If you can buy an existing job board that has revenue and traffic, thats usually abetter alternative than building from scratch. Having bought and sold many job boards myself, I’ve learned what to ask before pulling the trigger. So here are 30+ questions to include in your discovery process. If you have a few more to add, leave a comment.
Use these questions to help determine the value of the job board.
- How many people does it take to operate the business?
- List all expenses of the business.
- What do those people do?
- How much do they make?
- Are they full time, or part-time? (how many hours do they work)
- What is the bare minimum needed to operate the site in terms of staff/hours per week?
- What platform is the site built on (custom built or hosted software)
- If custom, what technology is it built with? Does it need replacing?
- How much does hosting and maintenance of the server cost monthly?
- How many monthly pageviews and unique visitors does the site get?
- How much of that traffic is paid vs unpaid? (seo, aggregators, etc)
- How much of the traffic is generated by google?
- Traffic trends: has the site lost traffic this year? gained it? or stayed the same vs last years numbers?
- Are their any free sources of traffic that are at risk of going away?
- Describe all revenue sources.
- What does each product cost?
- What are the sales number from the past 3 years?
- Is all sales data verifiable by a 3rd party? if so can you access that data for evaluation?
- Will they show you the tax returns for the business?
- How many clients does the business have?
- Does the site have a broad range of clients?
- Is the industry the site serves a growing industry?
- How is the job market in that area (canada) overall?
- Are there any agreements with 3rd party vendors that have to be honored?
- Does the company have any debt or copyright claims against it?
- How many emails of candidates and employers does the site have?
- How many jobs currently posted? How many from same time last year?
- Why is the owner interested in selling?
- Are all job postings original or do they scrape or backfill from other sources.
- How old is the site/domain?
- Can you speak with some of their clients?
- Does the site have established profiles on social media? (list # followers for each)
You also need to ask yourself how much will it cost you to take over the site. Do you have similar resources to operate it, Will you have to hire more people. Are you new to the industry, etc.
