A niche job board with employer subscriptions, candidate profiles, and resume matching — 8 weeks.
The client ran a newsletter and community for UX researchers. The job board was the logical monetization layer: employers post positions (paid subscription), community members apply (free). We built the job board from zero to launch in 8 weeks.
Monetizing an engaged professional community with a job board product without the cost and inflexibility of white-label job board SaaS
The client had a newsletter with 12,000 subscribers — UX researchers looking for career opportunities — and was manually curating a weekly job roundup by scraping LinkedIn and Indeed, compiling in a Google Doc, and pasting into Mailchimp. Employers were starting to reach out directly asking to post specifically to the community. The client was charging $200/post via PayPal invoice and managing it manually in a spreadsheet.
The business was real. The infrastructure was a manual nightmare that didn't scale past 10 employer customers.
White-label job board tools (Homerun, Recruitee, Jobboard.io) were evaluated. None of them matched the community-specific requirements: the ability to make candidate profiles visible to employers (the community's advantage was the quality of the candidate pool, not just traffic), the newsletter integration that was the main distribution channel, and the custom employer subscription model the client had designed.
Custom job board with Stripe employer subscriptions, candidate profiles, and newsletter-integrated weekly digest — launched to 12,000 subscribers
Stack: Next.js 14 App Router, Postgres (Neon), Drizzle ORM, Clerk, Stripe Billing, Resend, Vercel.
Job posting workflow: Employer registration with company profile. Job post creation with a rich text editor, required field validation, and a preview before submission. Stripe subscription billing — three employer plans (Starter: 1 post/month, Growth: 3 posts/month, Scale: unlimited). Posts go live immediately on payment confirmation.
Candidate profiles: Candidate registration (free). Structured candidate profiles with specialization, years of experience, availability, and portfolio links. Privacy controls: candidates choose whether their profile is visible to employers or application-only.
Application tracking: Candidates apply from the job listing. Employers see all applications in their dashboard with candidate profile links. No hosted resume parsing — applications are structured (questionnaire) + LinkedIn or portfolio link.
Newsletter integration: Automated weekly email via Resend pulling the previous week's new job posts. Newsletter template matches the client's existing Mailchimp design. Digest sent every Tuesday at 8am Pacific from the existing newsletter domain.
SEO: Job listing pages are server-rendered Next.js pages with structured data markup (JobPosting schema) for Google Jobs indexing.
One honest number to start.
Fixed-scope, fixed-price. The number below is the starting point — final scope is built from your brief.
Custom job board with Stripe employer subscriptions, candidate profiles, and newsletter-integrated weekly digest — launched to 12,000 subscribers
Three steps, every time.
The same repeatable engagement on every project. No surprises, no mystery, no billable ambiguity.
Brief & discovery.
We send you questions, then get on a call. Output: a written scope with every step, feature, and integration listed.
Build & ship.
Fixed schedule, weekly reviews. No scope creep unless you change the scope — and if you do, we reprice it transparently.
Warranty & retainer.
30-day warranty on every launch. Most clients stay on a monthly retainer for ongoing features and maintenance.
Results
- Launched to 12,000 subscribers with 6 employer paying customers on day 1
- 18 employer subscriptions within 30 days (900% revenue increase from the manual model)
- Google Jobs indexing driving 40% of candidate applications by month 2
Related engagements.
Questions, answered.
The 10 existing employer customers were migrated to Stripe subscriptions. They received an email with a link to set up their account and payment method. 9 of 10 migrated within 48 hours.
Yes — the JobPosting schema markup on each job listing page is submitted to Google Jobs via the structured data markup. Google Jobs is one of the best traffic sources for niche job boards because it surfaces listings to active job seekers without requiring the board to rank competitively for high-volume keywords.
Custom job board with employer subscriptions: from $22k. Fixed-price.
Tell Ryel about your project.
Describe what you’re building and what outcome you need. You’ll have a written, fixed-price scope within the week.