JobStash: A Job Board provided as a Public Good

Public Good Projects Discussion
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Project Description

JobStash is a free, unbiased job board designed as a public good for the entire crypto ecosystem. We curate crypto-native job opportunities and enable organizations to post vacancies and hire candidates at no cost. We provide visibility, transparency, and safety to both jobseekers and organizations looking to hire.

Our purpose is to grow the ecosystem both by onboarding new people professionaly into crypto and by facilitating talent rotation across organizations.
We do this by curating a comprehensive, safe, and complete dataset of the entire crypto ecosystem. We don’t charge job posting fees, placement fees, or interview fees—in fact, we have no fees at all. If one wants to gain extra visibility, we allow organizations to feature their job posts, but that’s about it.

We index data for ~8000 organizations and track about 2700 live jobs at any given point in time across the ecosystem. Our goal is to have near-complete coverage of all of the crypto ecosystem. Over the past year, we’ve served 53,100 job applications, 77,900 job card expansions, and 413,000 page views. We’ve grown to over 11k subscribers on Telegram and have 5,600 visitors per month on our website.

How we are different:

  • We pull jobs from career sites on a daily basis, rather than requiring orgs to submit jobs to us.
  • We include jobs for organizations that nobody else covers, thus supporting small founding teams in their growth.
  • We discover reputable organizations who support decentralization and import their metadata automatically.
  • We support importing jobs from a wide range of sources (bring your own ATS, Notion, templates, etc.).
  • We import and list job postings from organizations for free, in a permissionless way.
  • We have open APIs and are composable by definition.
  • We distribute jobs to an audience of >11,000 people on Telegram, for free.

This places us in the position of being a curator rather than a matchmaker. We focus on getting the data right, for everyone, equally, and we obsess about data correctness, accuracy, and safety rather than making a quick buck on job placements.

JobStash is more than a platform – it’s our commitment to growing the ecosystem one hire at a time by providing visibility, transparency, and safety to both job seekers and hiring managers who will ultimately drive decentralization forward.

GitHub Organization: https://github.com/jobstash

Budget Breakdown

This budget will allow us to focus on platform development, growth, marketing, and brand awareness. This will lead to solidifying our position as the leading crypto-native job board across the entire ecosystem globally.

Platform Infra & Maintenance (3k USD/mo)

  • Tooling and infra costs: 3k USD/mo
  • Enhance ETL & DBT infrastructure to support ingesting additional sources of data and set up automated flywheels to provide continued coverage expansion
  • Platform improvements: Add enhanced features, improve UX/UI and overall website experience, by enhancing the Search UI and the general user friendliness

Operations: 9k USD/mo

  • Salaries (core team compensation): Wages of our engineering and ops team who ensure the platform remains secure, stable, and scalable as we focus on global market expansion and brand awareness.
  • Support roles: A portion may be allocated for community rewards (volunteers who clean up our data) and marketing roles (writers and graphic design) to help drive marketing and brand awareness initiatives globally.
  • General overhead costs: Ongoing operational costs such as software subscriptions, and third-party service fees (e.g., LLM tooling and other SaaS costs).

Marketing & Brand Awareness Spend: 5k USD

This portion will be allocated toward creative marketing and brand awareness as we drive global awareness and expand reach. Our goal is to create a global buzz around JobStash through creative initiatives, strategic partnerships, and community activations.

  • Strategic Partnerships and Sponsorships: Collaborate with global crypto events, conferences, and hackathons to increase visibility in key cities.
  • Local Partnerships & Sponsorships: Partner with local coworking spaces and crypto hubs for relevant events (educational meetups, job-seeker workshops).
  • Paid Media & Online Marketing: Targeted online advertising (Google Ads, X (Twitter) Ads, Telegram Ads) to reach job seekers and hiring organizations, boost brand recognition, and drive traffic.
  • Creative Marketing & Global Event Activations: City-specific activations and event-based campaigns, including street-level marketing during crypto events to reinforce JobStash as the go-to platform for crypto hiring.

Impact Measurement and Reporting

Short-term Outcomes (0-3 months):

  • Optimize platform performance to handle a growing user base and ensure scalability (currently 1000 signed-up users).
  • Enhance UX/UI on the platform, moving toward building an omnichannel experience for all users.
  • Launch a new initiative to flag jobs suitable for onboarding candidates into Crypto.
  • Community engagement & testimonial gathering: Gather feedback from existing users to identify pain points and prioritize improvements.
  • Initial partnerships and marketing initiatives for brand visibility (collaborations with DAOs, crypto projects, and key influencers).
  • Monitor engagement metrics to measure the effectiveness of platform updates.
  • Curate sales enablement and marketing materials for brand awareness.

Mid-term Outcomes (3-6+ months):

  • Continue to optimize JobStash to support a growing user base and omnichannel enhancements.
  • Implement Attestations to move impact data on-chain in a verifiable way.
  • Improve the search capability of the site.
  • Improve SEO performance to widen reach.
  • User growth and retention: Expand user base from 1000 to 10000+ through targeted outreach and partnerships.
  • Market existing paid features and introduce advanced features to boost engagement and retention, aligning with a sustainable business model.
  • Develop brand growth initiatives, including city-specific events, partnerships, and collaborations with key influencers.
  • Partnership development: Establish and strengthen partnerships with DAOs, crypto-native organizations, and projects.

