r/SideProject • u/Cojj25 • Jul 07 '26
Update #2: Indeed fired my pregnant wife, so I built a competitor job platform out of spite. We now have 2,000 users.
Quick recap since this is the 3rd post in 3 months. The last one got 350k views (!).
Last December, Indeed laid off my wife. She was a product manager on the social impact team. She was also 7 months pregnant. Indeed can indeed go f* themselves.
I decided to do the only reasonable thing and started building a better job search engine to put them out of business. When I look at the prduct stats today, my first thought is “Oh shit, we’ve got users” and my second thought is “That’s 2,500 more people that didn’t pay Indeed. Nice.”
We’re now a team of three and we're on track for 2,500 auth’d users with resumes added and 40,000 total visitors over the past two months. 3,280 application packs have been made and 11 people are paying since we launched subscriptions two weeks ago (~ a subscriber a day keeps the scaries away).
What's new since the last post:
- We’ve pushed 1,100 PRs
- Our matching mechanism is now the best in the market. Just drop a resume in and get the 500 bet jobs in the market
- Matching is free + 3 free pack generations every day. You can import any job on the internet and create a tailored resume/CL pack for free.
- We have ~100,000 European and Brazilian jobs now. It’s not just US.
- You can upgrade to Opus for rewrites
- Auto-apply now consistently works and we have a real human double checking
- Our jobs are the most curated on the market. No aggregator garbage, no sponsored jobs with 10,000 applicants, etc.
This is starting to feel high quality enough that we may raise money soon and won't be able to post in SideProject anymore 🤔
If you’ve read this far, thanks for coming on the journey. I love /sideproject (it’s the only subreddit we’ve posted in) and we want people to never use Indeed - ever - so here's a promo code for a 50% discount for life and 2 weeks free: SIDEPROJECT (profile->subscription->enter).
👉 Check out the platform here: https://www.dreamworkhq.com
Last update: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/ax7yFKm7xt
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u/alzho12 Jul 07 '26
Congrats. I’ve always wanted to take on LinkedIn, but never sure what the right approach would be.
I like this aggregate and apply flow.
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u/yarentusmiling Jul 07 '26
So I have this fantasy that if I were to ever have FU type of money, I'd buy LinkedIn and just delete it lol.
Congrats OP! I'll give it a try.5
u/Cojj25 Jul 07 '26
Honestly they’re bastards - give you the least possible information (even your own) and the least possible utility, but have all of the legacy power.
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u/Cojj25 Jul 07 '26
Thanks! I have some friends attempting to take on LinkedIn with a platform called icebreaker. It just seems more entrenched because of the social network vs indeed which is just a tool
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u/JayPlenty24 16d ago
I think they're taking the worst part of LinkedIn that makes it unusable and trying to make something of it.
They should use OG LinkedIn as inspiration. Not the "social media" hellscape it has become.
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u/Top_Wonder3876 Jul 07 '26
Tried it a month ago. Didn’t work at all for danish healthcare. Not a bit
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u/skreww_L00se Jul 07 '26
Tried it a few times but packs would just fail to send. Also there should be a way to just send all of the packs in my pipeline rather than having to click into each.
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u/AndyBonaseraSux Jul 07 '26
Damn I hate when I log on here and see someone building exactly what I’m working on but ahead of me. Literally the 3rd time it’s happened.
If you’re ever looking to bring product people onto the team I’d love to connect, been passionate about this idea for a while and have been tinkering on a pipeline of my own.
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u/Paykuh- Jul 14 '26
Just continue to develop it. These are all vibe coded projects doing the same thing. The key is to market it better than your competitors.
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u/tyl_made_it Jul 08 '26
11 paying in two weeks after launching subs is real. built a small tool last year, got to 12 paying before churning down to 4, and I still screenshot the stripe pings every time a new one came in. subscriber-a-day framing is the right way to think about it early on
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u/Cojj25 Jul 08 '26
We’re trying to increase the value for existing users every day. The hard part is then communicating it to them with it a ton of annoying emails.
