Ruby on Rails Jobs

I finished Le wagon (a bootcamp to learn how to code in 9 weeks) in September 2020. I really sucked at dev and the only thing I knew (not well) was Ruby on Rails.
If you read that and you are not a ruby developer you probably won’t get it. But when you code in Ruby you are part of a cult. You don’t want to do anything else.
I started to look for some jobs, ruby jobs. And it was hard to find jobs only in Ruby. I decided to launch a little job board to help devs like me find Ruby on Rails Jobs

Running a job board is committing to a chicken and egg problem. You need users to attract companies and companies posting jobs to attract users. Most of the job boards start by scraping and filtering existing job boards like Indeed, Linkedin, Welcome to the Jungle… to start. It’s exactly what I did.

I started to have a bit of traffic ~800-1000 uniq visits / month and thought I would try to make a bit of money on the side of job. Making company pay to post a job felt off, making developer pay felt even worse. At the same a cool dude Joe Masilotti launched a banger idea, a reverse job board name Railsdev (he dropped it in 2025). I copied his business model. The idea is you let dev create a profile and companies pay to access the DB. I made my first sell on the internet 🥹 90€. I was hooked. Then a second the same week 🚀. Quit my job and… not a single sales in 2 months 🤣.

I am very lucky to have a wife that is a Ruby dev and tech recruiter. We pivot the business model to a more classic recruitment firm. The idea was the following the job board is an amazing lead magnet. You know who is recruiting and who is looking for a job.

So the tip of the iceberg is a free job board, the real business it a recruitment company charing 10% of the gross salary splitted over 12 months. We made 20K€ in 2023, ~30K€ in 2024 and roughly the same in 2025. Pretty ok for a side project (we both had jobs until recently).

2 things happened during those years. One amazing is my second kid Lily. The 2nd less cool is that the tech market collapsed (no more VC money + AI + too many devs). You are probably aware off it but there is now ~100-200 applicants per job… so the job market flipped from Dev being kings to devs fighting to have work.

And at the same time we also don’t feel 200% confortable prospecting. And if you want to run a recruitment business you have too. Why ? We felt like the middle men, not bringing a lot of value to the table. We are ‘just’ connecting people. It’s very low tech.

One part of that is amazing because we only work with companies reaching out to us. The annoying part is that it’s not how you grow a business.

Ruby on rails jobs is still alive, still making money. It’s clearly in the valley of despair but It’s my first side so I will probably never drop it. But I know it will never be enough to 1) fulfill my desire of building a “real saas”
2) be enough money to rely solely on it

If you want to launch a job board (I think it works for a directory too) here are my main learning

If you are building a job board or a directory feel free to hit reply or DM if you want to chat.