How I’m building a job board for Data Analysts, Update #02 - for February 2023
Hi all,
on Dec 19th I launched DataAnalyst.com - this is the second update (hopefully many more to come).
Want to make sure I document the journey, and keep myself honest, so each month I will be making a post about the statistics, progress, some thoughts and what are the next steps I want to be focusing on.
Early stages vision is to become the #1 job board for data analysts - hand-picking interesting data analyst job opportunities across industries.
Where I would like to see this going - my long term vision, is building a community of aspiring and professional data enthusiasts. A place for those who love data to collaborate, share, learn and develop their careers.
So, let’s dive right in.
Statistics
General Observations
While in January we’ve seen over around 800 visitors, in February the site grew to over 3,200 monthly visitors across 16,300 pageviews, and we’ve been able to register approximately 2,300 data analyst applications being started from the site!
For those of you visiting the site, you may have noticed that Europe region is no longer being covered, and the site is now purely US & UK focused. There were couple of reasons for that. First, salary transparency is non-existent in most European markets. Second, out of those jobs that were posted and included salary, majority of them would be in the local language. All in all, I simply realised that I wouldn’t be able to consistently add quality data analyst jobs for the individual market, which would eventually lead to poor job seeker experience - simply put, if there aren’t quality enough listings being added over the course of the week, you’ll extremely likely not to come back.
There is also little bit of a worry about the UK market for similar reasons - lack of salary transparency, but also the market is largely being operated by recruitment industry, resulting in lower number of direct company listings. I am committed to my approach to only have job listings with salary posted, so will need to monitor over the next few months if the time spent on the UK is worthwhile, particularly by a solo founder with limited time on my hands.
While not directly related to the site, through the whole process I did make an extremely important realization. It’s actually not that surprising, it’s pretty obvious, but once I started writing newsletters, blog posts, as well as these summaries, it became painfully clear:
I need to learn how to write better.
Effective writing is a critical aspect of being able to properly communicate to inform, influence, entertain, evoke emotions and create a connection with the reader.
Not only that, but good writing fosters good thinking that follows a certain logic, a story, a narrative, which is easy for others to follow. Writing out what you want to communicate forces you to organize your thoughts. On top of it, the more you write about a subject, the more you understand it, and you are then able to communicate your point of view in a much clearer way.
As the world keeps moving toward digital, as we continue shifting toward remote work and async communication, effective writing becomes a superpower.
Data Analyst Job Market Insights (monthly)
As mentioned last month, we’re utilising the data available to creating Market Insights - a deep dive into the data analyst job market, where we can have a look at the job openings and provide you all with insights on the latest hiring trends for the past month in the US and UK markets - with January and February editions available on the site.
With the insights I’m trying to bring answers to questions such as: Which industries are hiring the most? Are we seeing any salary increases? And what about the remote working trend?
I can totally see that at least at the start, this will not be extensive enough to highlight any trends, but I do believe that doing this on a monthly basis, it is something that will provide value over the long term to those looking for roles - the more data points we collect, the more insights we can uncover.
Things in the pipeline
- New data analyst jobs, added daily
- Actually launching the newsletter with the pick of best jobs directly to your inbox (yes, I know…)
- Monthly market insights (for the US & the UK market)
- Improving the overall site experience (this one is a never ending activity)
- “Day in the Life” - a series of interviews with data analysts sharing their experience, thoughts and advice.
Building in public - how sharing the journey on Reddit got 45k views
One of my favourite subreddits is r/dataisbeautiful - I find it amazing how talented some people are, being able to gather data from all over the place, structure it, and visualise it in a way that it tells a story so simple, yet so captivating.
Building in public is scary, it doesn’t (probably) get easier - it is however a huge opportunity to learn something new, improve your work, and grow.
With that in mind, I decided to publicly share my journey of building Data Analyst on Reddit. As most of you probably know, you never know which way the comments section is gonna go, so I was understandably nervous.
The feedback however was overwhelmingly positive, and the post racked up over 45k views.
I’m incredibly thankful for all of you who interacted with the post and shared your thoughts. I read through and replied to all the comments, and decided to do a wrap up of the experience in a post - summarising the most asked questions, tech stack as well as added some general thoughts.
Add On: Domains, domains, domains
There was a lot of questions and comments about the domain name, and in general, when people consider starting a project, the importance of the domain name is one of the most frequent topics discussed.
While I won’t be sharing the exact cost, here are some of my thoughts:
What I can say is that I’ve been building a portfolio of domains over the last 5 years, as I do believe that domains are the key to growing a successful (not just online) business.
There were couple of reasons for going with the exact match .com domain:
Instant credibility - I’ve started talking to some HR departments, and once I introduce myself and what I am operating, they pretty much don’t question my intentions at all. This doesn’t just apply to conversations with companies, but also to anyone who comes across the domain - it will help me shape, attract and help the people in the niche.
I’m a firm believer in “Start as you mean to go on” - in this case, fully committing to the project and planning for success.
There’s absolute tons of reasons why this experiment might fail, but the domain is a long term asset in fast growing industry / job role - no matter what happens with the site, the domain name will hold value over the long term.
3 ways you could help
- Looking for a new challenge? Check out the website - I’m adding new jobs daily
- Looking to hire a data analyst to your team? Do you know anyone looking to hire? Shoot me a message at alex@dataanalyst.com, and I’ll upgrade your first listing for free!
- As I mentioned, next week I’ll be sending the first “Day of a Data Analyst” interview. For those of you who are open to do an email based interview about your data analyst career journey, please just send me a message and we’ll organise something - would love to get you featured and share your experience with our readers!
If you have any questions, concerns, come across glitches - please just reach out, happy to chat.
Thank you all again, and see you in a month.
Alex