JobKaster is essentially the “Google Map of Jobs”. “We’re making it easy to find a job in specific locations – at walking distance from your neighbourhood, on your college campus, or somewhere near public transportation routes.” says Paul Chittenden, co-founder of JobKaster. Ravi Budhu, the other co-founder was earlier a competitor of Paul. Ravi was introduced to Paul “by a friend from Houston Startup community”. Paul recalls, “After our first phone call, I flew from Houston to Tucson, Arizona to meet him the very next weekend where we decided to team up and tackle this together.” He adds, “We’re all about helping locals find local jobs.” Ravi is “a genius software developer” according to Paul, and Paul has been a business development and marketing specialist.
Ravi and Paul were looking for new job opportunities. Ravi wanted to move to San Diego and was looking for a job near the beach. Paul wanted to find a job closer to his home in the Houston Galleria. However, for both of them, traditional job search portals failed. “Zip code searches on available job search websites returned results completely out of range, and we were fed up!” says Paul. The founders also figured out that many others were facing the issue. Paul adds, “We figured a map based interface would be much more intuitive when location matters.”
JobKaster is a classic two sided market. “We needed jobs to get users, and users to get jobs. A barren job map isn’t very useful.” Paul tells us. The founders found that the food service and retail jobs were even more location dependent. They thus decided to focus on them. They have spent the last four months on “beefing up” the job postings with an additional 200,000+ more jobs for their users.
JobKaster’s target users are students, families and people without means of transportation. Its primary target users are retail and food service workers in the USA. Paul and Ravi believe that JobKaster benefits them and they are ” thrilled that we can affect our users life in such a beneficial way.” Paul says, “They can spend more time with their families, more time studying, or just more time doing the things they love.”
“Craigslist is really our biggest competitor.” says Paul. He adds, “They’re a job posting system that has been around for quite some time and has been really successful for our target demographics. Yet, their system is still a bit archaic at the moment, so we think we have a fighting chance!” The founders are confident that JobKaster would be “the next big name in job boards”. They are rapidly expanding into all major markets and adding more jobs. “Hell, maybe we’ll go international!” says Paul.
JobKaster is using the classic job board model where companies pay per job posting. However, the job seekers can use JobKaster totally free of charge. It offers 3 free job postings for new advertisers.
Please visit https://www.jobkaster.com/ for more information.
