Over the past few months, I have been building a job board in my free time. The idea initially piqued my interest because it had the potential to impact hundreds of applicants and companies around the world, but I wanted to do this work with a purpose.

For my entire life, my dad has been a pastor. For those who don't know, the average length a pastor stays at any particular church is somewhere between 1-3 years. Turnover is extremely high. It is likely because 90% feel fatigued each week, 70% say they are 'grossly underpaid', and 90% reported working between 55-75 hours per week. Definitely not a gig for those lacking the passion or purpose - no question there. Because of these statistics and seeing the effects my whole life, my dad and I partnered up to make something that could simplify and ease the process of finding a new church to work at and, in turn, help the churches find qualified candidates that meet their needs. The mission seemed so apparent.

The indie maker in me took over and I got to work.

Rapidly building an MVP

Within a few days, I threw together a prototype while on vacation in Florida last July. It only took a few hours and we went straight to attempting to validate the idea. I threw together a PHP/MySQL minimum viable product extremely quickly and we went straight to the market.

Here is what the landing looked like... you can tell is was an MVP...🤮

It worked... what now?

After a few hundred dollars of Facebook ads, we sold quite a few job posts. The idea was immediately validated. Pastors were itching to find work and churches were hiring! It was such a cool feeling. This isn't the first project I have charged money for, but profiting off of your own project is the best feeling. That never will get old.

I rapidly built this MVP (a.k.a wrote sloppy code), so if I wanted to do this right I would have to start over and do it right. If you are going to do, you may as well do it right. Just as the idea had been validated, I had to go back to college for my senior year. Things got busy – quick! I was serving as Student Body President and was wrapping up a 4-year degree in only 2 years. Crazy times. I say that to say this took forever to build.

I started developing the product in about October and finished it in February. For most of those weeks, I probably only worked 4-6 hours on it. Regardless, I was head-down on this side project anytime that I could be.

Fast forward to launch 🚀

Because we weren't launching to the maker demographic, this was a little bit different for me. I was so used to waiting up until 3am and launching it on Product Hunt, but not this time. There was no Product Hunt equivalent for this market. No hunt the product, get customers, and get feedback process. I had to go get it... this was new territory...

After I had pushed the code live, I attempted share the news with an email marketing campaign. I had a email list from an old project of about 1,600 people, so I figured that was worth a shot. I sent it out and sure enough we sold a job post! It was our first on the new platform and all with $0 marketing dollars. Super cool.

Based on that one job post, we decided to do things that didn't scale. I contacted local newspapers in the same town as the church, crossposted to other job boards, and even developed a custom feature for that church. We had to make an impression. Ever since the start, we have been working tirelessly for each church that posts a job.

3 Months

Three months have passed since we first launched the product. It was a long three months of attempting to automate and squash bugs. Coronavirus definitely slowed things down, but Rome wasn't built overnight.

Marketing

In the past three months, we have spend $0 on ads still! Kinda cool to see this steady growth. Coronavirus definitely threw a wrench into things...

Each week we have sent out a newsletter to all people registered on the platform - below you can see the page views! Each month - we average about 60 new registered users. I am super pleased. An onboarding sequence is executed when someone registers, so most of the time they have already uploaded their resume and are ready to find work.

It spikes with each newsletter we send out to our list!

Automation

Since it is just a two man team, automation has been key. My favorite automation I developed has been the daily process of updating the sitemap. Each day, a function is run to get all of the pages on our website and submit it to Google! Procedurally generated pages helped us get a significant amount of traffic and take very little work. We are talking 4-5 new users per day just from a little bit of code. Kinda insane.

Each day at 11:55pm, the sitemap is updated and sends me a little message. I wrote this function to ensure everything we did was updated on various search engines and works well indexing wise.

Each time a 'great' action takes place I get a notification. It is super motivating and encouraging each day. Zapier makes it easy - especially if you use Stripe or a similar platform! Free at a small scale.

Can't share everything 😉

Admin Panel

Lastly, I created an admin panel to analyze users and figure out what they are doing on the JustChurchJobs platform. I can view CV's, job listings, and even login as a particular user to help. Before this, it could do done – just with some hard work. I built this platform to display a few key metrics in about a weekend and it has saved me hours from a customer support perspective.

What is next?

Sales, sales, sales. These past few months have proven that the infrastructure is there and that it works, but now I am ready to scale. I feel like saying that is super cliché and expected, but that is fine.

Maybe sometime down the road, I would like to make the entire backend a SPA for ease of use - but that is just a tech goal. My market will probably not even notice.

If you want to follow along, there is a public changelog.

I will write these every few months or each time I push an update that I think is worth noting! If you want to hear more, I tweet about it consistently @iambryansanders.

Thanks for sticking around,

Bryan