How Oysterlink Hit 280K Monthly Visitors Before Launch — Interview with Milos Eric

Introduction

What if you could grow a job board to hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors before the product even launches?

That’s exactly what Milos Eric, founder of Oysterlink, has done—focusing on organic growth, high-intent content, and deep insight into the hospitality industry’s hiring needs. In this episode of the JBoard Interview Series, Milos shares how he and his team turned a simple idea into a traffic-generating powerhouse, and what job board founders can learn from their journey.

Watch the full interview

5 Key Takeaways from the Interview with Milos Eric

1. Start with Audience, Not Product

Before building the platform, Milos focused entirely on creating a resource-first site that served hospitality workers and employers. By offering salary guides, hiring tips, and interview resources, they were able to attract highly relevant traffic and build a loyal audience—before writing a single line of code for the job board itself.

2. Organic SEO Still Works—If You Focus on Intent

Oyster Link reached 280,000 monthly visitors without spending on paid ads. Their strategy? Hyper-relevant content, consistent publishing, and a strong focus on what their target users are actually searching for. They avoided the trap of going after vanity metrics and instead built SEO around topics with real hiring intent.

3. Don’t Chase Traffic That Won’t Convert

One of the biggest lessons Milos shared: not all traffic is good traffic. Early on, they created content like salary pages that earned huge impressions—but very few clicks. Why? Because Google often surfaces answers in the snippet, removing the need to visit the site. The takeaway: always think about the user's intent and how the content serves your product.

4. Capture Demand, Even Before You Can Fulfill It

Even without a live product, Milos implemented clever ways to capture user emails and job interest—through pop-ups, newsletter sign-ups, and job alert forms. This “bucket-with-a-hole” strategy still helped them gather over 8,000 email subscribers in a single month, giving them a strong user base for launch.

5. Build for the Long Game: From Job Board to Career Network

Milos doesn’t just want to build another job board. Oyster Link’s vision is to become a career networking platform specifically for hospitality professionals—something leaner and more focused than LinkedIn. With AI-driven SEO tools and automation in the pipeline, they’re thinking several steps ahead in both tech and community-building.

Conclusion

Milos’ story is a masterclass in building a job board the right way—audience-first, content-rich, and SEO-smart. For anyone in the hiring space or building a niche platform, this interview is full of actionable insights you can start applying today.

Transcript

Martyn Redstone (00:02.024)

Milos, thank you so much for joining me today.

Milos (00:05.474)

Hi Martin, thank you so much for having me.

Martyn Redstone (00:08.406)

My pleasure, my absolute pleasure. So let's jump straight into it, shall we? It'll be interesting understanding a bit more about your background, your professional background and what led you to starting your job board.

Milos (00:26.03)

Sure, thank you. Again, thank you for having me here. I heard a lot of nice, really nice things about your show and your episodes. And when I was told to check it out, I told my team, like, guys, we have to get there. So thank you again for having me here. I'm really excited to be here. So as for my background, I kind of started being in this entrepreneurship

Martyn Redstone (00:46.108)

lecture.

Milos (00:54.83)

kind of mindset and industry even from when I was 18, 19. It's a very funny story. I enrolled into a computer science university and I was introduced to WordPress and took a free Udemy course, looked at it for five days, printed out a bunch of

cafes and you know, like bars, theme forest, you know, themes, print it out in color and went straight out to the street and asked for a manager in a cafe and said, do you guys have a website? And they said, no. And I said, you should have a website. And I did this for, I think, seven or eight days. I took to like 40 or 50 cafes.

And the 50th accepted for me to do the website for them. And I remember I sold it for $200. So the entire website. And to me, this was amazing. Like, Oh my God, look at all this money I'm going to make. And I think it took like a month to actually do this. So that was the first time I was in the hospitality industry.

Related to it. But then after that, you know, it went from small websites to bigger websites and I kind of built my own agency with a few friends from the hospital, from the university, which I then sold. Then I started working for a few other companies and then started my other business that was kind of successful. but then COVID hit and this business was completely, you know, shut down because it was a social network for athletes. We had like

Martyn Redstone (02:43.485)

Mm-hmm.

Milos (02:44.302)

25, 30,000 active users on a daily basis, but then COVID came out and completely shut it down. So my developer who was working with me at the time, didn't have the, you know, just to minimize all the costs, we had a bunch of these freelance people and so on and so forth. At one time I had 25 employees, by the way, I was 24 at the time.

