How Lior Neu-ner Bootstrapped His Job Board, Remote Rocketship, to Over 350,000 Unique Visitors per Month

I recently emailed our wonderful newsletter subscribers about our Jobs API and how you can build a job board with our B2B enrichment API.

And I had the pleasure of having Lior Neu-ner, the founder of Remote Rocketship, respond to that email explaining he's currently running a job board with the help of our API and was interested in doing an interview breaking down how his job board works behind the scenes.

So, of course, I took him up on that offer...

By the way, if you didn't already know, Remote Rocketship is a job board that specializes in helping people land remote jobs:

It's quite an interesting project.

So, without further ado, let's dive in and find out how Lior grew Remote Rocketship into what it is today:

Introduction to Remote Rocketship

Who is Lior Neu-ner?

Colton: Hey, Lior, could you introduce yourself?

Lior: Yeah. Yeah. I'm Lior, and, I'm the founder of Remote Rocketship. Remote Rocketship is a job board for remote jobs. We work differently than most other job boards, since most other job boards require companies to pay to post their jobs on their job board.

What does Remote Rocketship do?

Colton: What do you do instead?

Lior: What we do instead is we scrape job openings from 30,000 plus companies that we have, and we post all their job openings on our website. So job seekers love us just because we have tens of thousands more job openings than most other job boards.

How does Remote Rocketship make money?

Colton: Awesome. And so your form of monetization is what?

Lior: Most job boards charge companies to pay to post the listings. What I do instead is I charge job seekers $5 a week or $18 a month. In return, they get access to all the jobs we have on our website.

Technical foundations

How Remote Rocketship works

Colton: What is the fundamental technology stack behind Remote Rocketship?

Lior: The technology behind it is pretty simple. The front end is Next.js, and the backend is Supabase. But really, how everything comes together is through scraping job openings. I then use Proxycurl to enrich the company data for the job openings. So, when people see a job opening, there's lots of information about who the company is and what they're doing.

How Lior is using Proxycurl's API

Colton: What Proxycurl endpoints are you using?

Lior: The Company Profile Endpoint. I think it's the company profile one, the slash company endpoint. So, for example, if you look at our website, what I pull from Proxycurl is the company size, funding information if available, a blurb about what the company does, and their LinkedIn URLs.

How to pull company data with our Company Profile Endpoint

You'll first need a Proxycurl account (you can create one right here) and an API key to query our API, but outside of that, it's very simple to pull data from our API.

For example, here's a cURL request:

curl \
    -G \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer ${YOUR_API_KEY}" \
    'https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/linkedin/company' \
    --data-urlencode 'url=https://www.linkedin.com/company/google/' \
    --data-urlencode 'categories=include' \
    --data-urlencode 'funding_data=include' \
    --data-urlencode 'exit_data=include' \
    --data-urlencode 'acquisitions=include' \
    --data-urlencode 'extra=include' \
    --data-urlencode 'use_cache=if-present' \
    --data-urlencode 'fallback_to_cache=on-error'

The above would return tons of information about a given LinkedIn company, including the number of employees, funding data, exit data, acquisitions, and more.

How Lior scrapes job data

Colton: How do you scrape job data?

Lior: Most companies use something called an applicant tracking system (ATS), like Greenhouse, Workable, or Lever, to manage their hiring pipeline. All the job openings are hosted on some sort of URL on these websites. I use ScrapingBee (a web scraping API) to search Google for all the ATS links and check these links daily for new jobs. The job itself isn't scraped from LinkedIn; we get the job name, company, remote status, financial information, full-time status, and salary from the ATS links.

Note: Lior wrote a guest post for ScrapingBee where he elaborates a bit more on this, and after speaking to him, his general strategy for scraping job data is:

1. Use ScrapingBee's web scraping API to scrape ATS links, such as https://apply.workable.com/{company}/j/{job_id}
2. Extract and parse job information from relevant URLs (Lior uses ChatGPT's API to help with this)
3. Aggregate, and display that data

Colton: And then you use Proxycurl to enrich the company information?

Lior: Yes, exactly. Proxycurl enriches the company data with details like company size and funding information. This adds significant value to our job listings and helps job seekers make more informed decisions.

How you can pull job data with Proxycurl

While Lior individually scrapes ATS links, you could also pull job data and LinkedIn job listings through our Jobs API.

It could be as simple as the following cURL request to our Job Search Endpoint:

curl \
    -G \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer ${YOUR_API_KEY}" \
    'https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/v2/linkedin/company/job' \
    --data-urlencode 'job_type=anything' \
    --data-urlencode 'experience_level=entry_level' \
    --data-urlencode 'when=past-month' \
    --data-urlencode 'flexibility=remote' \
    --data-urlencode 'keyword=software engineer' \
    --data-urlencode 'search_id=1035'

That would return all of the entry-level remote job listings for Microsoft software engineers (using Microsoft's search_id). You can find a search_id of a company via our Company Profile Endpoint if you don't already have it.

Additionally, if you wanted to enrich any given LinkedIn job listing, you could do so with our Job Profile Endpoint.

