Why RacketJobs Failed: Tiny Markets and the Chicken-Egg-Problem

I like Racket. It is the first and only Scheme or Lisp dialect I have learned, besides Common Lisp. The community is very small, but active, and often comes up with unique and interesting projects.

In 2018 I wanted to give back to the community by building a job board for companies and developers that are using Racket. After three days RacketJobs was born. I shared it on Reddit /r/Racket and HackerNews (188 points). It is still among the top posts of all time on the official Subreddit.

A year later I taking am it down. What went wrong?

Chicken-Egg-Problem & Tiny Markets

A scary combination. Take a dating app for example: Would you sign up on a dating site without any users? Me neither. Dating apps are prime examples for the chicken-egg-problem. Users attract new users. The value, the likelihood of a match with another person, increases with the amount of users on the site.

Back to RacketJobs. In our case programmers attract companies, and the other way around. Attracting programmers was simple. Attracting companies turned out to be almost impossible. After a month of googling, mailing, reaching out to companies I ended up with three companies that are using Racket today, one company planning to hire a Racket developer.

The company that was planning to hire did not post an ad on RacketJobs. Guess why? $99 for access to over 200 Racket developers was not worth it. The market was too small. The list of subscribers barely increased as time passed. Removing the cost barrier did not change anything.

So, I let the domain expire and it was immediately aquired by someone else. Building RacketJobs was a valuable experience with a low time investement. I am curious to see the new site behind the domain in a few months.