Roadmap

Refer.io Project RoadMap

What is this page all about?

It’s really quite simple… we here at Refer.io are kinda different! We don’t act like a normal company… it’s more like a passion project. For the last 5+ years we’ve labored away trying to help job seekers find jobs, without getting distracted or too focused on making money. We’ve always just tried to ensure that we brought in enough to have the resources needed to keep increasing the value we provide to the Job Seekers & Employees who get our emails.

As the pandemic raged on, and disrupted the employment world (both for job seekers/employees and for employers) I decided it was time to get more aggressive with the growth of Refer. We want to help more people, in more ways, with more power than ever before.

And so I decided we should let our loyal followers be part of the Journey. This page allows people to see what we’ve done, what we are currently working on, and what’s coming up in the future. Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or comments by reaching out to us via email or social.

If you don’t get emails from me… or you don’t follow me online… please do so that we can stay in contact! And by all means… please refer a friend… I’d love to meet them too!

Your Job Search Friend… Ryan

The Backstory

The team here at Refer.io has always wanted this company to be a bit different. We didn't want to create just another job board, so we started just sending emails with specific jobs that fit the users search. We wanted them to create massive engagement, so instead of a corporate looking newsletter, we opted for a personal email from me… Ryan.

Over the years I’ve struggled to find the right business model that would allow Refer.io to thrive. I’ve always had a full-time job at ApplicantPro, so there wasn’t a need to fix things. We just focused on adding value by getting better and better at sending job ads that fit our followers desires, and our subscriber list would continue to grow and grow. As it broke into the millions, our programming team had done pretty much all they could to improve our ability to match people with jobs… but it wasn’t enough.

After 90 to 120 days of getting our emails, people would stop opening them. They weren’t mad or anything… they had gotten a job and no longer found our job emails important to their daily lives.

But something has always been missing.

Near the end of 2020, during the height of covid, I decided it was time that I focused on figuring out what to do with Refer.io. I hired a couple of writers, and together we started adding more and more content to our blog. Our readership grew, people opened our emails more and more, and the engagement kept going up. (Right now we get almost 2000 email replies a day!)

The birth of the Job Club concept

As 2021 came to an end, my partner Pablo introduced me to the NFT world, and something clicked. These NFT projects were just communities of people (on discord) following a team who was working on a project. Many of the projects lack any real usefulness (they are just a popularity contest) but it spurred an idea.

And that got my mind spinning… What if Refer.io could build these same type of project communities around people who were working in a given profession such as Software Product Management, or who all were striving towards a common goal, like moving from a customer service job to a marketing one.

What if we could connect them together with some mentors who would give them insider advice in how to be the best at their jobs, and create a connected community where they could help each other on their individual career journeys?

What is a Roadmap

The term “Roadmap” comes from the software world… a place that I’m quite familiar with. One of the most important parts of a Product Manager’s job at software company is to manage the Product Roadmap. This Roadmap lays out a list of ideas/features/adjustments/bugs that need to be worked on in the future, prioritized by what is coming up next, and they use this to let everyone know what is coming up next.

But you can use Roadmaps for more than just to develop software… you can also use it for pretty much any long term project that you are trying to accomplish by breaking it down into smaller projects, and accomplishing through deliberate work sessions (sprints).

Normally Roadmaps for Software platforms aren’t public. They are normally an internal document that is shared with the teams on a “need to know” basis. Sometimes small parts of them might be provided to clients or resellers, to let them know what’s coming up in the near future.

But as NFT projects came to be, they started to publish their Roadmaps online. They were doing this because the concept of these projects was to build popularity and community around their brand, and showing the world what they were working on was a great way to do that.

Since Refer.io is as much a “Community Project” as it is a “Software Platform”, I decided that we’d try publishing our Roadmap on our website to give our followers an insider’s view into what was going on, and to see what kind of feedback we get. So here goes…

The Refer.io Roadmap Sections

Our Roadmap can be broken down into 7 main types of items:

Audience: This is just another way to say followers. We work each day to constantly to expand the number of people that we can reach out to via one of 4 ways: email, search engine, live events, and social media.
Content: At our core, we are a content (or how to information) company. Our primary goal is to solve our subscriber’s problems when it comes to finding a job or being the best they can be at their job. We create content via video, audio, and written word… or we curate it by pulling it from 3rd parties (think job openings from job boards) and organize so that we can connect the right information with the right people at the right time.
Distribution:
Engagement:
Conversion: This one can be a bit of a touchy subject… so don’t be confused by thinking we are just looking to get you to click on something or buy something to make a quick buck. The # and % of viewers who engage with any piece of content or ad is important to us, regardless of whether we get paid or not. If people don’t click on links to learn more or buy something, it generally means that they didn’t find what we put in front of them useful or engaging. When we see that, it means we need to re-think what we are doing.
Communities: The future of Refer.io will have a lot of projects around building & facilitating communities of people who are on similar career journey. Our goal is to enable people with the same job title, in the same industries, to engage with & help each other like a club. (you know... like a school club, social club, sports club, country club, yacht club… you get what I’m trying to say!)
Technology: While it might seem like sending an email is no big deal, trust me, it takes a whole lot of programming magic to send out as many individualized emails as we do. Ensuring that the technology behind Refer.io is doing its job, in a scalable and secure way, will always be a top priority!

The Refer.io Roadmap

We will be updating this page on a regular basis to mark off what we’ve completed, to show you what we are actively working on, and to add new ideas that we’ve decided to work on in the near future. Check back as often as you’d like, or you can get updates on what we are working on by following us on social media or subscribing to our Project Alert Emails

ACTIVE PROJECTS:

Our team of amazing people are busy working away on the following projects… plus a bunch of other random stuff that I throw at them in our weekly meetings!

New Website – Re-design our site to make it more user friendly, and easier for our team to add content to!
Job Sharing Beta Test – We are testing out the idea of having our followers act as “job sharers” to help get the word out on certain jobs that we think the world needs to see. Job Sharing is tracked and the people who get the most engagement are rewarded!

FUTURE PROJECTS

These are just some ideas that we are working on, in no particular order:

Challenge Course – “Get the job you want in the next 30 days!”
Launch Podcast – “How to get a better job in 90 days”
Challenge Course – “How to get a Job you don’t Deserve!”
Launch Podcast – “Business Jobs in the Tech World”
Challenge Course – “How to get a Remote Job at a Legit Company!”
Kick off College Outreach – We’ll be working with local business colleges to help their students find jobs in the tech world!
Launch Merch Store – Like any good project… we gotta make some swag!
Launch Job Club – Software Product Manager Club - Aspiring, New, Current, and Experts!
Issue First Set of NFTS - We plan to use NFTs to secure a spot in one of our Job Clubs.
Launch Clubhouse – Create a login area for content, coaching, conversation, & community around a given job title.