Here's a quick example of that:

curl \
    -G \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer ${YOUR_API_KEY}" \
    'https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/linkedin/job' \
    --data-urlencode 'url=https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3667167926/'

Making money and growth

How Remote Rocketship grew

Colton: What was your first growth mechanism? How did you originally generate traction for Remote Rocketship?

Lior: The story behind it is what resonated with people. My wife was looking for a remote job and was frustrated with the lack of job openings and company information on other job boards. I knew many great companies were hiring but weren't listed on these job boards because they didn't want to pay for listings. So, I built a scraper to check for new job openings every day, giving us more job openings and getting them before other applicants.

I shared the site on Reddit, specifically on r/TheWorldIsBeautiful, and it did super well. I got 150,000 visitors in one day, which crashed the site. I also shared it on r/overemployed, where remote workers juggling multiple jobs found it particularly useful.

Remote Rocketship even landed Lior a job

Colton: You're currently working for PostHog as well as a technical writer, correct? Is there any connection between the two projects?

Lior: Yeah, Remote Rocketship is actually how I found PostHog. After launching on Reddit, I needed a new analytics tool. Someone recommended Posthog on Twitter. I checked it out, found it to be a cool company, and they had a job opening for a technical writer. I applied and got the job. PostHog is cool with me working on Remote Rocketship on the side.

Colton: What do you do for PostHog?

Lior: I'm a technical writer, so I handle marketing, SEO, and writing technical content for newsletters, documentation, and other channels.

How many unique visitors does Remote Rocketship get?

Colton: How many unique visitors does Remote Rocketship get per month?

Lior: Currently, we get around 350,000 unique visitors per month.

Colton: What do you think makes Remote Rocketship stand out?

Lior: One of the features people appreciate is the amount of filters we have, like salary and company size. Company size, in particular, is something we get from Proxycurl. We also allow sorting by funding data, like the most recent fundraise, which is also powered by Proxycurl.

Colton: You mentioned filters and company size. What other features do users find helpful?

Lior: People like to sort by various parameters, including the size of the company, which is something we get from Proxycurl. Another popular feature is sorting by the most recent fundraise, again powered by Proxycurl. These features help users tailor their job search to their specific needs and preferences.

Nice! Thanks, Lior!

For anyone interested in landing a remote job, please check out Remote Rocketship.

Is Remote Rocketship profitable?

While Lior shared financial figures with me privately, he was understandably uninterested in doing so publicly.

So, since I figure you'd like to get an idea of how much money Remote Rocketship is making, I'll leave you with this screenshot Lior shared on X from November of 2023:

...it has only been up from there 😉.

A quick recap

Why Remote Rocketship was made

Remote Rocketship was inspired by Lior's wife having issues finding a remote job. He knew how the job board business model worked and wanted to throw his hat in at building a different kind of job board.

So, Lior set out to make the process of finding and landing remote jobs much easier with Remote Rocketship.

Remote Rocketship's technology stack

Remote Rocketship is built with a solid tech foundation: the front end is developed using Next.js, and the backend is powered by Supabase.

They scrape job listings from over 30,000 companies using scraping APIs such as ScrapingBee, which systematically collects data from Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) like Workable, Greenhouse, and Lever, and then our B2B enrichment API, which enriches these listings with detailed company information.

Monetization strategy

Remote Rocketship adopts a user-centric revenue model.

Instead of charging companies to post job listings, it charges remote job seekers $5 a week or $18 a month for access to all listings.

Fundamentally, this allows most of this process to be automated and flips the usual business model on its head.

How Remote Rocketship gained traction

Remote Rocketship's growth was initially fueled by community engagement and organic traction on platforms like Reddit.

Specifically, Lior shared the story on r/TheWorldIsBeautiful, which led to a viral response and 150,000 visitors in one day. It also gained traction on other subreddits like r/overemployed.

Whew, that was quite a bit

Hopefully, you found some value and learned a thing or two from this interview.

Job boards have been a pretty popular application idea recently, but Remote Rocketship just goes to show with a slight tweak or two, there is certainly still plenty of potential. You just need to be able to differentiate yourself.

In Lior's case, he focused on remote jobs specifically and flipped the traditional job board business model on its head by monetizing job seekers rather than businesses looking to recruit talent, but there are about a thousand different twists you can put on this. Think outside the box.

This also goes to show you don't need a large development team or a lot of complexities to build profitable projects. Remote Rocketship is run by a single individual who invested a bit of sweat equity upfront. After that, the majority of the project runs on autopilot.

What a time to be alive...

Interested in creating your own job board?

Between our Jobs API and our Company API, we have all the data you need to make your very own job board today. All you need to do is actually make it!

But the first step is to create your Proxycurl account for free here.

And if you'd like to learn more about the job data you can pull through our API, this YouTube video will help out quite a bit:

Thanks for reading!

P.S. While Proxycurl works well for pulling job and company data, our API isn't limited to only that. We can also enrich personal profiles, provide contact information on prospects, and more. To learn more about what all our B2B enrichment API can do, click here.