How Sam Built a Job Board That Outranks Indeed & LinkedIn

Introduction

Imagine launching a side project just to learn a new programming language — and accidentally building a job board that ranks #1 on Google for high-traffic keywords like "software engineering jobs in Dubai." That’s exactly what Sam Mokhtary, the founder of Zero Tax Jobs, pulled off in under a year.

In this episode of the JBoard Interview Series, Sam walks us through how he scaled a hyper-niche job board from scratch, reached over 20,000 monthly unique visitors, and beat the biggest names in the industry — all by focusing on SEO, user intent, and ruthless simplicity.

Watch The Full Interview

5 Key Takeaways for Job Board Builders

1. Niche by Location, Not Concept

Sam originally positioned Zero Tax Jobs around the concept of tax-free salaries. Sounds catchy — but it didn’t align with how people search. He quickly pivoted to target specific locations like Dubai and Saudi Arabia, which aligned better with real search behavior.

“No one Googles ‘jobs with no tax.’ They search ‘software jobs in Dubai.’ SEO taught me that fast.”

Takeaway: Build your niche around how people search, not how you think they should search.

2. Backlinks > Content (At First)

When starting out, Sam discovered that backlinks were a stronger growth lever than content. He spent days manually submitting Zero Tax Jobs to directories, job sites, and niche communities — earning the trust signals Google looks for.

Takeaway: Don’t just crank out blog posts. Build domain authority first by earning high-quality backlinks.

3. Manual First, Automate Later

Sam spent months manually curating job listings to deeply understand what quality looked like in his market. Only after learning that process did he build automation — with manual checks and blacklists built in to keep standards high.

“People stay on my site for 4+ minutes because I only show them the best jobs. Not 2,000 listings they have to scroll through.”

Takeaway: Nail your curation strategy before scaling. Quality beats quantity — and drives engagement.

4. SEO is About Matching Intent — Not Gaming the System

Sam’s SEO strategy wasn’t about tricking Google. It was about aligning with what real users actually type. By targeting long-tail keywords like “remote frontend developer jobs in Dubai,” he avoided head-to-head battles with job board giants — and still won.

Takeaway: Google rewards relevance. Own the long tail and make your pages exactly what the searcher wants.

5. Great UX is Your Secret Weapon

Most job boards throw thousands of jobs at users. Sam does the opposite. By curating only 40–50 high-quality roles a day and keeping a clean, fast interface, users trust his platform — and come back regularly.

Takeaway: Design for focus and clarity. In a world of noise, a simple UX can be your biggest advantage.

Conclusion

Sam didn’t set out to build a business. He just wanted to learn Go. But by choosing a smart niche, obsessing over SEO, and putting user experience first, he built a job board that punches far above its weight.

If you’re building a job board today, this episode is packed with tactical, no-fluff insights on how to start small, grow smart, and beat the big guys — without a massive team or budget.

Full Transcript

Martyn Redstone (00:01.848)

Sam, thank you so much for joining me today.

Sam (00:04.278)

Hi, Martin. Thanks for having me.

Martyn Redstone (00:06.334)

Absolute pleasure, absolute pleasure. So Sam, let's jump straight into it. Why don't you give me a bit about your professional background and what led you to start up Zero Tax Jobs?

Sam (00:18.568)

And my background is quite complicated. I left the UK when I was 21, moved to Japan as a neuroscientist. So I was specializing in fMRI, reading the human visual system and basically decoding those signals using something pretty similar to AI, AI now. But in the night times, I was moonlighting as a nightclub promoter.

working with bands like the AAS, CSS, Metronomy, Members of the Stone Roses. And I ended up basically quitting my neuroscience job at some point to start a crowdfunding company for live music.

And I worked in Japan for a long time doing that. And I explain this because, you know, one of my big loves is music, concerts, crowdfunding, that kind of social element you get with that kind of product. But coronavirus came 80 years into that business. And in Japan, it crushed the live music market. We couldn't do a single concert. We couldn't do anything. This whole business, I built up to like a seven figure USD revenue business on my own.