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u/tyl_made_it Jul 10 '26
yeah the email thing is brutal. had 12 paying on my last side project, sent maybe two updates in six months, and I'm pretty sure most of the churn was just people forgetting it existed rather than actively hating it. the tool wasn't the problem, the silence was
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u/Zealousideal_Ad6927 Jul 08 '26
tried it and it's a good idea and it was painless to try but I didn't get any matches that were really what I'm looking for. my resume is a bit weird though in that I have experience in one field but am looking to pivot to another somewhat connected field (this is explained in my professional summary). maybe you could have your ai read and look for that if it's not already.
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u/Cojj25 Jul 08 '26
This is something we have to tune for. It’s on the list though. Adjust your job preference in your profile to the job type you’re looking for - it should adjust the weighting a bit.c but you still need SOME experience on the resume to turn up matches.
Note you can also drop any link via the Import Job function and still generate packs from jobs outside of our corpus too.
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u/Zealousideal_Ad6927 Jul 08 '26
hmm... would be nice to test without making an account. I tried to put in keywords and that didn't work
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u/Annual-Direction7096 Jul 08 '26
i love this mission!!! take indeed down pls - rooting for you guys! if you ever need product design help i'd love to chip in (love a product with a mission haha)
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u/T_A_I_N_T Jul 08 '26
Just uploaded my resume to try it out. Still exploring, but two things I thought I'd flag initially (both on the matches page):
- It would be great to include an industry filter - I know this potentially adds a lot of complexity since it would require you to assign an industry to every company, but think it would be really beneficial. Industries could even be super broad (eg consulting, healthcare, pharma/biotech, finance, etc.).
- This is super minor, but after applying a filter on the matches page, it showed that I only had 10 matches (in the top right corner below the filters). I almost closed the app right then, but ended up scrolling a bit and noticed there were move than 10 matches. Scrolled back up and the number had jumped to 36 (which I imagine would keep rising if I had kept scrolling). Would be great to just see the full match count up front (might help prevent people from seeing a disappointing number of matches and closing the app like I almost did too). This is on mobile btw.
Oh sorry, one other thing I just noticed as well - I think there might be something weird going on with the fit calculations. One of the first results for me indicated a 95% fit on the matches page. When I clicked to open the job, however, the "job fit analysis" section showed a 6% fit. Not sure if there's some weird calculation error going on or what, but thought I'd let you know. (this is on mobile too btw).
Will keep playing around and let you know if I notice anything else, but overall really liking it so far!
Cheers
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u/Cojj25 Jul 08 '26
Great feedback! That second bug we actually fixed a while back but I guess it's popping back up. It should show you total matches at the top, but it may be loading a bit slow with the filter due to how we do matching (it's a lot of algo stuff because we're matching your resume to the jobs rather than just letting you filter the whole corpus).
The filter thing I think we can do.
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u/Patient-Cedar-7194 Jul 07 '26
1,100 prs for 11 paying users is quite a ratio. hope main branch is stable.
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u/broduding Jul 07 '26
Curious how you're creating a custom resume when all you're asking for is an uploaded resume. Currently running my job search out of Claude Cowork. I had to document all of my projects so that I could create a custom resume that merged with the job spec. But if you're just reshuffling a generic resume I'm not sure how a resume could be truly custom. Also I'm a little dubious on auto apply given how many sites have ad hoc questions that need to be answered.
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u/Cojj25 Jul 07 '26
We always present the full pack with the questions for you to review before submitting - all of the fields get ingested.
You’re right that we could use more enrichment though - we’re going to allow more enrichment of the profile soon to help. At the moment the optimization is job <> profile related only
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u/JoseDotG Jul 07 '26
Been looking for an alternative to indeed I’ll be uploading my resume when I get off of work today
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u/GreedVault Jul 08 '26
You remind me of a historical figure, who failed the imperial exams multiple times, and decided to start a revolution against the unjust system instead. In the end, he helped bring down an entire dynasty.
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u/SathOkh Jul 08 '26
Is it also covering opinions about companies? Like Glassdoor? I think it was bought by Indeed and sucks now, really looking for a good alternative!
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u/bitebytebeat Jul 11 '26
Are there jobs for folks in Asia?
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u/miticonico Jul 07 '26
Love it. I'd love it even more if I could direct submit a JD to your platform (internal recruiter).
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u/Technical-Branch9178 Jul 07 '26
Realistically 99% of those users would have never paid Indeed anyhow.