Yeah, like a young guy asked literally lying about my age to people so they would respect me. It was really interesting. But anyways, he called me and said, I know that your company is going down, come over here. And that's where I came. This was the company called Digital Silk at the time. And our founder, this company is still operational. I was there for a few years. I was the COO.

and or like he likes to say, see, and yeah, it's actually that, you you just work with the problems in an agency. So, just to make this a little shorter, we were on a company trip and we were having some, you know, company dinner or something. And he said, what we're doing here is amazing. It's great. Our agency is one of the top and it is actually one of the top in the industry, but

It's not a product. want to build a product that can be scaled into a billion dollar business, you know, that, that you can, you know, have a single service or a few services given out to people. And we were bouncing some ideas and he came up with the idea for the hospitality hiring platform. Why? Because huge turnover, huge turnover in this industry, huge demand. No one built it in a way that it satisfies.

Martyn Redstone (04:17.598)

Mm.

Milos (04:34.476)

the needs of the user. The user is having the need to have a very simple, very, very simple job board. Like imagine match.com and all the more complex dating sites and then Tinder comes out and you're just swiping. That's Oysterling. So we are going after simplicity, focus on the hospitality, making sure our users are able

to find what they're looking for and making it as simple and as fast and as seamless as possible for the talent.

Martyn Redstone (05:12.488)

Fantastic. So the hospitality niche is all down to the fact that you've spent a lot of your entrepreneurial career providing digital solutions into the hospitality industry.

Milos (05:25.602)

Yeah, you know, when I look back, think Steve Jobs said you cannot connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards, right? Like you don't know why something happened because, you know, why something happened in the moment versus, you know, looking back. And when I think about it, everything I did so far kind of led me to this specific moment where I now have the experience of why don't

Martyn Redstone (05:36.392)

Yes.

Milos (05:55.118)

people do or and create user generated content. If you look at the numbers, for example, less than 1 % on LinkedIn are those content generators, those who are creating content for the rest. And this was a huge issue because my premise in my previous company that I ran, this social network was of course everyone is going to post this, of course everyone is going to be active. And then you start looking and you see that

Martyn Redstone (05:59.698)

Mm-hmm.

Milos (06:22.924)

They are not active. course they're not active. They're just there to look at others. And this is, that's one part. And then I had a part where I was running an agency where I had more than six, 700 clients that I was working with, including Marriott, including some, you know, Aqualina from Miami and then so on, like some huge, hospitality industry, know, brands.

where we saw behind the scenes, what are their issues. And we saw how much they're struggling with hiring, how much they're struggling with employer branding to reach the new generations. And all of this kind of was pieced together. And that's what we are doing with Oysilink right now.

Martyn Redstone (06:54.055)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (07:04.222)

Excellent. So how long ago was it then that you started Oysterling?

Milos (07:10.392)

So Oysilink officially didn't really start yet. I'm going to put the timeline in perspective. what we've built is an informational site. So we had this idea that we are going to build an informational site, create resources for hiring sites, so for the companies and then for the employer side as well.

Martyn Redstone (07:18.009)

the

Milos (07:39.758)

We are going to create resources that will attract some people. were hoping to find maybe 5,000 people, 10,000 people, and that's it. Done. To have any kind of engagement and any kind of usage prior to launching the actual platform and the actual product. actual product was not even, it's not even launched yet. We are launching it end of February and that's the hiring platform you.

Martyn Redstone (08:00.914)

Interesting.

Martyn Redstone (08:05.309)

Mm-hmm.

Milos (08:09.422)

We'll see, you know, with all the filters and all, you know, creating profiles and CVs and, uh, know, applicants tracking and all of the bells and whistles, but in a simpler way than some others that are creating them. So what we did is we created a website and we did, created this website, uh, a little over a year ago and we just started creating content.

Martyn Redstone (08:23.741)

Interesting.

Milos (08:34.03)

you know, writing articles that are helpful for hiring, for interviews, for salaries, for all of it. And then we started receiving, you know, some traffic and then we, and you know, we did some paycheck calculators and stuff like that. So we started receiving traffic and then we started receiving requests to post jobs and we didn't even have jobs. So what we did, we just put jobs within the articles that were literally paragraphs within the articles.

Martyn Redstone (08:58.736)

Mm-hmm.

Milos (08:59.726)

And then it went going more and more and like people are now requesting more and more jobs. So we created kind of a snippet, you know, we just, you know, it's not even a whole, an entire job, right? And then we built a little bit on top and top and top. now we have almost all functionalities of a job board on this website. And it's been only a year and we are looking at right now, looking at more than 280,000 people visiting our website every month.