Martyn Redstone (01:16.184)

Mm.

Sam (01:35.032)

and just, you know, couldn't run it, couldn't get any money out. Luckily, I ran a cash positive business and I was able to sell off my assets and I sat in a very good place, not technically having to do anything, but I knew I needed at some point to get back on the horse and, you know, start working again. So I started doing consultancy stuff around computer programming, AI, things like that. But I was...

Martyn Redstone (01:38.295)

Yeah

Sam (02:03.584)

still had this thing, you know, I really want my own thing. When you do consultancy, you know, you really, you feel like an employee, you still do. And I prefer not being an employee. prefer making the decisions, you know? So I, I was looking for just a side project, something to do. And it's funny, you know, when I was 20 and I started that crazy crowdfunding business, I was fearless and I would try anything, probably because I say,

Martyn Redstone (02:14.254)

Yeah.

Sam (02:31.714)

fearless, probably stupid is probably the right word. And so yeah, I would just try stuff, you know, without thinking about it. And hey, some stuff worked. But as a guy in his 30s, that changes and you start going, this isn't a good idea. This is never going to work. That's idiotic. Don't do it, you know. So every idea I had, was just putting it in the bin, in the bin, in the bin, in the bin. And eventually I said, Look, you just have to build something.

You know, because the more you build something, the more ideas you'll have, you know, you'll enjoy it, you'll commit to it, you know, this kind of thing. And at the time I was doing a project in Golang, or Go, some people call it Golang, but it's Go. And I was, I'd never written Go before, but I really enjoyed it. I thought, wow, this is a really cool language. It's just so simple and clean and yeah, I like it a lot. And I just said, you know what? I really want to write more Go.

Martyn Redstone (03:07.598)

Yeah.

Sam (03:27.992)

So what can I do to write more Go? And I thought, well, you know what's really easy when you don't know a language? A job board. A job board is not a complicated thing to build if you code. It's a very simple thing. so yeah, I was just like, OK, I'm going to build a full stack Go application, a job board. So that was why I got started. So very long story to get there, but that's why. And then, yeah, I had to choose a niche. I had to choose a niche.

And I was like, you know, what's my niche going to be? And from my experience in Japan, I had a friend, he ran a job board. I think it's Paul, Paul, Paul McMahon. And he runs a job board called Japan, not Japan Dev, Tokyo Dev.com. Japan Dev is another site, another guy runs like Eric. But yeah, both really good job boards. And then, yeah, he, he basically.

Martyn Redstone (04:17.41)

Yes.

Sam (04:27.672)

They both have done this thing where they got a really niche job board specifically around finding English speaking software developers jobs in Japan. And they've grown these businesses really nicely, know, with very small teams. I thought, you know, having seen the transformation from when Paul first started, which was that basically, you know, Japanese companies did not know how to communicate to foreigners. They didn't know how to say, hey,

Martyn Redstone (04:36.974)

Mm.

Sam (04:54.288)

and come work for us. They were still doing things in a very Japanese way. They weren't international enough. Paul really helped improve their understanding of what it took to attract international developers. Things like wage transparency, things like explaining the visa system, things which seem obvious to us, but to a Japanese company, you just know, wouldn't you? If you want to come to Japan, you just know. But no, of course, it's not like that. So Paul has basically made a great business doing that.

Martyn Redstone (05:00.27)

you

Martyn Redstone (05:16.835)

Yeah.

Sam (05:21.768)

I spotted a lot of similarities between that market and the UAE, Dubai in particular. I really thought this market, doesn't have that level of sophistication that the Japanese markets develop for attracting international developers. It's a bit different from Japan because it's a headhunter market. Most of the companies, they bring in international talent and that international talent isn't necessarily saying I want to move to Dubai.

Martyn Redstone (05:28.077)

Okay.

Martyn Redstone (05:39.064)

Mm-hmm.

