I have been a Data Scientist for over a decade now and recently (1 year ago) I left my job and started to freelance. I have always had a thing for side projects though, and I have built a few over the last 5 years, but nothing that really took off. A while ago, I saw a tweet from Danny Postma, where he offered a little recipe on how to build a business without and audience, using only SEO. So I decided to give it a try and build 2 projects around 2 keywords that seemed promising.

One of the keywords was “Data Science internships”. It looked like a good idea for a job board. I would simply look for data internships daily and publish them on a website, trying to rank in Google for geo-related keywords (‘data analyst internship in Korea’ for example). It started going well, especially after I implemented the JobPosting data. I am currently making 600 users/month, 50% from Organic Search and I have a newsletter of more than 150 users. I have not monetized anything yet. My idea is to start contacting recruiters and try to get them to post on my site, but so far no luck.

Since I have a bit of runway and I don’t need new clients right now, I have decided to take a break from freelancing for a couple of months and launch as many side projects as possible. Partly to improve my skills and partly to see if something takes off, because this is really what I want to do, not listen to another clients requirements or do things I do not agree with. If something fails, it is entirely my fault. I am also lucky that I have a supportive wife, that can let me do this very risky thing (at least for the next couple of months).

So I am launching the first as a side project of Data Internships. Over the last 6 months I have collected a lot of info on the salaries paid for each internship. Not all companies share salary information but a few do, and it’s quite a valuable source of info for interns and to evaluate the market. So I standardized all the data, cleaned up and collected average/min/max salaries for all countries and companies all in one page.

I am launching it today on Product Hunt. Let me know what you think!