6 ms·
Show HN: LaunchAfrica – Find startup and tech jobs in Africa
- truetaurus 6y agoFeedback much appreciated too! :) Got a startup or tech company in Africa hiring? Get in touch or post your job for free.
- truetaurus 6y agoEspecially on how to market it/gain traction/get noticed.
- Infinitesimus 6y ago[Please feel free to disregard this feedback] Small but perhaps meaningful adjustment to the hero image of the page: It might be best to use an ambiguous or darker skin tone. Regardless, congrats on the launch! There is a lot of hunger an ambition to work at startups and this will help expose the talent and opportunities.
- truetaurus 6y agoDesign is not my forte, but eventually I will figure out something. But yes I agree with this.
- mkoryak 6y agocool site. I wish it had better scroll restoration: I scroll down a bunch, new results are loaded. I click into a job posting and click back, now I need to scroll down a bunch again to go back to where I was. You can open postings in a new window or you can clientside cache the responses
- truetaurus 6y agoGood points, I shall look into this! May also go with the good old pagination with numbers. Can be good learning experience with client-side caching :)
- Scoundreller 6y agoJust don’t be like a recent organization’s job board that I had the misfortune of visiting: To get to page 12, you have to: Starting on page 1, you can see pages 1-5, so go to page 5. This will allow you to get to page 6. Go to page 6, where you can see pages 6-10, click page 10. Now you can click on page 11. Now you can see pages 11-15 and can finally get to page 12.
- truetaurus 6y agohaha yeah thats quite annoying. For a quick fix I am opening the jobs in a new tab. Will then look into this further.
- fctorial 6y agoJust goto page 2 and add 1 in front of 2 in the url.
- Scoundreller 6y agoI wish. The URL had a bajillion characters with nothing resembling anything that straightforward.
- nondeveloper 6y agoThis is really cool. It looks like it’s free to post jobs; do you plan to monetize it?
- truetaurus 6y agoThat is right, its free to post for now. Limited time offer, then I plan on monetizing more with additional features such as "featuring" or so. Dont want to to be so expensive like a lot of these jobboards that i feel overcharge. Basically I need enough to pay the bills :) But lets see what happens. Just need to continue gaining traction and figure that all out.
- k82a 6y agoSudan is two countries these days :)
- truetaurus 6y agoYep, they are there as 2 countries: Sudan and South Sudan. I think those are the official names.
- k82a 6y agoHaha yeah sorry I meant the map on the homepage. I'm a bit of a map person so it caught my eye.
- truetaurus 6y agoah right, stock images :) and im not much of a designer, but will look into this
- atlasunshrugged 6y agoIt might be out of scope but maybe add a volunteer category? As an American I've tried to figure out how to break into the African startup scene (mostly West Africa) but I'd feel bad about taking a job there that could be done by a local. However, if there were opportunities to volunteer as an advisor or just to help out a bit that could let me get more involved, I'd be quite keen to learn about those sorts of opportunities. Also curious why someone would choose your platform over angellist (other than their UI just being shitty)?
- truetaurus 6y agoGreat idea! Just added that as an "Employment type". And i regards to why LaunchAfrica as opposed to Angelist? Well firstly your point - the shitty interface and how they push for you to sign up and stuff like that. It is also full of other stuff and I prefer something straight to the point. Also i think its always better to focus (on Africa). I am also still trying to figure out more features that could make it stand out.
- atlasunshrugged 6y agoAwesome! Ha, yes, somehow it's one of those platforms that seemed to get worse over time. But cool that you're focusing on Africa specifically. Best of luck!