Sam (05:50.944)

It's a headhunter contacting them saying, you could move to Dubai. You didn't know it was an option. Why don't you come? And you know, those headhunters are making a lot of money doing that. And these companies are paying a lot of cash to bring them over. And I started thinking, you know, I think there's probably an angle to really educate people that the device, an opportunity you should be thinking of anyway as a software developer. So this was kind of an opportunity that I saw and I saw that nobody was running a good niche.

Martyn Redstone (06:00.504)

Mm-hmm.

Sam (06:20.258)

job board for software engineering and technical work and any kind of tech work for that market. So I started thinking, you know, what should I do? How should I market this? What's the idea? And I thought, well, probably a lot of people who are looking or interested, the thing they're most going to be interested in is not paying taxes, know, no income tax, right? So I thought, okay, you know, that's, I can probably make something around that. And I came up with

Martyn Redstone (06:27.342)

Okay.

Martyn Redstone (06:39.918)

Yeah.

Sam (06:47.114)

zero tax jobs, because that's what it is. It's a very simple domain name. It's very easy to remember. And it says exactly what it is. So I started there and I started thinking, okay, actually, maybe it's not just to buy, it can be all over, can be everything. And so when I started, I kind of went more with the zero tax angle, I was talking more about zero tax. And, but quite quickly, I started to realize, no, I really need to niche specifically around specific countries where there's most demand, if I'm to grow this.

in terms of SEO. Anyway, I'll stop there because think I've explained what you asked me.

Martyn Redstone (07:21.046)

Yeah, I don't know. That's super interesting. Super interesting. so kind of building the job or came around by accident because you enjoyed you enjoyed writing in go or developing and go whatever you want to call it. And and and so came around by accident. thought, well, yeah, exactly. know, yeah, it'll just.

Sam (07:39.576)

these days it's prompting AI in Go, isn't it? Prompting AI for Go. That's what it is these days, it? Vibe coding.

Martyn Redstone (07:47.031)

letting an agent decide which language is best or something. Just say, I want to build a job board and let it go. Yeah, so job board was the simplest kind of way of kind of messing around with the code. Deciding on a niche because of your acquaintances in Japan and then and then kind of going for it and then realizing that actually rather than niching on the zero tax jobs, niching on, you know, the the location as well, because it's it's about kind of getting deeper and deeper into that.

Sam (07:49.205)

That's it. That's it.

Sam (08:17.08)

Well, just to jump in there, I should explain this more as a mistake, really. I think it was getting greedy. mean, sometimes you come up with an idea. And originally, the niche idea was UAE. But then I got a bit greedy and did that classic thing of going, I can appeal to everybody. I can get a much bigger market. And that's a mistake. And I realized that quite quickly. No, you can't. You're never going to rank on Google with SEO if that's your traction option. If you want to bring people in through Google Search,

Martyn Redstone (08:32.555)

and

Sam (08:44.194)

you're never going to rank with something kind of generic that people aren't searching for. People aren't searching for jobs with no tax. No one searches for that. Income tax free jobs, that's what I want. No one thinks that. They might think it in their head, but if they think it, they think, what are the places where I can get an income tax free job? And then they go, okay, I can go to UAE, I can go to KSA, I can go, and then they start searching for their job title in that place. And so if you want to, if you want to,

get the traffic in, you have to position yourself in the way that the users are searching. So that was a mistake, I think, that I made very early on.

Martyn Redstone (09:23.16)

then quickly recognise that mistake and solve that by focusing back down. Is it UAE, wider UAE, or is it Dubai? Where are you focusing your niche on?

Sam (09:38.178)

So the keywords I use right now are Dubai and Saudi Arabia because it's a funny thing. I don't think many people go and search United Arab Emirates, UAE jobs. It's not really the way they do it. They tend to search Dubai, it's a high traffic word, and Saudi Arabia is also a high traffic word. And so I kind of positioned around that and that's been good. I found the balance of having enough breadth to have options in two markets.

Martyn Redstone (09:42.893)

Okay.

Martyn Redstone (10:08.161)

Okay.

