terms of feedback from the HN community, it was positive and helpful. We're now aware of a bunch of places where we can improve. A few of the smaller pieces of feedback have already been incorporated (like being able to filter our remote companies by country), and we plan to continue chipping away at the rest after we release Himalayas for job seekers.
As an aside, if you plan to present something on HN, I highly recommend reading this advice from dang, one of the HN moderators. Pay particular attention to this suggestion: Drop any language that sounds like marketing or sales. On HN, that is an instant turnoff. Use factual, direct language. Personal stories and technical details are great.
Like any launch, there is also a component of luck – don't get down if you don't get the result you want.
Featured in Product Hunt newsletter
Despite a lackluster launch in April, which you can read about here, we were lucky enough to be featured in the Product Hunt Daily Digest on May 5, 2022:
Another tool worth mentioning is Himalayas, a remote job board that allows you to search 2,000+ open roles at 1,700+ remote companies. You can filter by time zone, visa, skills, company, salary, and tech stack.
This mention, along with our existing Product Hunt page, drove 726 visitors in May.
Other fixes and improvements
- Updated social images to increase clickthrough rate
- Fixed bug preventing draft job pages from being previewed when no salary specified
- Changed gray in our theme
- Various security updates and improvements
- Added company mission field to company edit page and companies database
- Improved design and visibility of verification of companies
- Re-added job skill/category suggestions and improved algorithm
- Fixed issue causing banner links to not open in new tabs
- Fixed issue causing people to be unable to create a new company if another company existed with the same name
- Switched to using payment date rather than created date to order job cards
- Updated design of company information and job information cards
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.
