🏷️Product: New job alerts from 10+ most popular sites.
🌐Website: https://first2apply.com/
🗨️Social pages: 🔗@first2apply 🔗LinkedIn 🔗Facebook
💸Investment: ~$1k
📊Business model: Monthly subscriptions.
🛠️Tech stack: Electron.js, Supabase, React.js, Tailwind.
Can you tell us a bit about your background and what led you to develop First2Apply?
I’m a full stack developer with over 10 years of experience. At the beginning of 2024 my wife was searching for a junior frontend developer role and we were talking about how hard it is to constantly browse open LinkedIn tabs and check which jobs you’ve already seen. Also a lot of jobs were advertised as junior level, but in the job description they required 5 years of experience.
This led us to think of a way to automate the discovery of new jobs from LinkedIn (+ other job boards) and also run the job description through ChatGPT to get a more accurate view of what the job requirements are.
After we’ve built a rough MVP, we also found some Reddit posts where recruiters were saying that when they get 500+ applications for an open role, they usually fill the position by going over the first 100-200 applicants. So the idea that applying early increases your chances of landing an interview took shape. This fit really great into our MVP and we added notifications when the app finds new jobs so that users can apply early.
How did you validate the concept for First2Apply before starting development, and what specific gap in the market were you aiming to address?
After building the MVP for internal use (my wife loved it) we launched a landing page with a subscribe to waiting list option and started pitching the idea on Reddit and Hacker News (ShowHN). We’ve identified subreddits specific for job seekers and created posts there explaining the idea and inviting users to subscribe for the launch. We got ~100 subscribers in the first few days which made us believe we’re on the right track.
One month later we launched a private beta to gather feedback.
Right from the start we were aiming to send new job alerts as often as possible to test out the idea that applying early actually helps.
Can you walk us through how a user typically interacts with “First2Apply”? What steps do they take from signing up to receiving their first real-time job alerts?
We don’t have a signup option on the website, so the first thing users need to do is download the app and install it. After signing up, they need to create some job searches for the app to scan. After that just leave it running in the background and it will periodically scan the saved job searches to pull in new jobs.
Every time the app does this we save the results in our database, so at the end of the process we “diff” the current results with the ones we already had in the db. If there are new entries we send real-time job alerts so users can apply immediately.
How have users benefited from being the first to apply for jobs? Do you have any success stories or feedback that highlight the impact of your tool?
Unfortunately we haven’t been actively asking for feedback from users, but we received one great review in the MS app store that we also featured on our landing page:
“After being able to only send out about 5-10 applications a day, which usually took me about 3 hours of parsing through a bunch of suggestions that simply weren’t relevant to me, this app immensely increased my productivity! I was able to send out about 30-40 applications most days, in the course of about 2 hours. It also found jobs that I would’ve otherwise not seen! But most importantly, it allowed me to be one of the first applicants (I believe I was within the first 5) to a particular job, which I am sure was instrumental in me then landing that position!”
I also got a couple of emails from users with similar stories (after answering some support questions).
But most users actually enjoy the automation part, not having to manually scroll through LinkedIn and only going over the emails with new found jobs is a huge retainer for us.
Especially for users searching for multiple roles where they have 5-6 saved LinkedIn searches. Also most users use at least 2-3 job boards, so aggregating everything in a single dashboard with real-time job alerts is also quite appealing.
How did you attract your very first users for First2Apply, and what strategies are you currently using to promote the product and reach more job seekers?
Showcasing the project on Reddit. We started by targeting some niche subs like r/overemployed and got really great feedback. The app was in beta for a few months until we implemented a payment system.
Currently we’re only using Reddit. Creating new posts to showcase the project and also replying to other posts where users are asking for help with their job search and where f2a would actually be a fit.
We’re also actively working on adding content to our blog to increase our SEO presence. That and building backlinks.
Eventually we would like to try google search ads, but can’t afford to hire a performance marketeer yet.
With many job alert tools available, what are the key reasons users should choose “first2apply” over other job search platforms?
The main advantage of First2Apply is that it aggregates job boards together so that a user can receive alerts from all of them in the same place instead of receiving an email from every job board.
Also, almost all job boards only support weekly or at best daily emails for new jobs. First2Apply can scan the job boards as often as every 30min. This is configurable in the app settings, but most users leave it at 30min so there is definitely an interest in finding out about new jobs as soon as possible.
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