Sam (10:08.31)

But narrow enough to basically get to number one, number two for really important search terms. So for example, if you're in the UAE and you search software engineering jobs in Dubai, I'm either number one or number two, depending on the day. it's basically me and Indeed. So I've knocked all of the big guys.

you know, off the top because they're just not niche enough on that topic. So this is really what's driven my traffic. think people look at my site, I think who don't, it's funny, I talk to employers these days a little bit and you can tell they've never heard of me, you know? And they're like, how can you be, how can you be in the top two on Google? Cause they've never heard of me. I'm like, because you're not searching. You're not there searching for a job. That's why you don't know me, but the job seekers do. The people who want to work with you do.

Martyn Redstone (10:53.038)

Mm.

Martyn Redstone (11:06.073)

Yeah. And that's quite interesting. So there's a couple of things that I want to go on to based on a couple of things you were just saying. So you mentioned quite a lot about niching down based on keywords, what people are searching for and those kinds of things. So is SEO your strategy for attracting people? I know you're now kind of like you said, like first or second place on Google searches for software engineering jobs in Dubai, but.

Sam (11:06.892)

They know me, you know?

Martyn Redstone (11:35.521)

If you were giving advice to somebody who was kind of starting out and had decided on a niche and wanted to kind of go for it, talk us through that journey of how you kind of looked at the keywords, how you decided on where to focus, and also now what you're doing to take advantage of that search traffic.

Sam (12:02.52)

Well, the first thing I'd say is I think it's really important whenever you run any business and you're thinking about marketing. I think you have to be strategy agnostic. I think it's a mistake that people make is that they see, that worked really well for that guy SEOs the way. Go out and understand what other people are doing. It's really important to understand what all the options are. But what's going to happen is you're going to hopefully experiment a little bit with each of those.

Martyn Redstone (12:12.728)

Mm-hmm.

Sam (12:30.104)

And then very quickly, you're going to start to smell what sells for you. You what's working. What's the, what is the method which is bringing people in? And that's what I did. I didn't just go, I'm just doing SEO straight away. wasn't the only thing I did. I started posting things in different places. I think for me, a lot of them, a lot of them are obvious. I just can't see software engineers really like serious software engineers, the ones that I want to attract because I know the employers will want to meet those guys. They are not on Instagram.

Right. They're not going on Instagram, looking at like reels of guys wearing Rolex watches in Dubai, like come work in Dubai as a programmer. Here's my Rolex. They're not doing that. That's not happening. So you quickly start to work out, the audience isn't there. It's here. know, where are they? How are they finding these things? And so that's what I did. And that's how I came down to SEO. So I think that's really important. Keep that in mind because

Martyn Redstone (13:06.638)

Crypto Bro, yeah.

Sam (13:24.62)

You might be starting a job board in something very different. I let's say you are in construction. You're in a construction job board. I've been looking at construction recently. I love it. I love construction. I love construction teams. They're great fun people to be around. It's like a crazy pirate. Because of my promotion background doing concerts. I always think being in a concert is like being on a crazy pirate ship with all these random people. And construction's like that too. So I love it. So I've been like, maybe I want to do a job board in construction.

But if I did construction, I would probably be thinking, you know, maybe Instagram is good. Maybe TikTok is good. Are good. Cause I walk past construction sites and I see guys sitting there watching, you know, some serious TikTok, you know, about various stuff. So I'm like, it could be, it could work for you. So keep that in mind, you know, and try things out, see what works and what is working is the thing to double down on. So to that, back to your question, I, I, I doubled down on SEO.

Martyn Redstone (13:58.765)

you

Martyn Redstone (14:17.196)

interesting

Sam (14:21.592)

And so I think you want to know a bit more about how I did that. Okay. So for me, when I first started, I was like, oh, I've never really done SEO as a specialty, you know? And so I started looking at the topic and tried to understand it better. And there was a lot of snake oil, like a lot of snake oil, they spot it straight away. There's these, everyone's saying, you must do this. This is the trick. You gotta do it this way. It's the only way to do SEO. It's like, it's, most of it's garbage. Like the reality is, is that why...