Martyn Redstone (09:29.886)

Wow, that's a great achievement. So it's quite interesting because obviously, the job board is a two-way marketplace. You've got job seekers that you're trying to attract and you've got employers that you're trying to attract. it sounds very much like, and it's a chicken and an egg situation. When you launch a job board, what do you do first? Do you get jobs on there or do you get job seekers on there? And one doesn't come without the other a lot of the times. And it sounds very much like what you've

tried to do for the last 12 months is attract the job seekers so that when you go live with the employers, you've got a really decent pool of talent that you can advertise to, which seems like a really sensible plan if you can do that. But through organic reasons, what you've done is you've also attracted hires who want to post jobs, which is really interesting. And I'm glad you mentioned

the um, uh the salary calculators because I had a quick I I I took a quick look at the website, um before this call obviously and and before this interview because I wanted to wanted to kind of get some ideas and I do it with everybody and um And I and I I thought wow, you know and took took a look at some of the kind of visitor stats and thought really really impressive and then I noticed on the On the seo side of things. There's a lot of traffic that goes to those salary calculators. Um, so what's that?

The question I have around that and it's quite interesting because we were going to talk about some kind of milestones and achievements and I think those kind of numbers are a significant achievement. you, are you concerned that attracting people through content that can be quite generic as well in terms of the salary calculators is going to attract people who might not be relevant to your employer clients?

Milos (11:27.198)

I am not concerned at all. know that for a fact, I know that we are getting people who are not a hundred percent relevant to hospitality through these, through these, you know, pages and this kind of content. That's why we, we didn't go deeper into that. We are not launching new pages. We are not growing this content. The content is growing on its own. Like we literally launched the idea and it's

started ranking and it went like that. So now we are, we could go into millions of visitors a month if we wanted to, because we know what to do right now, but we just don't want to. And because that's not the audience that we would like, but that audience, if you look at the HFs or SEMrush or other tools, it's not actually showing the actual picture because

What we're looking at, we're looking at analytics and Google Search Console, and that is actually showing that we have more than 85 % of traffic and clicks and everything from the jobs and the career resources. For some reason, that HFs and the others are not able to actually catch that properly.

Martyn Redstone (12:42.738)

Okay.

Milos (12:44.044)

But they are catching, they are, I think, overestimating Pager calculators and some other tools that we have. So I think it kind of balances it. Yes, yes. So you know, like...

Martyn Redstone (12:51.912)

Possibly, you know.

So that's still great because if 85 % of your traffic is coming from relevant content, then that's really significant. And I think that that's something that I think that of our audience would love to kind of understand more about is how do you create relevant content? How do you get that many people?

coming along to the site and also what are your conversion rates like? So you talked about the number of visitors that you have, but how many of those people are registering a profile or even an email address on the site?

Milos (13:38.412)

Right. So that's a good question. So the issue that we had and the issue that we still have, we kind of bandage this issue, but we didn't really fix it fully because the platform is not live yet. You cannot create a profile with us. There's really nothing to create. So I kind of compared our site to a bucket with a hole at the bottom, right?

Martyn Redstone (13:55.474)

Yeah. OK.

Milos (14:06.502)

a lot of things are coming inside and then all of them are just spilling out as well. So what we did is we created a bunch of pop-ups and ways to subscribe and a way to say I would like to receive more jobs like this or I would like to understand more, get more topics or more interviews we're doing.

A lot of industry interviews, for example, we're interviewing people from, you know, Marriott's and, know, Four Seasons and the other, you know, some Michelin star restaurants and so on and so forth. There is nowhere on the internet where you can find content where someone says, here's how you get a job with Marriott. Here are the hiring steps, you know, so that's what we are doing. surprisingly, the social media is not picking up at least not per my expectations. We have a few thousand people following us, but you know,

The quality of content is amazing. what we are doing is, know, we are creating content. are really strict about content that is relevant to us. We will never post anything. And even if we post that was a mistake and we take it down, we will never post anything regarding, let's say how to cook something or how to prepare. That's not what we are. We are hiring, we are careers, are, you know,

Martyn Redstone (15:21.928)

Yeah.

Milos (15:29.326)

jobs, that's what we are about. You asked me about the conversions. I can tell you that right now we are looking at my Google Search Console. have just this month we had 129,000 clicks. Out of these 129,000 clicks we have 8,000 people subscribe or give us an email. So they are more or less within industry area.

