Building the Anti-Hustle Job Board: $5/year for Calm Companies

I spent six years at startups. At one of them, I tried to push for a better work culture: fewer pointless meetings, async communication, respecting people’s time. I got fired for it. Not laid off, not “let go due to restructuring.” Fired, because the way things had always been done was more important than whether people were actually thriving.

The realization nobody talks about

When I started job hunting again, I noticed something obvious that nobody seemed to be solving: there was no way to filter for company culture. Every job board lets you filter by salary, location, tech stack. None of them tell you whether the company actually respects its people or just says it does on the careers page.

I started keeping a spreadsheet. Companies I’d heard good things about, companies with transparent policies, companies where people actually stayed for more than two years. 37signals, Buffer, DuckDuckGo, Zapier, Fathom Analytics. I researched each one personally, reading Glassdoor reviews, checking employee tenure on LinkedIn, looking at their actual policies (not just what they claimed on their careers page).

From spreadsheet to side project

I shared the spreadsheet with a few friends who were also frustrated with toxic workplaces. Their reaction surprised me. Not “cool, thanks” but “can you keep this updated? Can you add companies in Europe? Can I share this with my partner?”

That was the signal. People didn’t just want a list; they wanted someone they trusted to maintain the list. The curation itself was the product.

I threw up a simple site at calmcompanies.club. A free company directory, a blog, and a weekly email newsletter every Monday with curated job openings from the companies I monitored. Last week’s issue had 177 jobs across 53 companies.

The $5/year decision

Every SaaS playbook says to charge $10/month minimum. I went the opposite direction: $5 per year. Not $5/month. Five dollars for twelve months.

Why? Because I didn’t want pricing to be a decision. I wanted someone to see the newsletter, think “that’s less than a coffee,” and subscribe without a second thought. The goal was subscribers, not revenue per subscriber. I figured if the content was good enough, the audience would compound and other revenue opportunities would follow.

It worked. The conversion rate from “visits the site” to “pays $5” is absurdly high compared to anything I’ve seen in SaaS. No free trials, no feature gating, no “upgrade to pro” friction. Just one price, one product, done.

SEO through genuine helpfulness

I started writing blog posts about the problems I’d lived through. “Interview red flags that signal a toxic culture” (because I’d missed them). “What ‘unlimited PTO’ actually means in practice” (because I’d been burned by it). “Signs your company actually cares about work culture” (because I’d learned the hard way what the real signs are).

Twelve posts total. Not a content farm, not keyword-stuffed filler. Real advice from real experience. The interview red flags post gets shared in Slack channels I’ve never heard of. The work culture post resonates with people who’ve been through the same thing. Together, the blog brings in steady organic traffic that feeds the newsletter.

What I’d tell someone starting today

Don’t build a SaaS. Don’t build an app. Open a spreadsheet and start curating something you care about. The spreadsheet phase taught me what people actually valued before I spent a single dollar on hosting. It forced me to do the work manually, which is exactly how I discovered that manual curation was the product, not a stepping stone to automation.

I’m still @RaulOnRails on Twitter. Still bootstrapped. Still no VC. Still manually checking every company before adding it to the directory. The scale is deliberately small, and that’s the point.