Martyn Redstone (14:24.546)

Yeah, please.

Sam (14:51.04)

How does Google work? It's pretty simple. Google wants to recommend good content to people because the more it does that, the more you use Google and the more advertising dollars they can get. So that's what they've tried to do. That's the system they wanted to create. Yes, you might be able to game the system. You might be able to cheat it for a bit. But Google's going to change the system and punish you later. So don't bother. Just do things which Google likes. That's it. Then there's the next part.

Someone else will, you'll hear other people say that. But then what they'll try and tell you is, so you need to write great content. You need to write the best content there's ever been. And it's just not true. Just do a Google search now for a lot of topics and you'll see a lot of the content is AI garbage and it's ranking on number one. So that tells you that currently the state of play in Google is that unfortunately they haven't really figured out how to guarantee high quality content right now.

So they're doing something else. What are they doing? Backlinks. It's the backlinks. And what's a backlink, in case someone doesn't know listening to this call? It's a link to your web page. So it became very clear to me that you've got a strategy which involves get a lot of backlinks and then do content. Content is important to some extent. You do need some. But it's way less important than backlinks.

Martyn Redstone (15:45.464)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (16:05.507)

Mm-hmm.

Sam (16:08.6)

But of course, everyone tells you the content's more important because they can sell you the content. It's very easy for someone to go, oh yeah, I'm going to make content for you. Just pay me this money. Nobody wants to go and get you backlinks because it's hard. I mean, if I talk to you, Martin, say, Martin, please can I have a backlink? I really need a backlink. In fact, for this interview, I said to you, oh, will I get a backlink? Because it's so hard. They're so hard to get. You want one. Of course you do.

Martyn Redstone (16:30.06)

It's the first thing you ask me. It's literally the first thing you ask me.

Sam (16:36.226)

But that's why they're the important thing that you need to build. So go and take the time to find a way to get backlinks. If you're doing SEO on day one, getting your website linked to, it's so basic. But you will quickly find, as those things start to get recognized and crawled by Google, that your rankings go up and your volume of traffic coming into your pages goes up. Even if you get your content strategy wrong on day one,

Once you put the backlinks, when you change the content strategy, that's like an amplifier. So get the backlinks right, if nothing else. So that's how I started. And I can explain more if you want about the actual techniques I use, the tools I use. But you know.

Martyn Redstone (17:19.022)

I was going say absolutely. think that it's one of those subject areas that we haven't really dived deep into as yet in terms of backlinks and how to get them. Like you said, they're really difficult to get. So I'd be really interested to understand what your strategy was, what your methodology is. So yeah, I'd absolutely be really, really interested in hearing that.

Sam (17:42.328)

Well, the truth is that when you get into SEO, people are often trying to sell you expensive tools, like maybe SEM Rush or something like this. And the reality is that probably at the level that we're working at, most job board owners, we don't have that much competition. If you've chosen a good niche, we don't have that much competition.

Martyn Redstone (18:00.91)

Mm.

Sam (18:01.08)

And you don't need a crazy expensive tool. You can probably get away with something cheap like Ubersuggest from Neil Patel. It's not very expensive. can buy like a lifetime membership to it, I think for like 400 bucks or even less. And that's basically two months of SEMrush, or they'll charge you. So you might as well go for the cheaper one and have lifetime access. And that's what I ended up doing. I tried SEMrush and I thought, yeah, it's got all of these features, but I mean...

They hardly make a difference. They just make you bamboozle and feel you've to do all this stuff that doesn't make a difference to a guy not working at the top level. We're not working at the top level. get your hands on the tool like that. And you can do things like look at your backlinks. Look at other people's backlinks. Real simple. Maybe you want to start with if you're doing this. Maybe you want to put my site in.

Martyn Redstone (18:34.146)

Yeah.

Sam (18:53.408)

to just see what backlinks have I got. Because if I've got those backlinks and I don't have a lot of time to work on this site, right, then you can probably get those backlinks too, right? So just look at what other backlinks other people got in similar genres to you and you've been given a hit list of all the places that you should go and get backlinks to.

