Building In Public: The Strategy That Took My Job Boards to $5K
In this interview, Nithur discusses how he started multiple apps, built a thriving job board business, and found success by building in public.
👋 Hello, Idris here! Welcome to this week's Indieniche newsletter. Each week, I feature tips and stories from successful self-made founders, share insights on building great products, talk about growing your business, and showcase essential tools to help you build and scale better.
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In this interview, you'll meet Nithur, a serial entrepreneur building and shipping multiple products. I discovered him on one of my Reddit threads and thought to feature his journey.
In this interview, Nithur shares:
His backstory and how he started.
How he got his first free and paid customers for his product.
What was effective in attracting customers to his product?
His competitive advantages, what gives him an edge, and insights that have proven beneficial to his operations.
Which books, podcasts, or other resources have had the greatest impact on him.
What advice would he offer to entrepreneurs who are just starting out.
Q. Hello! Who are you and what product are you working on currently, and who is your target audience(Age range)?
I’m Nithur, from Southeast Asia. I’m working on two job boards and a few AI-based products:
My target audience varies with each product. For my job boards, it’s job seekers.
Q. What is your backstory and how did you come up with your idea? What year did you start?
During the pandemic in 2020, I started writing online to build a daily writing habit. But I couldn’t find an app to automatically track my progress, so I decided to create one myself. That’s when I learned JavaScript and built my first Chrome extension.
While promoting it, I discovered a community of independent developers creating successful apps. Inspired, I started building more apps. Some of them didn’t work out, but it’s been a great learning journey.
Real Work From Anywhere began in 2022, and MoAI Jobs followed in early 2024.
Q. Take us through the process of building the first version of your product MVP.
I started Real Work From Anywhere as a simple GitHub project where I curated work-from-anywhere job listings in a markdown file. I updated this list daily.
As people began asking for features like category pages, tags, and search, I built a basic website to make the listings easier to navigate. Since then, I’ve been improving it day by day.
Q. How many employees do you have working on your product? Do you have any co-founders?
It’s just me and one social media manager.
Q. How much monthly traffic do you receive?
Across all my sites, I get over 150,000 page views per month.
Q. How did you get your first customers for your product and how many free/paid customers do you have currently? (Feel free to list them out).
My first customer came through organic traffic. I don’t offer free plans, except for Wandpen.
Q. Since you launched your product, What has worked to attract customers?
I focused on driving traffic to my job boards. This brought in job seekers, which in turn made companies willing to pay to post their job ads on my sites.
Q. How is your product performing currently, and what are your plans for the future? Can you share your current metrics and revenue figures?
In November, my two job boards earned $5,000. Moving forward, I want to focus more on SEO and building stronger relationships with my community.
Q. Since the inception of your business, have you gained any insights that have provided you with a competitive advantage and proven beneficial to your operations?
Yes, I build my products out in the open, sharing my process with the public. Most of my competitors keep their operations private. This openness helps build trust with my customers, and they’re more likely to support my business.
Q. What tools have helped you grow your product?
I use Vercel, Supabase, Google Analytics, Stripe, and Plunk.
Q. What advice would you offer to entrepreneurs who are looking to start or have just begun their journey?
If you’re an indie maker looking to build your own apps, persistence is key. Try building many apps, move quickly, and keep improving until you find something that works. Stay in the game long enough to succeed.
Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions! What is your contact info if people would like to inquire about your services? You can add all your links.
You can reach me at info@moaijobs.com
Let me know what you learned from this interview and have a productive week!🙏
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