And, you know, it's not something groundbreaking, but it's still, I think, a very good position to be in pre-product phase. You know, we, we. Yeah, go on.

Martyn Redstone (16:06.974)

Oh, think, think, yeah, I if you take that, that 85%, you know, relevancy that you talked about earlier, you still talking about 6000 plus emails a month that, you know, of a relevant audience, which I think is pretty, you know, pretty decent number, and something to be proud of with such a short amount of time of doing this. So I think that's, yeah, it's really quite impressive. Absolutely. So

Milos (16:14.638)

Thank

Yep.

Martyn Redstone (16:37.788)

So we've talked quite a bit about some of the challenges you've had, having a load of content, but not having a way of converting people until recently, losing out on a lot of that opportunity. We talked about not even having a live platform yet, but still actually receiving opportunities to post jobs. If you could go back.

12 months, or even 18 months or 24 months when you were starting to think about this. What would you do differently? What would you tell yourself to say, don't make these mistakes?

Milos (17:15.886)

Well, I can tell you one thing though. So I'll think, you know, because as we said in the beginning, I didn't really prepare for this. So I'm working from from experience. So I can tell you one thing though. Look at this. We have salary pages. So just think of this thought process. We have salary pages that are telling you

Martyn Redstone (17:25.458)

No, that's fine.

Yeah.

Milos (17:40.066)

how much can VATER make in a certain location. And we have specific pages for each location for each position, right? And I can tell you that just this month, we had 224,000 impressions on Google, just in this segment. How many clicks do you think we had? Take a wild guess.

Martyn Redstone (17:57.224)

Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (18:02.622)

224,000. Let's just say 10%.

Milos (18:05.696)

And I can tell you, I can help you with this. I'm sorry to interrupt. 6.8 is our average position. So we are not like page five. Obviously we have so many impressions. So we are 6.8 average. How many clicks do you think we have?

Martyn Redstone (18:22.238)

I'd say let's call it 5 % so 10,000 clicks.

Milos (18:32.91)

317

Martyn Redstone (18:35.772)

Wow, okay, that's

Milos (18:37.646)

Okay, here's why. This, I'm sorry for my language, this sucks. You know, this is bad. So, so, so here's, here's, here's the trap that you as a founder or a startup, you know, uh, can fall into. So when we started doing this, as I said in the beginning, we were creating content that we hoped to get people to engage with. Then we get them.

Martyn Redstone (18:43.804)

Yeah.

Milos (19:06.744)

to funnel, then we funnel them to the jobs when the platform comes out. So we started with one of these ideas and we saw salaries going like this and we saw like 10,000 impressions. We're like, holy moly, like, look at this. What happens is that what's the actual intent behind this? Someone is Googling and I can click on queries. Someone is Googling how much do waiters make? And I'm a number one position. But you know, what's the problem? The problem is that Google

actually replies. The snippet from Google says an average waiter's salary is $34,500 in Tampa, Florida. And that basically fulfills the entire need and no one needs to click. So the issue that we basically did, the mistakes that we made in the beginning is that

We were chasing some numbers. These numbers are amazing. We saw that it's low difficulty. We went for it, know, and so on and so forth. But we didn't think about what's the actual need. Person just want to see the number and they go elsewhere. They don't even need to click. So there's a bunch of these ideas that we had that we thought are going to be amazing. And then we just failed. They didn't give us any results. You know.

Martyn Redstone (20:25.256)

Mm.

Yeah, I think that's interesting. And I think that's the same challenge that so many job boards and so many websites are now having from an SEO perspective is that, you know, they've created all of this content and now Google is just showing it as an answer. And I absolutely get that everyone's struggling. So where would you put your efforts into if you could do it again to get around that challenge?

Milos (20:57.336)

So.

I think what we did is really the right way to do these things. And I don't think it's just for the job, I don't think for anything. I was thinking recently, if I opened an electrician's business, I would do exactly the same. I would try to rank for SEO and I would only do it organically, nothing else.

Martyn Redstone (21:24.062)

Mm-hmm.

Milos (21:24.11)

When I say organically, I don't mean I wouldn't pay for anything. I would pay for links. You need to do some link building. You need to do some PR. You need to build some brand. know, brand and SEO go hand in hand because of the brand recognition and because of the relevancy in the industry. If you're just pounding your chest saying, look how amazing I am and look how much content I have, no one's going to care. But if some other people start talking about you, then you get the

Actual, know, actually you get recognized and then you get you get it so I would do exactly the same what I would do may be different I would maybe Go more go faster, you know and develop faster our platform I would maybe Even have a step in the middle like because what we are launching right now is is a full-fledged product

Martyn Redstone (22:21.246)

Mm-hmm.