And those lists will usually tell you how influential one of those links is, how important it is. So you'll already get a priority list of which order you should go in. Work through the list, OK? And do this for multiple sites. Find multiple sites, find multiple opportunities, and go and get those backlinks.

It's time consuming. You can take you 10, 20 minutes to fill in a form or whatever the site wants to grant you that. Often it's things like becoming a member of a website. Let's give a good example. Product Hunt is a popular one where you announce your site and your service. That will give you a backlink usually. So things like that. just go and do it. Spend a few days doing it.

and in a few months time it'll pay off. I my site right now is still not a huge, super well-backing site. I've got a domain authority of around 18. But for a site which has been around for less than a year, it's not bad. I look at people in Dubai, not my competitors, but I look at recruiters, actual recruitment companies.

who have specialized in my niche, and I have a more authoritative site than they do. And they've been working for 10 years in that market. And they're supposed to be trying to communicate who they are and attract clients, especially employer clients. And they haven't even got a well-linked site. So what that means is that when an employer is searching best recruiters in whatever, they're probably not ranking that high.

Martyn Redstone (20:26.744)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (20:43.886)

Yeah, no, absolutely. And it pays off because I know that your visitor numbers are looking really healthy. Why don't you talk us through where you're up to in terms of metrics and numbers?

Sam (20:58.454)

Yeah, so I'm doing 20,000 unique users a month, getting to 20,000. And on that, I get 100,000 page views per month. what else have I got? got the one I'm actually most happy about is my average time on page is 4 minutes and 21 seconds, which I think is like a crazy.

high time on page number. Like usually people just drop into a page and disappear. They all don't like this. I'm off. So for me, it means I've got a really engaged audience. And also my bounce rate, which people don't know what that is. means how often someone just arrives and leaves straight away. That's really common on most websites. People will just come, this isn't what I want. I'm leaving. My bounce rate is 30%, which is, like for a job board, think is in the low category.

Martyn Redstone (21:28.654)

Yeah, I think for a job board that's pretty difficult. Yeah.

Sam (21:51.402)

So I feel like, you I've really hit on something that with the job seekers, they really care about what I'm doing. So that makes me feel really good.

Martyn Redstone (22:00.207)

And so, looking at those metrics, 20,000 unique views, do you say? Unique visitors, I couldn't remember then. Unique users, sorry. So 20,000 unique users.

Sam (22:10.188)

Good accusers, yeah.

sorry, that's not the correct term. You know these terms, get away from you. Users makes it sound like they're registered all on the site. That's not correct. Unique visitors, that's the word.

Martyn Redstone (22:17.026)

Yes.

No, users yet. Yeah, so 20,000 unique visitors a month who are staying on the site for four minutes at a time and only 30 % of them are bouncing. What's keeping people on? What's keeping people on there?

Sam (22:35.896)

Well, I think there's a few things. think obviously when I compare what I do with say Indeed or LinkedIn, I think like it's overwhelming when you go on a site like LinkedIn. You just go search for jobs in my markets and it's, you have to go through about 20 jobs till you find one which is good, you know, or even relevant to a software developer.

You might get like some crazy role about civil engineering or just stuff which doesn't make any sense. And I feel that what I'm doing is I'm curating. I have a kind of standard. won't list jobs that I don't want to think of polite word, not good companies. I want to list jobs at companies that are serious about software engineering and they recognize that it's an important part of their product.

Martyn Redstone (23:01.88)

Yeah.

Sam (23:29.846)

not something that they just tack on, or at least a technologically led company, you know, who has an open mind to employing international developers. So I've created that list. And so I probably post around 40 to 50 jobs a day rather than 2,000.

Martyn Redstone (23:39.768)

Yeah.