Long-term Impact (5+ years):

  • Establish JobStash as the go-to job platform for crypto-native hiring.
  • Launch premium features for candidates and hiring managers (visibility and recruitment tools).
  • Scale platform to support 100,000+ users.
  • Continuously iterate to improve JobStash.
  • Build a global community of crypto-native professionals and hiring organizations across all major ecosystems.

Outcomes Measurement:

Quantitative Metrics:

  • User engagement: Track active users, registrations, and job postings.
  • Page Visits: Monitor traffic sources and visits to job listings.
  • User Retention: Measure how long users stay active and frequency of return visits.
  • Feature usage and adoption rates: Track percentage of users utilizing new features.
  • Brand awareness: Evaluate through social media metrics and event engagement.
  • Partnership growth: Track the number and quality of partnerships with DAOs, crypto organizations, and projects.
  • User satisfaction feedback surveys.

Qualitative Metrics:

  • User Feedback: Gather insights from community forums, Telegram, and other channels.
  • Community Impact: Measure engagement in Telegram groups and broader ecosystem discussions.
  • Satisfaction Ratings: Regularly track satisfaction through ratings and reviews.

We will use Google Analytics and other relevant tools to track quantitative feedback and gather qualitative feedback.

Interim Reporting:
Regular updates: We will provide monthly updates on progress, outlining key metrics such as user growth, feature launches, and partnerships. We will set up a Karma GAP project page to document progress and milestones in a transparent and verifiable manner.

Milestone Verification:

  • User growth: Number of active users and job postings.
  • Platform engagement metrics: Job searches, applications, completed hires.
  • Marketing activities: Summaries of marketing campaigns, events, and key partnerships with supporting metrics.

Sustainability Plan

Our sustainability plan includes a core freemium model, with premium services for jobseekers and organizations. We will also generate revenue through:

  • Premium services: Advanced visibility features for candidates and hiring managers.
  • Targeted job posting: Offering paid features for organizations seeking increased visibility.
  • Paid recruitment solutions: Helping organizations access a list of crypto-native candidates for exclusive hiring opportunities.

By growing our user base and improving platform quality, we ensure JobStash remains financially self-sustaining long-term. We also plan to build key industry partnerships, bringing in additional revenue streams.

Case Studies and Testimonials

  • We gather feedback through channels such as our Telegram community (516 users) and support channel.
  • We maintain a smaller community of industry experts who provide in-depth feedback.
  • Testimonials from satisfied users (including Everclear, Gearbox, and Reserve) are showcased on our platform.

Showcasing Success

We will showcase success through social media and our website (blogs, resharing posts, etc.). Our current social channels include:

Advancing Values of Freedom and Privacy

JobStash is committed to decentralization and user privacy. We are crypto-native and embrace decentralization, ensuring users maintain ownership of their profiles and work history. Our verification system relies on provable public data. While we are currently centralized, we are researching ways for users to control their professional credentials securely without relying on a central authority. We maintain transparency about our operations.

Supporting Decentralization

JobStash operates as a public good, offering a free platform for both jobseekers and organizations. By focusing on fair and unbiased access, we provide full visibility to Web3 projects, helping experts and newcomers navigate the job market. We aim to support the entire crypto-native job ecosystem with no misaligned incentives.

Team Information

  • David L (DuckDegen), Technical CoFounder: 20 years of Web2 experience, multiple enterprises, exposure to large corporates and microstartups, experience in fintech and blockchain (Connext Protocol, Gearbox). Has taken roles from Dev to Sales Director, DevRel, Engineering Manager. Builds and maintains AI pipelines and data ingestion services.

  • Laura Brown, Head of BD: Extensive experience in recruitment, sales & partnerships, and talent operations. Industry experience includes crypto, Banking & Fintech, Marketplace, and Payments. Core experience with global startups/scale-ups.

  • Obafemi T, Lead Backend Engineer: Functional programming enthusiast, prefers Scala. Maintains all backend services.

  • John B, Lead Frontend Engineer: UI builder with dedication to high-performance, low-bundle-size webapps in React/Next.

  • Cristiano C, Senior Frontend Engineer: Our pixel perfectionist, crafting flawless UI and user experiences.

  • Deniz K & Gintare K, UI Designers: Design team. Deniz won the RedDot golden award, with global high-end project experience. Gintare is our design queen.

Social Proof

  • JobStash is an official community partner of Venture Miner for their AI2WEB3 Bootcamp in NY (Dec 9-13). Other sponsors include Coinbase, NEAR Protocol, Celo Foundation, Morph, Gear Technologies, The Graph, and Ankr. We are shaping an ongoing 2025 community partnership with Venture Miner.
  • Venture Miner X Status
  • Official partner at EthDam ‘24, a hackathon and conference focused on privacy with over 600 attendees.
  • Part of the Cartographer Syndicate, an initiative by Sov from GitCoin.
  • Successfully awarded a grant by ThankArb to build https://ecosystem.vision leveraging JobStash data.
  • Built public goods such as https://gitcoindonordata.com and https://ecosystem.vision.

Transparency

JobStash is committed to transparent funding use. This proposal outlines our vision and commitment to providing a free, transparent, and decentralized job board for the entire crypto ecosystem. We seek to connect the entire crypto talent community and become the leading platform for crypto-native hiring.

Other funding:

  • Optimism RetroPGF3: 12,500 OP tokens
  • GitCoin (various rounds): ~20k in direct funding + matching
  • Bootstrapped the rest of the funding through direct capital investment and revenue generated through the platform.