I started this project, by myself, back in April. I managed to get a working version in about 3 weeks.
The reaction to the original version was amazing. A lot of people chimed in, helped with feedback and professional advice. I've had designers, product people, project managers share their thoughts about WeRemote. This is one of the reasons WeRemote.eu exists.
Here's the article I wrote when I originally launched on weremote.ro
It got traction. So I decided to let it sit for a while, and just talk about it on my LinkedIn profile. As an added benefit, I also got a lot of connection requests on LinkedIn. This helped me tap into even more potential, and talk to a broader audience.
In May I decided I would move everything from weremote.ro to weremote.eu and go one step further, to see if the EU was an actual "market" for remote work.
Took me three weeks to get the first version of the platform in the hands of people. Then it took me from the beginning of June all the way through September to migrate everything to over to the .eu domain.
Actually, I did a lot more than just translate texts. I created a new landing page, changed the way job postings looked, designed a new email template for the weekly newsletter and to top it off I also made some architectural changes.
But this stands to prove that greenfield projects are a ton easier than so-called "legacy" projects. And there's also something to learn about what we consider legacy. We tend to think about very old code when we talk about legacy, when what we're actually doing today is writing tomorrow's legacy.
If you're working with code you wrote a month ago, then you're working with legacy code. This means that you have to dance around previously-made technical decisions, avoid some sharp edges, and deliver your features. This last part was specifically a sour spot for me since I can't work on a piece of code and not refactor it if I feel that it fails in some way. But I had to learn to live with it.
After the .eu launch the platform kept on growing to the point where it's nearing 2k users. And companies weren't late to the party either. There are companies posting jobs on the platform which I've never heard of.
But there was still no revenue. Actually, the operational costs of the platform kept rising, since MailChimp wants more money for more subscribers, DigitalOcean needs more money for the resource usage of 2k users, and so on.
It was about this time that I realized I would not be able to do this by myself. The platform needed marketing, promotion and sales, in order to become sustainable. So I made the decision to bring in my good friend Cristi Pirvulescu to help me with the technical stuff.
But before I could hand over everything to Cristi, I had one more thing on my mind — I wanted to add company/professional accounts and make things easier for both ends of the marketplace.
For companies, this would eliminate the need to fill up the company details every time they wanted to post a job. All jobs would be in one place — the dashboard — and they would also get access to statistics and possibly applicants (in the future).
For professionals, I thought about myself and how much I hated whenever I had to fill huge forms for each job I was applying to. This is why I created professional accounts. We're now working on creating a "thin profile" where each of our users would keep a couple of relevant links, their email and their name, and use this profile to apply to jobs. If a company is interested in them, then they can ask for the extra info on their first interaction.
We're also waiting for LinkedIn to grant us access to their API so we can integrate it and make things easier.
The end of 2019 finds us in a good spot, from the product's standpoint.
2020 is all about growth, in all aspects: features, users, finance.
Have a great 2020!