Sam (23:49.592)

And I think that makes the workload really manageable. So it's a kind of funny concept. Some people think, if I had 2000, I should get really long times on page. But I think what you're going to get is you're going to get people overwhelmed and just going, yeah, I can't, no, I'm off now. I'm tired. I think like when you go to a site where, know, if I check it once a day and I see the listings, I know the best jobs are here. And I know I've spent my

Martyn Redstone (24:14.776)

Yep.

Sam (24:17.14)

five minutes really well and found the best jobs and I've only worked on the ones which are relevant to me. What I generally see is I see some sessions which are really long, like 30, 40 minutes, and I think those people are maybe more active in the application process, those ones. But yeah, actually I posted a screenshot on my LinkedIn today actually.

of some recent session replays that I got from Post Hog, which is what I use for monitoring. It's a great service. recommend it. And yeah, I mean, you can see like the whole mix of people in different countries and the kind of time lens, but I was really happy just to see all of these people from all of these different countries. have like Sweden, Portugal, India, Pakistan, the UK, I had lots of people in the UK. Obviously US, well the US wasn't in that list actually, because I think at the time of day, but.

Martyn Redstone (24:50.947)

Mm-hmm.

Sam (25:13.528)

You know, it's a really healthy mix of people from all over the world and not too skewed to one market, which I think when you compare me to something like LinkedIn, LinkedIn is very popular for Dubai jobs with the Indian and Pakistani market only. I think if you are putting a job up there, you're going to get 95 % applicants from those markets. Um, you know, there's a lot of social media content out there on Tik Tok.

on Instagram in those markets saying like you must apply for jobs in LinkedIn. It is the place you have to do it. You have to do it. And days get very viral. And I don't know. It's I think it's more important to diversify your hiring sources. So if anybody was watching this, it was a hiring manager, I'd be saying, you know, you know, you need to try and open the net a bit and appeal to people from everywhere. So you get the most diverse workforce.

Martyn Redstone (25:53.816)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (26:13.23)

Yeah, no, it's really, really interesting. So I'm interested in going back to that, almost that quality over quantity situation. posting 20 to 50 jobs a day, not having thousands of jobs on there, making it a really kind of quality experience for people who are coming to the site because only the best jobs are posted on there.

Is that something you're doing manually or are you still automating that backfill of jobs or are you, because you said you're curator, how's that working for you?

Sam (26:50.072)

So I'm the kind of guy that when I start a project, I usually try and do it manually as much as I can, because by doing it manually, I really understand the process. So I started off for a very long time every day. I would literally go in my spare time. I would spend like 30 minutes to an hour at lunchtime going through the listed jobs on other job sites. I wrote a little widget, a Chrome widget.

Martyn Redstone (26:59.758)

Mm-hmm.

Sam (27:18.018)

which basically allowed me to instantly send that to my site and it would then process it and convert it to a job format for my site and post it. So that's how I did it. So it was human oversight and real curation of all jobs with automation just to push it. That's the way I did it.

Martyn Redstone (27:26.296)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (27:38.05)

Yeah, nice.

Sam (27:39.224)

So, yes, I was manually doing that for a very long time and a couple of weeks ago, I thought, can I replace me? You know, can I actually find a way to have the same kind of curation that I do mentally, you know, automatically? And I deployed something into production, which is doing that. And it's been doing it for about two weeks now.

And I'm pretty happy with the results so far, but I'm going to keep monitoring it and see how it goes and see how the traffic changes, things like that. Does it go up? What's going to happen? So yeah.

Martyn Redstone (28:17.698)

Yeah, interesting.

Sam (28:18.936)

That's my current approach is I should automate it more because I don't really have an hour every lunchtime, you know, forever to do that. It's just not feasible. And that hour lunchtime is an hour that I want to spend doing stuff like this, which is why actually that you kindly invited me for this interview a while ago and I couldn't take it because I was like, where's my, where's my hour going to go? You know, need the hour for jobs now. Now I can take these interviews. So anybody else wants to interview me? I'm ready. Come on, please.

