Building my first web product and selling it for 5 figures in 2010

Hello 2020, it’s more than a decade since I’ve been building products. Not only as as engineer, but a product manager of sorts. Lately, I have been reflecting on my journey as an engineer, engineering manager, CTO and I have realized something. I have been half a product manager all my life. As a startup founder, as the first engineer that built the product, as an engineering manager working with product managers, it was how I led and collaborated throughout the journey.

My very first foray into product management started 12 years ago. I was introduced to a web framework called Rails, and Rails changed my appetite for web development. Prior to my acquaintance with Rails, web development was like getting lunch at Fazoli’s in the 2000s, a whole lot of Spaghetti …. ahem, PHP.

The product

Having worked as a C++ software engineer for a few years after graduation, I got suck into the world of Techcrunch and witnessed the rise of Digg and web 2.0 and had wanted to change my focus towards web development. While planning my career change, I had one big question, how much does a web development software engineer earn (in 2007) and what about a software engineer living and working in different states, say California vs New York? I started researching and found various sources of data such as the U.S DOL.

Ideas started flowing into my mind … What if I create a salary search engine, What if I make this a UGC site and allowed users to confidentially and anonymously add their salary data to the site’s “data”. There were so many interesting possibilities and I was really excited to hack out a MVP with my new found AJAX skills.

The approach

If you are a product manager, you might have heard of the “Value Proposition template”. Its adapted from Geoffrey Moore’s book, Crossing the Chasm.

For: [target customer]

Who: [target customer’s needs]

The: [product name]

Is a: [product category]

That: [product benefit/reason to buy]

Unlike: [competitors]

Our product: [differentiation]

Using this template, it was easy to establish a product vision behind the idea and plans to building a MVP.

For Job Seekers,

Who are looking for salary information,

The site, PayScroll.com,

Is a search engine

That offers salary information using job title as the query and displays the information visually

Unlike the DOL site,

PayScroll.com, is fast to use and easy to understand.

The journey

Armed with this mission statement, it was time to start building. Since it was a nights and weekend project, I did not have the luxury of having a designer to help with creating the design for the site. It started with simple wireframing on paper, moving on to using my favorite photo editor, GIMP. I took on the role of the designer on this project! My goal was to have a simple design while providing the features — Search and Salary Data visualization.

Search. The search feature was easy to build since I have already decided where I will be getting the data from. The data set I decided on was published by the U.S Department of Labor in 2 ways, aggregated survey data for over 800 occupations that are classified using the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) System and individual prevailing wage from the H1B Case disclosure archives. Using these 2 sources of data, I ended up with a database of over a million data points and that was good enough in my book.

Salary Data Visualization. This feature was slightly more challenging as the vision was to provide an intuitive and easy to comprehend page that shows the visitor the information they are looking. I decided that there should be 3 visual components:

1. A Google map showing specific data point. This was cool, Google maps API was new and I wanted to build something with it
2. A chart showing percentile — low, medium, high for a job title.
3. A table that visitors can see individual data point ( from the H1B prevailing wage data or User contributed).

Here’s what version 1.0 look like

Growing the product

After the initial, launch of the site, there was not many visitors in the beginning but I had anticipated that since there were $0 marketing dollars for this project. However, I had a plan. The plan was to heavily rely on search engine optimization, SEO.

By leveraging on the popular jobs, popular locations and popular companies sections on the main page that links out to pages that with relevant url slugs. Sure enough, Google started picking up the subpages and in a month, I was seeing organic users discovering PayScroll.com from their Google search. It was exciting to see the plan working!

Monetizing the product

Six months after launching the site, I started to think about how can I monetize the site. I had the option of adding Google Ads but my product thinking hat was not convinced. I wanted something more relevant. What else could be more relevant than job postings, i thought? To experiment on monetizing using job postings, I had to build out a job posting feature and find companies to advertise and that was just too much work for an experiment.

Well, sometimes, timing is everything in the startup world. One weekend, I came across a startup called, Indeed.com. Indeed was one of the earlier search engine for jobs and they’re a startup. I’m a startup too ( well, more like a nights and weekend startup ) so I decided to reached out to see if they have something brewing under the hood for publishers. Well, indeed, they had! They were trialing a publisher API product and on seeing my site, they were happy to grant me access.

In a few weekends, I was able to roll out Search Jobs and Relevant Job Listings on the individual job title pages.

TL;DR Exiting the product

Building PayScroll was one of my first experiences creating and building a web product by myself. There were a lot of AHA moments and a lot learnings along the way. My original goal was never to build a company out of it. It was my way of learning web development using Rails by getting my hands dirty and just doing it. I enjoyed every moment of it but it came a time to say good bye.

The site was growing slowly organically, I was spending less than $50/mth hosting it on a Slicehost ( who remembered Slicehost !!! ) and I was eager to start on my next project. I decided the best exit strategy was to hand this over to someone who can extract more value from “technology”. I listed the site for auction on Flippa. There were a few interested buyers and after some due diligence, I was happy to complete my first exit for a $10000 and the rest is history.