Remotelane.com is the seventh startup from @ronatory in the 24 Startup in 24 Months challenge.
Where do I start with this post? 😃
I think I just write it down the way so that in 10 years when I will read it again, I will just smile 😁 (or just if I read it again) btw I listened to the official Remotelane.com 5.0 Playlist while writing this down. Just created this playlist for it (will make a future SoundCloud set out of it) 😉 You may get also a feeling of how long it took me to finish writing down this 5min blogpost thanks to this playlist. Actually this set was recorded on this day.
Did you press the play button? ▶️ Ok, let's start 🚀
Remotelane.com has a little bit of history for me and the current state of what you see right now of it is the fifth iteration. It's now five years since we introduced the first version.
I remember that we got the inspiration for the site from levelsio's RemoteOK. So thanks to him, that you kind of read this blogpost and you came across this 24 Startups in 24 Months Challenge at all.
Back in 2017 @sonnypgs and me thought about which domain we could use for this project and there it was "remotelane.com" was free... We couldn't believe it in the beginning. At this time we both knew The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime and combined the words "remote" and "lane" (from fastlane) to have "remotelane".
Thanks to Product Hunt, you will find the release of the first version here. There we targeted only "Software Developers" because we thought "Hey starting with a niche is always good and then go to the big market...". Also I remember that most of the application if not all was written by @sonnypgs with Ruby On Rails in a couple of days as a side project (It's still a side project and always will be 😉).
The difference to version 1.0 was here that we tried to let everyone post jobs for free on our page to get more traction and awareness.
Puhhhh version 3.0. It was so far the most successful launch and which got us so far the most attention in the www until today. A detailed post about version 3.0 you can find via #244: A Dream Comes True - Featured On Product Hunt. If I haven't mentioned in the linked post, here we just changed from "Remote Jobs for Software Developers" to "Remote Jobs for Everyone", because we can 🤓 Since this release we could put the Product Hunt "#4 Product of the Day" Badge on the site 🏅 which lead to more trust and page views.
We added a category filter in this version. Also the search was improved via highlighting the search term in the results.
It's kind of funny that with this version 5.0 we also have the fifth year of development on this side project. So Happy fifth Anniversary (which was actually on May 2nd 😅)
So what is the difference to the versions before?
The tech stack
First of all, I completely rebuild the app with a new tech stack which I want to mention first, because right now I have the feeling the first time since I started developing apps/websites that I kind of found my go to stack for web development (I know this will change again with time) 😊 which is the following:
-Digital Ocean for hosting everything
-RedwoodJS for frontend and backend
-GraphQL for querying and mutating data
-PostgreSQL for the database
-Tailwind.css + Tailwind UI for styling
-Github for code repository and deployment
-ElasticEmail to support the daily/weekly mail newsletter
Before the current stack we relied on Heroku and paid already something for a database plan. They announced recently that they wanna remove their free product plans. So that's another reason switching to the current stack.
So we don't need to use Heroku anymore :). But thanks to Heroku 🙏. Without you, we couldn't have played for free with a lot of random projects and Remotelane.com was one of these.
The landing page
The job cells are bigger and include now tags. You can filter by the most used tags in combination with categories. Thanks also to the previous development of earlier startups like Web3RemoteJob.com, NFTRemoteJob.com and Coypot.com the development of the current version was so much easier and kind of playing a little bit lego. I think right now of these two:
"One Thing Leads To Another And This To Another" - 1, 2
and
"You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." - Steve Jobs
Also a job description was added compared to the versions before. You can expand/collapse the description by clicking on the job cell. When you search with a specific term it will be highlighted in the title, company, description and location.
Also a detail page for each job is now accessible with readable URLs e.g. https://remotelane.com/remote-job/dropbox-cash-accountant. And btw you can copy the url via a "Copy Link" button above the "Apply" button.
Example for filtering by category
Example for filtering by tags
Example for combining filtering by tags and categories
The "Post a Remote Job" Page now includes a Live Preview for the Remote Job you want to submit and examples on how a published remote job post looks like. And also you can choose between three pricing options, which are:
BASIC (for currently $149): 30 days posted, not fixed on top
FEATURED (for currently $199): 30 days posted, highlighted, fixed on top, fixed on top in search results, fixed on top of category filter results, fixed on top of tag filter results and fixed on top in the mail newsletter
PREMIUM (for currently $249): FEATURED + posted on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
Payments are done via Stripe Checkout
For the near future the focus will be on the SEO side of this page on how to improve it.
Thats it. Looking forward to the next five years of this side project ❤️
As long as we have jobs in our world which can be done remotely, this site will support those who seek for a remote job and those who provide a remote job (with this little back story) 🙂
And Whoever read until the end, let me tell you "Never, ever give up on your dreams :). It's that simple."
If you like Remotelane.com, you can upvote it via Product Hunt 🚀
Also check out the seventh startup from @sonnypgs.
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