- truetaurus 6y agoThanks for the feedback, if anything else comes to mind, throw it at me :)
- atlasunshrugged 6y agoAh, one last thing. I'm not sure how hard getting employment visas are but a selector for 'will sponsor visa' might be interesting
- truetaurus 6y agoI already have that option in the post job page :)
- dbetteridge 6y agoAny reason you're not including salaries? Feels like it would be a valuable addition, could make them optional when creating but nudge new job posts to include them by default. Also a good data point when you choose to monetise
- walrus01 6y agoIf I had to guess it's because salaries will vary WIDELY with the location and cost of living, and relative size of the tech industry in each city. Looking at the website right now I see a huge amount of job posts in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Africa, as a category, is an immense place. For two jobs doing exactly the same role, salaries would be very different in Cape Town and in Accra, Ghana.
- 908B64B197 6y agoThat's an even better reasons to post them.
- truetaurus 6y agoDuring my research phase, I was looking at job posts (in africa) on other sites and hardly any would post salaries. And also in general, most job sites dont show salaries. But a few people have asked for this and it would make sense even if just a few companies would make them available.
- 908B64B197 6y agoIt's a negotiation tactic. What I found is that extremely high performers will simply ignore posts without salary information. So it only really works if you are looking at hiring average devs.
- truetaurus 6y agoGood point, yeah ill add this to the to-do list to figure out how best to do this
- mceoin 6y agoNice work. Best of luck with the launch! (Sending this to a friend who runs a company in Africa)
- truetaurus 6y agoAwesome! thanks, much appreciated as I am trying to get some good traction.
- MrsPeaches 6y agoWell done, some big names on here. Very impressive! We've got a role we'll be advertising soon, so will defintely be in touch. Looks like we might be the first ones advertising in Zambia!
- truetaurus 6y agoAwesome! Which company is this? I grew up in Zambia :)
- MrsPeaches 6y agoCool, it's a great place to work! Open Energy Labs: https://openenergylabs.co/ https://openenergylabs.co/ We teach young people how to build renewable energy supplies. Feel free to drop me an email (in my profile)
- mhotchen 6y agoAfrica is _the_ underrated continent. Just as many smart and driven people as anywhere else without the capital investment. Go Africa!
- smabie 6y agoHaving lived in Africa (Tanzania), I don't really agree. People their aren't very smart, for a variety of factors: poor nutrition, parasites, life history factors, terrible education system, limited access to books and technology, limited access to factual information, a terrible suppressive government, etc. Of course I can't generalize to all of Africa, but saying everyone is equal intelligence everywhere doesn't make any sense. Like as a thought experiment, if I locked a kid in a box and didn't teach them anything, or interact with them at all, would they be as smart as the kid who wasn't in the box? Probably not.
- greendude29 6y agoThe above two comments are why I hate this website. People with very narrow views of the world making vast generalizations. No wonder Silicon Valley's ability to innovate has faded. We've taken people with mediocre intelligence, and told them they're the smartest in the world. yuck.
- Cieplak 6y agoLet's not conflate abilities with capabilities. Clearly abilities depend on economic factors. I interpret this thread's root comment to refer to capabilities. To add more anecdotes to the mix, I work with a few Africans on a daily basis and they are highly talented, more so than myself. Perhaps this is skewed by immigration; that would lead me to believe that intrinsic capabilities approximately average out between the continents and hence my agreement with the root comment.
- tiew9Vii 6y agoA friend has been running online training courses for some not so trivial stuff. A large proportion of his delegates are from Europe/US but surprisingly he also had an unexpected large number from Africa. It seems there is a lot of non profits running code camps in Africa to help with education and a way out of poverty. Also more surprising was the courses my friend is running are not your hack a nodejs app together in 24hours but some advanced Scala and functional programming courses. I don’t know much about Africa but if they are training up highly skilled devs and not just people writing small Python/Nodejs scripts us western countries are then all the better for them.
- overcast 6y agoYo, grab the "launch.africa" domain!
- truetaurus 6y agoWay too expensive for my budget
- unixhero 6y agoAfricapace.com tried the same. Now defunct :/ still on twitter and linkedin
- koreanguy 6y agomajority of the jobs posted are in South Africa , there is almost zero jobs outside South Africa.