How a $50‑a‑Month Site Earned $23,000 in Profit

Background

Rodrigo Rocco (Rod) created JobBoardSearch.com, a directory that lists 406 remote job‑board sites. The idea originated after a tweet about Stack Overflow shutting down its Jobs feature.

Initial development

On Saturday night Rod registered the domain https://stackoverflowjobsalternatives.com/. The next morning he built a minimum‑viable product in a single index.php file using plain PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and a small amount of jQuery. After the MVP was live he added 10–15 job‑board entries.

Growth through community promotion

Pieter Levels shared the site on X (Twitter) and asked Rod to place RemoteOK at the top. The endorsement triggered outreach from other job‑board founders, rapidly increasing the number of listings and traffic.

Monetisation model

Rod introduced a three‑tier paid‑listing system (gold, silver, bronze) with custom branding and highlighted placement. The first paying customer was Phil from 4‑day‑week‑job‑board; within the first week three payments were received, stabilising the monthly recurring revenue at about $1,300. To date the paid listings have generated roughly $23,000. Additional income comes from two advertising slots sold to job boards.

Traffic acquisition

Organic referrals from Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter) and backlinks on blogs.

SEO‑optimised filters for job‑board categories.

Automated bots that post job ads hourly on Telegram, Reddit, X and LinkedIn.

In August the site recorded over 12,000 ad clicks.

Community metrics

Telegram group: >5,300 members

Subreddit: >4,200 members

Twitter followers: >900

Newsletter subscribers: >5,400 job seekers

Infrastructure and costs

The entire stack runs on a single Linux VPS costing less than $50 per month, which also hosts Rod’s vacation‑rental site VillasMediterranean.com. Operating expenses are minimal, so almost all revenue is profit.

Source code

Rod’s public repositories, including the JobBoardSearch code, are available at https://github.com/rrmdp.

Reference

Original article:

https://www.indiehustle.co/p/this-site-about-job-boards-is-making-23-000