Making $145k a year from job boards

Wouter is a self-taught developer who makes $145k a year from niche job boards. He learned to code after he grew tired of outsourcing the work to other people. Learn how to got into programming and created his job board businesses:

Can you tell us what you’ve achieved so far as a founder? 

I am 32 years old, live in a small place near Rotterdam in the Netherlands with my wife and two kids.

Currently I run around 5 job boards take make money plus my other business ​Inhuren.com​ that is still around and doing fine (but not at the scale it did back then).

Big difference right now is that I am doing it almost solo. Instead of with a team of employees. I have a couple of freelance contractors helping me out with stuff but 95% of the business is just me. 

I am only running my only business fulltime for over two and a half years now and the job board revenue is only part of it. The freedom it gives me and my family is amazing. And I will probably never again run a company with employees, and office and lots of overhead costs. 

How did you learn to code? 

I basically started with the HTML/CSS course on CodeCademy and then after that I did the PHP course like 3 times so I had a good understanding of the basics. 

Believe me when I say that to this day, I consider coding very hard. Also, because I only do it a couple of hours per week, this keeps the learning curve pretty flat. 

Next step was learning Laravel and in the meantime working on my Wordpress websites and building custom themes, functionalities and then basically go from there. 

Do you have advice for people learning to code in the AI era? 

Just like website content for SEO, I am not a fan of AI generated or low quality content just for the purpose of getting traffic without providing any value. 

I think I approach coding a little bit the same. Yes, nowadays I use AI but I still want a clear understanding of how code, functionalities or certain concepts work. 

Why did you become a founder?

I think I became a founder because I just have difficulty working with/for other people (hahahaha). 

Most people around me would describe me as a loner/anti social person. Never had much friends or a big social life. So that is why running an online business is a blessing for me every day. Because I do not really have to rely on other people. 

How did you get the idea for Sustainable Jobs ? 

The idea of a sustainability job board came from the fact that I thought it is a broad term where you can define a lot of jobs under. Sustainability in the Netherlands stands not only for climate or energy transition but also for biodiversity, nature conservation, NGOs, non profits, ecology and organizations with a positive societal impact. 

Why do you think a lot of job boards fail and yours did not? 

That is a very good and interesting question. 

My simple take is that lots of people try to run a job board like a 100% digital business. Whereas with my job boards, I run them more like an agency with lots of client contact, making personal offers per email, selling articles/news posts/backlinks and working with other marketing/recruitment agencies helping them find clients. 

I don’t do any cold outreach for the job boards or anything like that. All the work is basically focused on improving the website. 100% of new clients coming in via Google/LinkedIn or word of mouth. But that is only for the first job posts. But the question is: ‘’How do you get them to post more and keep posting?’. Well, the answer to that is definitely getting results in terms of job applications. 

But another part of it is I think try to offer companies packages to make it more interesting for them to post, or do certain offers or just sometimes email them and try to find ways to improve certain job descriptions etc. Then there is the competition part. More competition makes it just so much harder. 

Then there is I think the fact that I see lots of job boards with amazing designs, lot of cool colors and details. But a job board should be a simple website, with a job post form and an easy way to apply for job seekers. Nothing more. 

But actually the biggest part maybe is the cost. So I basically spend no money running these job boards. My only costs are hosting/domain names maybe 35 per month, then ActiveCampaign, which is like $100 per month and a couple of plugins on Wordpress. Like Yoast SEO Premium and Gravity Forms premium. But that is really about it. 

I sometimes see job boards for sale with numbers like 100K revenue and 15k in profit. It turns out all the revenue comes from a hired sales person/expensive marketing. Then I ask myself what is the 100K revenue good for? If it costs so much money to get there.. 

Learning to code was primary driven by the fact that I was frustrated by hiring developers for the most smallest things and having to spend money on it, which ate into profits. 

Do you think there’s an advantage to making a job board for just the Dutch market?

No, there is lots of competition in the Netherlands. I think that is a big mistake. The Dutch recruitment industry is very professional and big. With lots of smart/talented people. So definitely not easier. However, I would love to build an international version of ​Sustainablejobs.nl​ - ​Sustainablejobs.com​. But I think that will be much harder. 

What are your future plans for Sustainable Jobs? 

Well, I like how my job boards are running right now. With my two largest doing around €115.000 combined this year and then maybe €25.000 from the smaller ones. 

Where can people find out more about you and Sustainable Jobs ?

Yes, people can find more on ​Sustainablejobs.nl​ - follow us on ​LinkedIn​ - or maybe for the English audience, sign up at ​Sustainablejobs.com​. :) 

Also, ​I am new to X​ and I would love to connect with other founders/owners of digital business/job boards/Laravel/PHP Saas etc.