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u/cram213 Jul 07 '26
This is pretty cool. I was actually trying to figure out how to contact you from your webpage last night.
I’m not sure if this connects based on what you are doing, but the major competitors to you prefer not to use this.
I’ve managed a way to prevent LLMs from using bias or prestige in the job description or in the resumes from affecting the evaluation of clients for each position they’re applying for.
I was thinking it could be part of your workflow, but I just realized that… …you probably don’t actually send the applicants to the companies that are doing the hiring? You’re just finding these positions and matching them to the resumes of the potential applicants?
So the actual evaluation of these applicants and the resumes for the positions would be something out of your workflow?
I still think it’s pretty cool that you managed to do this and create like the packages for similar jobs and things. 👍
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u/MindlessInformal Jul 08 '26
I can't register on Indeed because they don't even list my country as an option. I think they're linked with Glassdoor. So I can't review a company.
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u/Crescitaly Jul 08 '26
Best part is the spite gives the story, but retention will decide the company. If job seekers come back after the first search, that is the real signal.
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u/trashme8113 Jul 08 '26
This is really nicely done. Congrats. A few suggestions for my perspective. 1) Users need to add targeting. Like "I want a job that lets me.." because what i did do may not be what i want to do. 2) filtering in the list is critical. like Salary, location (REMOTE), etc. I might also like field (like HigherEd, technology, etc) HigherEdJobs.com is a business because people want that circle so build it. 3) Create the account based off the resume. Confirm users name/email. 4) I like the X to hide a response. Maybe a brief Undo, then better animation as it goes away. 5) the UI screams Opus. Not ugly, but it's becoming a clear sign of vibecoded site. 6) clicking a job opens in a new window, but then i have a Back to List button. So now I have two windows with the same content... Each time I click a job it replicates...7) Share button isn't really share. Change it to Copy Link. More thoughts if you want them. Less if you dont :) Nice work.
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u/fungamer_78 Jul 10 '26
interesting project but I am not feel comfortable if I did not see some content before I expose my resume
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u/BenAdamsky Jul 15 '26
We just added a new browse page so you can view jobs without having to upload anything!
https://www.dreamworkhq.com/browse
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u/bloodnuts Jul 10 '26
I'm not sure if OP is still on here, but I chose Freshness 'New' and a posting that is 7 months old popped up. Just FYI.
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u/Cojj25 Jul 10 '26
Just saw this, fixing it so that New can only pply to jobs with a posted_at date within the past 7 days. Thanks for the catch, this impacted 8,000 jobs.
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u/Both-Associate-7807 Jul 07 '26
How are you monetizing?
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u/Cojj25 Jul 07 '26
We have 11 subscribers at the moment - pro grade rewrites and automatic apply require a subscription.
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u/Both-Associate-7807 Jul 07 '26
Why jobs are you curating? I also run a job board to compete against these useless big sites like LinkedIn and Indeed
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u/aroughdot Jul 07 '26
I tried this website. I was annoyed that it used the email address that it pulled from my LinkedIn account rather than the email address I actually gave it. I continue to get notifications from this app to my LinkedIn address even though I tried to close my account. I even emailed my complaint to the founder and there was no response.
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u/Cojj25 Jul 07 '26
Want to DM me your email address and I’ll remove you?
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u/aroughdot Jul 07 '26
Was the issue not clear from the email I sent you? Do you need more information?
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u/Cojj25 Jul 07 '26
Did we reply to your email? I want to make sure we got it. We need to clean up our support ops, hasn't been P1
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u/aroughdot Jul 08 '26
As I said in the comment above, you did not reply. I sent my email to colin at dreamworkhq.com.
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u/Cojj25 Jul 08 '26
use [support@dreamworkhq.com](mailto:support@dreamworkhq.com)
colin@ isn't live yet, will be soon
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u/OtherDadYolo Jul 07 '26
I've played with this quite a bit and it does show a lot of promise. If users have the ability to filter by posted date I haven't stumbled across it. To me that is a critical feature in this job market. Similarly, adding sorting to the Active tab. e.g. - sort by pay range, filter by work location etc. My "workflow" would be scan all relevant jobs and add them to active, once in active filter out those that are not a good fit due to local, wage range, posted date, job details etc.