How I Made $2,000 in 1.5 Months Starting with a Google Form-Based MVP

10 years ago, I taught myself Ruby on Rails and spent six months developing a local job board. I seeded the site with jobs from Craigslist and paid my local news station $3,000 to run a month-long ad. Unfortunately, all that time and money only brought in 50 visitors a day. I ended up selling just one job post, becoming discouraged, and shutting the site down after a few months.

Needless to say, I didn’t know what I was doing, but you’d be surprised how many well-capitalized startups proceed along those same lines today and do even worse than I did back then. It’s because the answer isn’t in spending large sums of time and money. It’s in running cheap and measurable tests that provide the market feedback you need to keep cranking on your ideas. Here’s how my latest project Old Geek Jobs made $2,000 in a month and a half by running cheap experiments.

Age Discrimination Led Me to My First MVP

On September 15th, I read Tim Bray’s "Old Geek" post about ageism in tech. It struck a chord because I experienced what I felt was age discrimination interviewing with a startup run by 20 year olds. I registered the domain name OldGeekJobs.com for $9, fired up a $10 Digital Ocean instance, and uploaded a Google form embedded in a static site.

Getting Eyeballs After Launch

My site was posted to HackerNews and collected over 500 upvotes. The next day, Quartz wrote a piece followed with another from Evil HR Lady. Employers started submitting jobs, and I copied and pasted them from the Google form to the static site. I wasn’t making any money because the job posts were free, but in less than a few days, I had the feedback I needed to move forward on my idea.

Over the next few weeks, I began developing a more robust version of the site using jQuery, Python, Flask, and Postgresql. I broke out jobs by city and state, added real-time keyword search, and added an innovative quick preview feature. Here’s what the site looks like now with that quick preview feature activated:

The Elephant in the Room — Will It Make Money?

I also made it $50 to post a job. In exchange for the $50, jobs are posted for 45 days, highlighted in green, and display above other jobs aggregated from StackOverflow. I bring in jobs from them so there’s enough good jobs on the site to keep bringing visitors back. I also put a notice on the site that explains how it all works:

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by John Wheeler via SitePoint