Boulder has been getting some good press recently which encouraged me to create this list of Boulder Internet companies and entrepreneurial resources. Feel free to e-mail suggestions to eric at justjobs dot com.
Boulder startup resources
Boulder Internet companies
If you could afford a domain name for your job board that contained a single dictionary word, your category keyword or some related keyword, would you do it? These folks did:
Judging by compete.com traffic graphs, it's a relatively high flying group...
Know of any others?
This is the 2009 guide to the top 100 US job board niches. For each top employment category it lists the top 3 or 4 niche job sites. This report excludes:
1. Offer unique value
Choose a niche that is poorly served that you can dominate very quickly. Bells and whistles do not qualify on their own unless you are planning to spend tens of millions of dollars at a very minimum.
2. The right domain
Does it contain your keywords? Is it short, easy to pronounce, spell and remember? The right domain puts the wind at your back where you want it.
3. Create more value than you capture
Some say the domain name isn't important... just look at Google with its gibberish name! In my experience, the name is important. So, if you are starting a job board, I think this list of job board domain types will be useful for you.
These are all the prefixes, postfixes and conjunctions I came across in my research for the top 100 niche boards report. The '_' in this list represents the name of the niche or profession as in "marketing" or "marketers".
Years ago, I got very excited about networking and we filed for a patent that described a 'brilliant' way of integrating social networking into a job board. But when we started implementing the idea it
went nowhere and I became disillusioned. Recently new software platforms have
proven that the networking idea was not at fault, rather it was our
implementation that was to blame.
As little as six months ago I thought that social networking was a bubble about to pop... now I think it is more like an earthquake for the recruiting world. One of the websites that convinced me is Chris Russell's Jobboarders.com.
And yet, it will still take years for a lot of really viable niche sites to emerge. Yes, these sites can grow very quickly, however, a social networking site needs much higher traffic than a job board does to become a valuable recruiting tool.
There was a time, believe it or not, when we thought LatPro might raise $10 million in venture capital and head for an IPO shortly thereafter, lol. Today, I don't envy the public companies and am glad we didn't raise the money. Here is a list of those less fortunate job board companies who call themselves public corporations.
Job board experts agree that running a job board is getting more difficult as time goes by -- but launching a board is easier than ever. In a couple of hours, without even pulling out your credit card you can create a reasonably functional and good-looking website with today's social networking tools or blog software.
How times have changed... To start LatPro in 1997, I learned to program in Visual Basic and wrote all the code myself for a little more than two years. That code was all replaced in 2000 and today comprises 162,000 lines of java code, 310,000 lines of PHP code and 43,000 lines of html. Much of it will get replaced again. At LatPro, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on our software and infrastructure.
This is the 2008 guide to the top 100 US job board niches -- the 2009 Top 100 job sites report is here. For each employment niche it lists the top 3 or 4 niche job boards. This report excludes:
Hi, I'm Eric Shannon, I live in Boulder, Colorado and my 12 year old job board company LatPro Inc. is based in Plantation, Florida... 
Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat.
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Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.
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The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.
-Pema Chodron
The best way to predict your future is to create it!
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Excellence can be obtained if you: ...care more than others think is wise ...risk more than others think is safe ...dream more than others think is practical ...expect more than others think is possible.