Launching SvelteCareers

This week Chris Jayden and I launched SvelteCareers, a job site for Svelte(Kit) developers.

It’s the first project I’ve coded that I expect to generate revenue. Having started programming just over a year ago, I’m pleased to now graduate from practice projects. Working on this MVP was highly educational, as it was complex enough to be challenging, but not overwhelmingly so.

Chris and I decided to collaborate on this project after brainstorming business ideas for a while. This idea aligned with our mutual interests and seemed promising. We had worked together a decade ago at Heroic, where he already showcased great internet marketing and web design skills. I knew he’d continued his evolution and became a web developer. As I picked up coding and developed an interest in Svelte, we reconnected. Collaborating with someone years ahead of me as a developer has proven invaluable, and this MVP wouldn’t have progressed as quickly without him. It has also been enlightening (and equally frustrating) to learn how to collaborate as a team of developers, properly using Git and Github workflows.

Our thesis for SvelteCareers is straightforward. Svelte is growing in adoption, and many developers rate it as one of the most enjoyable frameworks to work with.

The job market for Svelte is small, and since it’s relatively new, there aren’t many companies hiring for it yet. But it’s gaining traction. Svelte devs indicate they’d like to find more Svelte jobs, yet with its nascency many are forced to use older but more established frameworks like React and NextJS to find employment. We’d like to change that.

I hope to build on my experience growing a job site from scratch with MusicCareers, which I sold as I exited my other music ventures. Since Chris and I both love Svelte and its ecosystem, this seemed like the right opportunity to partner on and contribute to the Svelte community.

Now that we’ve launched the MVP, we’ll focus on curating the best jobs and marketing. We plan to introduce featured and paid posts next. We have to be careful about over-engineering the platform until we see initial traction however. Since this is partly an SEO play, this will require patience. Luckily we built some useful automations to save time, like weekly job mailers and automatic posts to social media.

I’m excited to see where we can take this and to operating a new fledgling business. For the devs reading this, if you’re interested in finding a new Javascript job, do check out the site!