Morgan Gao knew what he wanted.
When he was looking for a new job opportunity in 2021 as a software developer, he knew what type of tech stack he wanted to work with. He knew what kind of company he wanted to work for. He knew how big he wanted the company to be.
The problem was, he found it difficult to apply those parameters to the job search sites that he was using.
“There's so many different filters, and you can only apply one of those to the bigger sites … You start to go through pages and pages of job ads and say ‘Oh, this is what I’m interested in — like three to four pages [in],” Gao told me recently.
Gao did find a job through that traditional process — one he currently still has (see below) — but the overall experience left him with the thought that there was a better way to find new career opportunities in the software development field. That thought led to him in 2022 founding EchoJobs, which was recently named one of the winners of the 2024 Vogt Invention and Innovation Awards.
Launching EchoJobs
In July 2022, he opened the EchoJobs site, which as of recent date had helped 352 software engineers find new career opportunities as paying customers. When I spoke with Gao, he said that he had about 70 active subscriptions.
At the time, the site said that 6,699 postings had been added within 24 hours. The jobs come via an application tracking system (ATS) technology and job alerts set up on career pages of various tech companies. They are then uploaded and formatted automatically into the EchoJobs site.
Gao does not type in any of the data himself, but the most time-consuming aspect of the operation is vetting new companies that have listings. As of a recent date, the site was pulling job postings from approximately 5,000 companies. Furthermore, approximately 30% of the job postings are remote. According to the site, engineering jobs for jobs listed range from $100,000 to $200,000. The average salary for a posted senior engineer position is $160,000.
“There are big companies, like Amazon, Meta, whatever ... but a majority of them are very small startups, like maybe under 50 people or 20 people. Those are the smaller companies that you cannot find on LinkedIn or Indeed,” said Gao, noting that a lot of the startups do not have the budget to pay the costs to post jobs on the big sites.
To access the site, job-seekers can pay $17 a month, $47 for three months or $67 for annual subscription. The company also runs ads from career coaches and employment recruiters.
From seminary student to entrepreneur
Gao initially arrived in Louisville in 2014 to attend the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on Lexington Road. He ended up earning two master's degrees from the institution (divinity and theology), but ultimately decided his calling to be a pastor had subsided.
Having earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science at a university of his home country of China, Gao began working at Humana as a software engineer in 2018 before leaving in 2021.
He currently works remotely as a senior software engineer for Openly, a home insurance company based out of Boston.
From a funding perspective, Gao said that he is currently figuring out how far the $25,000 in non-dilutive funding that he won from the Vogt Awards can go before looking into other outside capital opportunities.
“The main priority for me is to find a channel to scale the subscriptions,” he said.
At the moment, EchoJobs has an approximate monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of $1000, but Gao hopes for that number to expand to $10,000 before the end of this year — which would translate into 700 monthly users, give or take.
Looking further down the line, Gao wants to look at other niche job board sites for other occupations, such as one for accountants or marketing professionals, for starters.
“I know the general job board has their roles, and then they’re dominating the job market,” he said. “I believe the niche job board will help job-seekers better.”
In a related note, in May Gao acquired the rights to the RemoteFront.com, which only lists (you guessed it) remote jobs. At the moment, though, users can access the site without a paywall.
