The $50 job board that turned into $1M a year

Every creator has a golden window when the brain is sharpest. For most, it’s the morning hours before lunch. That’s the time to do your most important work like writing, building, creating.

Don’t waste it on email, meetings, or scrolling. If you’re a night owl, the same rule applies: protect those late hours. Then sit down, focus, and get the work done.

Case Study: RemoteOK

I want to share something that might spark an idea for you. It’s about Pieter Levels, the creator of RemoteOK, one of the biggest remote job boards in the world. The crazy part? It started with a super simple idea and grew way bigger than anyone expected.

Back in 2015, Pieter was just a solo developer. No investors, no team, no big funding story. He built RemoteOK in just a couple of weeks. The concept was straightforward: collect remote job listings in one place. At that time, working from home wasn’t mainstream yet, so he spotted the opportunity early.

He launched with nothing fancy. Just a clean website, job postings priced at fifty dollars each, and a bit of distribution through his Twitter and communities like Hacker News and Reddit. Within weeks, companies were paying him. Literally just from Twitter.

Why did it work?

First, timing. Remote jobs were starting to trend, but nobody had built a proper hub yet.

Second, the pricing was dead simple. Companies knew exactly what they were getting.

Third, distribution. Instead of waiting for SEO or ads, Pieter plugged into communities that already had his target audience.

And finally, automation. He’s obsessed with making everything run by itself — from scraping jobs to sending email updates. The site practically runs on autopilot.

Today, RemoteOK makes over a million dollars a year. That’s around fifty thousand dollars a month. And here’s the kicker. It’s still just Pieter running it alone. No staff. No office. Nothing.

Here are the lessons I take from this:

Pick a niche that’s underserved.

Launch quickly and polish later.

Charge from day one, even if it’s a small fee.

Leverage communities and networks instead of waiting for SEO.

Automate everything you can, so you don’t need a team.

The real beauty of this story is you don’t need venture capital or a giant audience to start. One person, a basic website, and a clear problem to solve can be more than enough.

Checkout RemoteOK here