Martyn Redstone (28:42.089)

you

Well, no, that's cool. That's cool. I really appreciate you spending your lunch hour kind of talking to me rather than adding jobs to the site. And it's great to hear that you've gone through that kind of process of, because like you said, you want to get the best on there. So the manual curation is really important. And that's why it has to be manual. But then just starting to kind of slowly automate that sounds like a really interesting thing. Yes, I suppose it's slowly.

Sam (29:09.442)

with the automation still has manual elements. You know, I keep like black lists and white lists of companies. So it's kind of, started to realize that often you decide if you're going to post a job based on the company. So I found a way to, it's not very complicated really to say this company never take their jobs, like never put them there. And then these job companies, yeah, okay, this is a job that it could be good, but review the content. If the content satisfies these requirements, post it, this sort of thing. So I create a kind of heuristic.

Martyn Redstone (29:20.376)

Yeah.

Sam (29:39.392)

sort of process and yeah, and it's allowed me to deliver what I do mentally and I am happy with the results. The only thing is that I...

I think I've got what's called a review list, which is the, if it's something which just falls outside of my white list, black list, I add it to a list for later. And I said, I'll start off just reviewing those every weekend. I'll have a look, I'll read through the list and check out those companies. And if there's companies that I think they're good, I'll add them, you know, and let their jobs get put on the site. That's the way I'm going to, I think I'm going to do it for now, but at some point I might, I might replace that too. But for now, I think that's good. keeps that level of I have vetted this.

Martyn Redstone (30:12.27)

and

Sam (30:22.134)

company. I think this company is good enough. I think it's worthwhile, you know.

Martyn Redstone (30:26.434)

Yeah, no, that's great. Like I said, you know, it sounds very much like you're going down this route of quantity rather than sorry, quality rather than quantity. I'll get it right one day. But but but and that's like, like we said, you know, that's what potentially is keeping people on site for such a long time is is the fact you're giving them that that quality experience and not just throwing up thousands of jobs that they have to sift through continuously. So it seems to be working. That's for sure. So that

final few minutes of this conversation. I'd like to ask our guests that one final question, which is if you could go back to the beginning of when you first were thinking about starting zero tax jobs, what would you tell yourself? What have you learned over the course of your journey and what would you like to tell yourself right at the beginning?

Sam (31:20.92)

What would I, oh, it's such a difficult question. It goes against my belief system, that question. I'm a real big believer that you're only ready to do what you're ready to do and you need to be more forgiving of yourself, of where you are in life. And I don't look back at any decisions that I've made in my life with real regrets because I recognized that that was the decision I was ready to make then. And I feel the same way about this. Like I can't honestly look back and think,

Martyn Redstone (31:23.5)

like an Indian.

Martyn Redstone (31:45.74)

Love it. Yeah.

Sam (31:48.44)

That was right for me. Like I explained, you know, it was a time in my life where I had analysis paralysis. And even if this project never comes to big, big money or something like that, you know, whatever, I don't know what I'm looking for with this project, you know, even if that doesn't happen. And it was so good that it got me out of analysis paralysis. I got me, you know, working part time again on something for me.

that's the most important thing. So I don't think I'd change anything.

Martyn Redstone (32:20.28)

That's a answer. Great place to finish. know, that if it wasn't for this, you'd be stuck in analysis paralysis. And I suppose that that old saying of, you are the product of all your experiences, which I tend to kind of stick to as well. So I totally get where you're coming from. Sam, look, it's been an absolute pleasure, absolute pleasure talking to you today and really hearing about your story as well. So, you know, I'd like to say thank you so much for spending your lunch break and spending your time.

with me today just sharing the benefit of your experience. Thank you so much.

Sam (32:54.252)

Likewise, Martin, I really appreciate it. And yeah, if anybody ever wants to reach out, my email is open. on the site in the about section. Just send me a mail. I'm happy to have a chat if you want any advice.

Martyn Redstone (33:04.982)

We'll add all of your contact details to the video descriptions. People can get a hold of you nice and easily and really appreciate that. Sam, thank you so much. Cheers.

Sam (33:13.08)

That's great, Thanks, Marvin. Take care. Bye.