Rodolphe Dutel

Rodolphe Dutel is a France-based founder best known for Remotive, a bootstrapped job board and newsletter that helps tech professionals find remote jobs. He started it in 2014 as a side project and has kept it independent, saying in 2019 that it was not exploring the investment and buyout offers it received.

Dutel joined Google in early 2010, working from Dublin to sell Google's cloud office suite to French companies, and began advocating for remote work there in 2011. After Google he took a sabbatical sailing around the world, then joined Buffer, the fully remote social-media startup, first in business development, then as operations manager and finally as CFO, while Buffer grew from about 15 to 90 people.

Remotive began as a newsletter of remote jobs he curated on the side while at Buffer. Dutel went full time on it in January 2017, and in April 2019 relaunched a rebuilt job board that collected more than 1,000 upvotes on Product Hunt. Revenue roughly doubled in 2019, and his Indie Hackers interview carried the title Bootstrapping to $12,000/mo as a Non-Technical Founder. By 2020 about two-thirds of revenue came from companies paying to post jobs, and about 90% came from outside France. Remotive also ran a public list of companies hiring remotely, which grew from 200 in 2016 to 2,500 at the start of 2020.

Today Remotive calls itself the number one indie remote job board. It sells job posts and a paid membership that unlocks all listings, offers a free API and RSS feeds, and says more than 500,000 people follow it on social networks. In 2019 Dutel ran it with a small part-time remote team, including a part-time CTO in Croatia.

He was one of the loudest voices on remote work before the pandemic, with a 2018 tweet that passed ten million impressions, and he is a good example of a non-technical founder building a durable niche job board through curation and community.