Milos (22:21.454)

It's a piece of art platform that's gonna have, I'm not gonna say everything and then people think too many features. No, I'm just gonna say that we have everything that a very senior platform that is possibly years on the market has. It's not an MVP. It's a product that...

You launch and that's it. What I would do different and I would have a middle step where you have much less features and then already are in the marketplace and already are charging. We were hoping to have these results in the year three or four. We have these results in the year one. So we are kind of like jumpstarting our timeline for about two years and we're going to start implementing our revenue models on day one basically.

Martyn Redstone (23:04.158)

Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (23:12.158)

Interesting interesting interesting. So so, know plans for this year, um Very much launching the the platform in february and then going for kind of you know Incredible growth over over the coming 12 months. Does that sound about right for for your plans for the next 12 months?

Milos (23:31.374)

Well, I'm expecting to launch the platform and then say, Oh, you know, to see, to see all the issues that come with it because, um, you don't, nothing can go smooth ever. Everything has to have some issues. Um, and, I'm fully expecting that I'm telling this to my team. I'm telling them, you know, there is going to be people who are unsatisfied.

Martyn Redstone (23:37.588)

you

Milos (24:01.356)

You know, you have LinkedIn, by the way, this is another thing to maybe consider, you know, if you're running a job board, you will get bad feedback or bad reviews, no matter what. No matter what. Why? It's because companies want to hire fast. Companies that have jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed don't get any candidates. They have a job on our board. They don't get any candidates and then come to me and said, your job board is bad. Why am I not getting any candidates?

And I'm saying, why don't you ask LinkedIn who has, I don't know, 800 million people there and I have 200,000 people here. You know, I am a drop in the bucket. like go ask them and tell me what can I do? So, uh, we really need to, know, team teams really need to be, you know, thinking, uh, long-term and not get distracted by these kinds of things, but to come back for the, uh, for our plan for 2025.

Martyn Redstone (24:43.556)

the

Milos (24:59.756)

So we're launching now in late February. It's going to be probably February 28th. That's our deadline. Our founder told us you have to launch in February. So it's February 28th. of course, know, every day matters. And then we are going after...

We're going to implement, we're going to build more teams. We're going to build a sales team, a customer service team, an outreach team, all of that is coming. Then we're going to double down on some branding. And our phase 1.5 is already basically underway, which we will involve a few AI ideas.

That's very exciting. Some automations, some AI, some automations for SEO. I'm just going to say, I'm not going to go into details because this is something that is really, really high end. And I think it's not something people are thinking about, but we're going to find ways to automate our SEO optimizations. So we're going to identify automatically how to, how, you know, pages that are underperforming.

Martyn Redstone (25:45.81)

Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (26:04.221)

Interesting.

Milos (26:09.774)

that are underperforming in terms of SEO, terms of click through rates, in terms of whole sentiment. And then automatically we're going to identify them and then we're going to re-optimize and then we're going to track automatically all of this and get basically alerts and so on and so forth. We're building a bunch of agents and a bunch of all of these things and all of this. So it's really a think tank here. So that's like the next. And then phase after that, we are going after basically our

Martyn Redstone (26:33.607)

Interesting.

Milos (26:39.938)

vision is to this is probably not going to happen this year but maybe next year our vision is to become the not the hiring board but to become the networking platform we want to have your career here we want you to connect with other people we don't want to be a social network it's not going to be something that you post and you you know likes and all that no it's going to be a platform where you find like

not like-minded people, but like people from the same career, same areas. So you can connect and find new opportunities. That's it. It's not LinkedIn. Very bare bones LinkedIn.

Martyn Redstone (27:15.356)

Interesting. Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (27:19.848)

Got it. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I like this thought process of kind of automated conversion rate optimization. I think that that's sorely needed for a lot of job boards. So that sounds really, really exciting that Milos, we've got to the end of our time, unfortunately. I could talk to you about this forever. Automating things like conversion rate optimization is absolutely fascinating. But in the meantime,

Wishing you best of luck with all of your plans for 2025 and thank you so much for joining me today.

Milos (27:55.97)

Thanks so much, Martin. Yeah, we have to do the Joe Rogan type, three hours at least.

Martyn Redstone (28:00.318)

At least, at least. Cool, thank you very much.

Milos (28:02.99)

Thank you for having me.