This week I built my first job board based on a personal experience I had four years ago.
In 2022, I bought a used Subaru Outback off Facebook Marketplace, and somehow it ended up getting me an $80,000 a year job.
The quick backstory: The guy selling the car was asking $12,000. I'd just shut down my shoe company after 5 years, so I was trying to knock off some cash and barter. When we met up I opened my trunk and it looked like a little flea market (camera lenses, an old Mac, a bunch of shoes).
He was kinda skeptical, but he went for it.
I was also job hunting at the time, and I'd heard referrals were the best way into a corporate job. So in the middle of haggling, I asked him what he did for work. Turns out he was an account executive at a pretty big tech company.
After negotiating, we landed on $9,700, a few of my nicer camera lenses, and a referral for an SDR role at his company (sales development rep, the entry level job in tech sales).
And...I got the job!
Most directories that work started as someone's own problem
Kinda cliché, I know. But when I talk to people who are seeing results with their directories, a lot of them picked something from their own life (an old job, a hobby, something that annoyed them one too many times).
Personal niches aren't magically better for SEO. They just keep you interested, and month three of a directory is usually boring (no traffic, no money, just you and a spreadsheet), and the people who push through tend to be the ones who actually care.
And when you care about something, you notice stuff that outsiders miss.
Hot take: Job boards in 2026 don't really help you get a job
Most job boards show you a list of postings, you click apply, and your resume lands in a pile with a few hundred others. I did that plenty of times and it basically never worked.
They're really optimized for monetizing the job seekers and employers to oblivion.
What worked was a real person vouching for me. And referral didn't just work for me. In 2023, a year after I got my job, my older sister was burnt out from culinary school, so I told her to message SDRs on LinkedIn and ask for 15 minutes to learn about the role. She landed her first tech sales job that way and moved to San Francisco.
So I built warmhires.com around that. Every job comes with the SDRs who already work at that company, a message you can send them that doesn't feel weird, and a little tracker so you remember who you reached out to.
It even matches people by office. If a company is hiring in Atlanta, you see SDRs in Atlanta, not someone in California who's never met the hiring manager.
How I found the people who work at each company
This part is way simpler than it sounds. Go to Google and type something like this:
site:linkedin.com/in "sales development" "Sage Intacct"
Boom, a list of people who do that job at that company right now. Swap Sage Intacct for Salesforce, Oracle or any company you want. No scraping LinkedIn (they've sued people for that), just normal Google results.
I ran that search for every company on the board, then filtered it down to people who still work there and live in the right city. It ran for over 10 hours while I slept.
If your directory is about people more than listings (recruiters, coaches, local experts), this one search gets you pretty far.
- Paid Partnership -
All that searching ran overnight on my Hostinger Claude Code VPS, which I've used for my last directory build too. It's perfect for job boards and event directories that need constant data upkeep. It's basically a computer in the cloud that never turns off, so I could close my laptop, go to bed and wake up to a full job board.
- Super quick setup: pick a plan (I use KVM 2), pick your AI coding tool during setup, and it comes installed and ready to go.
- Runs while you sleep: long scrapes and daily data refreshes don't need your laptop to be on.
They're running their Black Friday sale right now, which is their biggest one of the year. You can check out the Claude Code VPS here and use code FREYCHUVPS for an extra 10% off your purchase.
Why I'm keeping it free (for now)
My first plan was the usual job board playbook: a $19/month plan to see every job, plus companies paying to get featured.
Then I slept on it and changed my mind.
Nobody knows me in this space, and if someone's first visit hits a paywall, they're gone for good. Charging people who are literally looking for a job never sat right with me either.
So it's free for at least the next 6 months to a year. I'm not chasing huge traffic here either. I'd be happy with 100 people a month who really need it.
A couple days after launch, I saw a Reddit post asking for "Duolingo, but for SDRs."
That got me thinking: when a job board works, people leave. They get the job and never come back (great for them, not so great for a business).
But an app where you practice cold calls every day, and get thrown objections like "just send me an email," is something people would actually open every morning. My final interview was a mock cold call to a CFO, and I would've loved more practice before that one. Now *that* I'd feel good charging for someday.
Just a potential idea for future monetization, and I think it aligns perfectly with the audience of my job board.
If you're still looking for your idea
Think about something you got the non obvious way, like a job, a deal, an apartment or a fix for a problem. Then compare how you actually got it with how the internet tells people to get it.
There's usually a directory hiding in the gap between those two.
For me it was "apply on Indeed" versus "talk to someone who works there." Yours will be totally different, but we all have unique, personal experience that could turn into a solution for thousands of people.
I'm not sure warmhires will ever make real money (page one for "SDR jobs" is all DR 87+ sites, so I'll be living in Reddit threads for a while...). But it's the first thing I've built in a long time where I'd be happy if it just helped a handful of people get hired.
Keep building,
Frey
