Four months building a remote job board for the world: $0 revenue, 13 real visitors a day, and what we are changing

This blog will mostly be about the job market: what is open, to whom, and for how much. This post is about us. People who search for remote work are having a hard time, and we think the honest version of what it takes to build something for them is worth writing down.

What we built #

remoty.work started in July 2026 with one idea: a remote job is only useful if you can take it from where you live. Most job boards show every "remote" listing to everyone. Then a person in Algiers, Lagos or Manila opens twenty of them and finds "US only" in the last paragraph of nineteen.

So every listing on remoty.work is read for the countries and regions it accepts. You choose your country once; the board shows what is open to you, and each job page says so in one line.

Four months later:

• 17,000 live remote jobs, about 800 new ones a day, from job boards and directly from employers' own career pages.
• Matching: upload a resume, or just type your role and top skills, and every live job you can take is ranked for fit, with the reasons and the skills it asks for that you do not show yet.
• A connector for AI assistants, so Claude and other assistants can search the board and check eligibility on your behalf.
• Weekly numbers, which you can now read on this blog.

What the analytics said #

On some days our dashboards showed hundreds of visitors from Google, a rising line in analytics, and clicks on the Pro checkout. It felt like it was finally working.

What was true #

When we looked at the raw request logs instead of the dashboards:

• The "Google visitors" were 725 hits from a single country in one day, steady at about 80 an hour, from 334 addresses, and none of them ran a browser. A bot that sets a fake Google referrer.
• Of the 72 visitors on one day whose browser ran our scripts, 41 came from the same country with no referrer at all: scripted browsers.
• Every Pro checkout click that day was a crawler.

After removing all of that, about 13 real people a day used the site. Ten of them came from ChatGPT, which links to our job pages when someone asks about remote jobs in their field or country. They come from Germany, Japan, Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Lithuania, Italy, Turkey, Nigeria and Morocco. Many come back.

Revenue, four months in: $0.

We are writing the bot numbers down because we suspect many small sites are reading the same inflated dashboards and making decisions on them. If your analytics suddenly show growth with no change on your side, check whether those visitors run JavaScript, where they come from, and whether they ever click anything.

The first real buyer, and the bug they found #

On 1 November at 00:56 UTC, a visitor from Nigeria found a job through Bing, ran a resume match, saw five results and 45 more locked, and clicked to upgrade within two minutes. It was the first real attempt to buy anything on the site.

They did not buy. Looking at why, we found a real problem: Pro is unlocked for the email that pays, matched against the account signed in on remoty.work. A visitor who was not signed in could have paid $10 and seen nothing change. Now the upgrade signs you in first, then opens the checkout with that email already filled in.

One visitor, one click, no sale, and it still found the most important bug on the site.

Where people drop off #

Over a day and a half of real visitors: 82 opened a job page, 9 went on to the matching page, 1 ran a match. The matching page asked for a resume file, and most people browsing on a phone do not have one to hand.

So matching now works without a file (type a role and a few skills), and it happens on the job page itself: you see your score for the job you are reading, without leaving it.

The hard part of this niche #

• The supply is uneven. For someone in the US, the board has about 8,700 jobs they can take. For someone in Nigeria, about 600. We can filter honestly; we cannot make employers hire in more countries. The numbers are here.
• The people who need this most have the least to spend. A $10 subscription is a different decision in Lagos than in Ohio.
• Search engines index a fraction of us. Google has indexed about 1,100 of our 17,000 job pages. Job listings are short-lived and look alike across boards, and search engines treat them that way.
• Bots are most of the internet. Every number has to be checked twice before we believe it.

What we are changing #

1. Rewriting the site in Rust. The board, matching and job pages already run on a single fast service; the rest is moving over. Faster pages matter most on the slow mobile connections many of our visitors use.
2. Matching where people already are, on every job page, without a file.
3. More jobs from employers directly. ChatGPT sends people to job pages a few days old, so fresh, complete listings are what bring visitors.
4. This blog. Weekly reports, analysis and guides built from the board's own data, written for people looking for work rather than for recruiters.

We will keep publishing the real numbers here, including when they are bad.