2024 Update to Employbl

Hey friend,

July 13th 2018 - that’s when the first career-oriented tech professionals signed up to use Employbl. Almost six years later I’m still hacking away at it — a free product to help tech candidates discover startups and find jobs.

The idea for Employbl first came to me after I graduated from college, taught myself how to code for a bit and was looking for a job. I wanted to find Y Combinator companies headquartered in San Francisco but I couldn’t do it. The platform that came closest was AngelList (since rebranded Wellfound) but the reality is they didn’t have all the startupsand I couldn’t filter by investor. I wanted a map with verfied startups not a bunch of side projects with no money. As I learned more about coding I really wanted to filter companies by the tech stack they used, show me companies that use the Laravel PHP framework. Or these days, show me companies that use Next.js.

I started building a spreadsheet…

I was living in West Oakland, CA at the time. I’d commute into the city on BART and every time I saw a company logo I didn’t recognize I’d add it to the spreadsheet. I wrote a script to populate latitude and longitudes from company addresses and then launched a Google Map of companies in San Francisco on HackerNews. It got to the front page that day. When I came into work that morning my coworkers were talking about it.

From there, Employbl has grown to be a site with:

• Up to date info on over 18,000 tech companies and startups, ranging from pre seed to Fortune 500 companies.

• A combined 28,000 unique, active job listings at the time of this writing.

• Information on private company fundraising from over 45,000 funding rounds.

• Over 60,000 pageviews per month by thousands of candidates.

It honestly feels like the tip of the iceberg in terms of the potential to build a first class product for job seekers.

There have been a few things holding me back:

• I haven’t had time to work on this while also holding a fulltime job.

• The incentives aren’t aligned. For a free product if I make it better and more people use it the only thing I get are higher AWS bills.

• There’s spam. With a free product a lot of people sign up to promote their (sometimes shady) businesses.

That’s why I’m announcing a change to Employbl.

A week from today Employbl is becoming a paid community for job seekers and growth oriented tech professionals.

Making Employbl a paid product will do a few things:

• First it will provide a path to sustainability where incentives are aligned. As more people sign up I can justify spending more time and resources on making the site better.

• Paid membership opens up the possibility for a true community free of spammers where we can discuss things like resume writing, interviews and career growth paths.

• Lastly I think that it will result in higher quality feedback. People often vote with their dollars. This way it’ll be easier to see if what I’m building is providing real value to people.

Special Offer for Early Adopters

In seven days I’m going to gate the Employbl site so that only members can access the company, jobs and funding round search.

One time payment for lifetime membership to Employbl will be $299 for a limited time. The first 100 people to sign up though can get 50% off by using the code EARLYADOPTER.

Remember to use code EARLYADOPTER for 50% off of a lifetime membership.

What will membership to Employbl get me?

• Once you’re a member you’ll be able to continue to access Employbl functionality for finding tech companies and jobs by funding round, Venture Capital firm, headquarters location and tech stack.

• I’ll be launching a members-only Discord to discuss career advancement. I’ve worked as a technical recruiter and senior software engineer and look forward to providing resume feedback, interview tips and tech coding help where I can.

• Lifetime access to all future product improvements. We’ve got a lot on our roadmap from exclusive tech industry reporting to improved funding round search, better tech stack data and onboarding founders of early stage startups into the network.

That’s all for now. I hope that you see membership to Employbl as an investment in yourself and an investment in us to make a damn good platform for tech job seekers and growth oriented tech professionals.

If you have any questions or concerns about membership or your account just hit “reply”. I’ll read every response.

Until next time,

Connor