Playbooks
Charge the people in a hurry, not the businesses
On a job board or directory, charge the readers who need the list fast, not the businesses you assume have money. Skip the free tier.
The hard part: finding a market where one side is clearly more urgent than the other and will pay without a free tier.
Who pays
The reader in a hurry. In these examples, job seekers pay weekly, monthly, or yearly to see a filtered list of jobs.
How to build it
Choose a niche of hurried readers
Pick a niche where readers are in a hurry, such as job seekers in one field. Set up Supabase to store the listings and user accounts.
Lock listings to paying users
Turn on Supabase row-level security so only paying users can read the full listings. Do not offer a free plan.
Offer weekly, monthly, and yearly plans
Create weekly, monthly, and yearly prices in Stripe Checkout. Have a successful payment unlock access in Supabase.
Add new listings every day
Set up a scheduled scraper or feed import that pulls new listings into Supabase every day, so the list stays fresh.
Tag and summarize each listing
Use ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok to tag and summarize each listing, so readers can filter quickly.
Launch the site with a preview
Build the site in Next.js and deploy it on Vercel. Show a short preview of the listings, and put the full list behind the paywall.
Sources on X
- rrmdp · Aug 27, 2026
The poster says a niche job board that charged companies to post jobs made $0 in one year. The poster says a new niche job board that charged job seekers made $400 in its first month. Both numbers are the poster's own result.
- starter_story · Sep 6, 2026
In a Starter Story interview, Roman says Career Hound, a job board launched two years earlier by a non-technical founder, made $25K the month before. That is the operator's own claim. As of 2026-09-06, it was reported to use a hard paywall with no free plans, priced at $7/week, $20/month, or $50/year.
Ideas are curated from public posts and untested by us. Read the full note.