Andrea Holland, founder of Remote PR Jobs, joined me on the Job Board Talk podcast to share her journey building a thriving niche job board for public relations and communications professionals. With over 20 years of industry experience and a bootstrapped approach to growth, Andrea’s story offers valuable lessons for aspiring job board entrepreneurs.
From Silicon Valley to Coastal Consulting
Andrea’s path to founding Remote PR Jobs wasn’t a typical startup origin story. After spending a decade working for major global PR firms in Silicon Valley—handling clients like Intel, PayPal, and Visa—she made a life change at age 30, relocating to a small coastal town in central California. Faced with the need to pay bills in a tech-desert location, she began freelancing, eventually building a successful PR consultancy focused on early-stage tech startups.
The Problem That Sparked an Idea
While managing her consulting practice, Andrea found herself struggling to find quality freelance PR opportunities online. Generic job boards mixed marketing and PR roles together, making the search frustrating despite her strong professional network. This pain point sparked a realization: if she couldn’t find these jobs easily, others probably couldn’t either.
Testing the Market with an Email List
Rather than building a full platform immediately, Andrea started lean. She manually searched for remote PR jobs each week and sent them to a small group of freelancer friends via email—just 10 jobs the first week. The response was immediate and enthusiastic.
What happened next validated her instincts: the weekly email list began getting forwarded around PR communities, with people asking to be added. After just a few months of manual curation, Andrea built a simple Squarespace opt-in page and watched her membership grow nearly 100% month-over-month.
“That was the very first early signal that I needed to make this accessible for people to sign up,” Andrea recalls.
From Free to Paid: A Pricing Evolution
The site remained free initially while Andrea tested for market viability. As she increased the value proposition—better curation, more job sources, additional features—she gradually introduced pricing. Today, Remote PR Jobs charges job seekers $19.99/month while keeping employer postings free to maximize job supply.
The data tells a compelling story: the average subscription lasts well over a year, and when members cancel, the most common reason is “I found a job”—exactly the outcome the platform aims for. Notably, price is rarely cited as a cancellation reason, suggesting members see genuine value in the service.
Building Trust in a Skeptical Industry
Andrea’s marketing approach differs sharply from traditional playbooks. Despite testing Facebook and LinkedIn ads, she found paid acquisition underperforms for her audience. Why? Communications professionals are naturally skeptical of promotional messaging—they understand persuasion tactics intimately.
Instead, Remote PR Jobs has grown primarily through:
- Content marketing on LinkedIn and the blog
- Andrea’s personal presence as a LinkedIn Learning author teaching PR and entrepreneurship courses
- Transparency and consistency in how the platform operates and curates jobs
- Direct customer engagement, with Andrea personally responding to member feedback weekly
- “Communications professionals respond to transparency, consistency, and demonstrated expertise over time,” Andrea explains. “That builds familiarity, confidence, authority, and trust in a way that paid ads simply doesn’t.”
Technology Evolution: From Toothpicks to Custom Build
For the first six to seven years, Remote PR Jobs ran on what Andrea calls “toothpicks”—a patchwork of Squarespace, Kajabi, Mailchimp, and custom layers bolted on top. This year, she made a significant investment: rebuilding the entire platform from scratch with custom technology.
The new stack includes:
Ethical API sourcing to aggregate jobs from hundreds of sites
Human review to filter and verify every job posting before it appears
AI on the backend to standardize formatting, structure, and categorization while maintaining relevance
“The AI gives us scale, but the humans protect the relevance of the jobs,” Andrea notes.
Adapting to Market Changes
When the pandemic hit, Andrea faced a critical decision. Remote PR Jobs had launched with freelance and contract roles only. As the market shifted, she nervously expanded to include full-time and part-time positions, expecting higher churn rates among employees who are typically less active job hunters.
Instead, churn remained stable. Andrea attributes this to ongoing market uncertainty—even employed professionals want to stay informed about opportunities. This insight led to a broader expansion of job types without sacrificing retention.
The Value of Being Your Customer
When asked for her number one piece of advice to aspiring job board founders, Andrea is emphatic: “Be your customer or know your customer very well.”
This authenticity permeates every decision at Remote PR Jobs. Andrea’s 20+ years in PR inform her curation standards, her understanding of what the industry needs, and her ability to build credibility with a naturally skeptical audience.
Looking Ahead
Remote PR Jobs continues to evolve. Upcoming roadmap items include:
- Online courses integrated into the platform, expanding beyond downloadable resources
- Virtual community events, such as monthly roundtables for members to connect
- Enhanced educational resources on PR fundamentals, measurement, data, and AI applications
- The job market for PR and communications remains challenging, with ongoing layoffs and return-to-office tensions. Yet Andrea remains bullish on the industry’s future, viewing it as one that will continue to evolve rather than decline.
Key Takeaways
Andrea’s journey offers several lessons for job board founders:
- Start small and validate—An email list is a perfect way to test market demand before building infrastructure
- Know your niche deeply—Being from the industry provided invaluable insight into customer needs and pain points
- Build trust over hype—For professional audiences, authenticity and consistency outperform paid advertising
- Monitor the metrics that matter—Conversion rates, churn, LTV, and member feedback reveal whether you’re delivering value
- Be your customer—Understanding firsthand what your audience needs creates an insurmountable competitive advantage
- Remote PR Jobs stands as a compelling example of how niche focus, authentic leadership, and genuine customer obsession can build a sustainable, profitable business—even in a challenging job market.
Remote PR Jobs is live at remoteprjobs.com.
