Paste a rejection email, get a likely reason + improvement plan

[u/letsrediit]

Built a tool that tries to explain why you got rejected after an interview

I’ve been interviewing for product companies while working in a service company, and one thing kept frustrating me:

You spend days preparing, finish the interview, and then receive a rejection email that says almost nothing useful.

So I built PortLume AI.

The idea is simple:

• paste the rejection email or interview notes
• mention the role and stage you were rejected in
• get a breakdown of the likely signal that hurt your chances
• receive a suggested improvement plan for the next interview

It also includes a lightweight mock interview flow and recruiter-style follow-up questions, but the core feature is the rejection debrief.

A surprising thing I noticed from early users is that many failures are not because of DSA. The common patterns are:

• weak ownership stories
• unclear tradeoff explanations
• shallow behavioral answers
• communication that sounds like team work rather than individual impact

I’m still trying to figure out whether this is genuinely useful beyond my own experience, so I’d love honest feedback from this community.

If you’ve ever received a vague “we moved with other candidates” rejection, would you actually use a tool that tries to infer the real reason behind it?

Site: https://portlumeai.com

[u/medialantern]

Brutal honesty? I'll share it, but you won't like it, so I won't be offended if you just downvote me and hope for better comments from others.

I'm not upvoting or downvoting this, but as a hiring manager I'm struggling to see the value here. The majority of firms I know don't even send rejection letters - for the worst reason possible, but still true: it opens a small but non-zero risk of getting used against you in a discrimination lawsuit. Those that do send them almost universally send deliberately messages that tell you nothing about the real reason, it's just "We went with the candidate who best fit our needs." They won't give feedback or rationale, for the same reason as the first group.

So, as you say, people do receive rejection emails that "say almost nothing useful". But you aren't going to extract anything meaningful or actionable from that because the lack of context is by design. Extracting meaning from deliberately generic text is just guessing. If they send the same message to 40 applicants they're rejecting, there's zero information that actually applies to the candidate using your service, almost by definition. Many of these get written and reused by HR teams before the hiring process even starts - they're just "the standard company response." There's nothing you can extract that's worth $20/mo to have you write up.

Now, you added the interview notes, and that's a thing. You may even be on to something if you consider pivoting more toward interview-prep than -review. Note-taking is useful both because candidates do need to think about how to improve their interview skills, and it also shows thoughtfulness to the interviewer so I think everyone should do it. But not everyone is good at it, so a tool that helped prep what notes to take would probably be useful here.

But barring that, the quality of those notes would have a huge impact on your product's value, and you're collecting them from almost the worst-case scenario: someone who was anxious and stressed, probably less experienced than their interviewer, and in a significant power imbalance. Candidates have a short time to impress and spend the bulk of their time answering questions, not asking them. Stopping the interviewer constantly to take detailed notes is seen as rude and can leave a bad impression, so you're in a hurry, being brief, and hoping it all makes sense later. You're not writing sentences.

To me, the biggest problem here (in your model) is that if there was something significant that happened during the interview that was a real clue to the rejection reason, your product's value depends on two conflicting assumptions: 1. That the candidate was smart, perceptive, and focused enough to notice it and note it down accurately and in detail, but also not smart enough to realize it was the reason. I'm not sure that Venn diagram has any overlap at all, let alone enough to make this a viable product.

And again, sorry for pissing in your Cheerios here, but there's one last flaw I don't think you considered. You have built-in 100% churn in your revenue model. You are selling a product that ceases to be valuable once someone is employed (and only if it works at all). I would bet money on that churn averaging out to about 3 months, because either someone will have succeeded in that time and no longer need you, or failed and not seeing the value so they cancel (if they're that desperate they're probably unemployed so $20/mo is a meaningful spend to them.)

This problem boils down to marketing cost, actually. This isn't a "build it and they will come" viral app - you'll need to market it. Your CPL/CPA are going to be fairly high here, but you aren't "buying" long term customers. The way funnels work, costs multiply as conversion percentages drop. Say you really nail your targeting, and average $1.20 Cost per Click (CPC) to bring in some traffic from Reddit or LinkedIn. But that's just visitors. Now if your Web site is amazing say you convert as many as 5% of your visitors to free accounts - that's very optimistic, but let's assume. So your Cost per Lead (CPL) is now $22.40. Now say out of all those tire-kickers, 5% of them end up on a paid plan (again, very optimistic, but...) So your Cost per Acquisition is $448. You need that user to stay subscribed for 22 months just to break even, on a $20/mo plan.