ThatNewJob.com
I was a struggling developer looking for work, and I thought a gig platform might be interesting to build — small jobs posted, members bid, everyone wins. I built an early version in PHP Laravel and it lasted about five minutes before I noticed something more interesting happening around me.
In the Discord communities I was spending time in, there were a lot of people in exactly my situation — not looking for side gigs, looking for actual jobs. Developers, designers, PMs, all sending out CVs in bulk and quietly losing track of where they’d applied, what stage they were at, whether they’d heard back. Someone would ask “how did you get on with that application?” and you’d get silence, or an honest admission that they genuinely couldn’t remember.
I’d been doing it differently. I had a spreadsheet — every job I’d seen, why I wanted it, the salary and benefits, the job description, what stage I’d reached or when it was rejected. Nothing sophisticated, just disciplined. I started thinking about the job search as a sales funnel, except instead of closing a deal, the deal is someone hiring you. The spreadsheet was the pipeline.
I shared a copy with a few people. Spreadsheets built in isolation aren’t always easy for others to follow, so I tidied the concept up and built it as a GitHub Projects kanban board — public, templateable, cloneable. People could copy it and work through the stages. The problem was you couldn’t enforce the stages, so it was more of a tracker than a system.
But enough people were interested that I thought it had legs. I scrapped the gig platform and rebuilt the site — still PHP Laravel, still MariaDB — as a proper visual funnel. Track your applications, record what stage you’re at, log the interviewer’s name, note the appointment. I liked what I had. Getting it hosted was the problem. Free and cheap hosts are free and cheap for a reason, and the performance was bad enough that I wasn’t proud to point people at it.
So I rebuilt it again. This time in Vite, with Firebase on the back end and Google authentication to keep each user’s data their own. It was much harder than the PHP version had been — it took me a weekend to build the Laravel version with users, reporting, and a feedback mechanism built in. The Vite version took two weeks and I never liked it as much. That told me something about where my actual strengths were, even if I wasn’t quite ready to hear it at the time.
I pushed it out anyway. Told the Discord communities. Got somewhere under a hundred signups. Most used it a handful of times. The feedback came in — too complex, too fiddly on mobile, could you add a CV builder, could you add a member directory, what about an AI assistant. I built the CV builder. I built the optional member directory. The AI assistant I couldn’t figure out how to do without leaving the free tier, so that stayed on the wishlist.
I started building a Flutter mobile app in parallel — same Firebase store, same logo, similar colour scheme, different UI. I had it running on my own phone and a friend’s for testing and was talking about it regularly in Discord. And then I got a job.
The energy I’d been putting into ThatNewJob evaporated almost immediately. Without me active in the communities, user numbers dwindled. I started thinking about a pivot — maybe a job matching service, something closer to an agency model. I started sketching out a pipeline in AWS. That work is unfinished.
The Flutter app still works. Three people use it. The web interface is currently disabled — login is off, there’s a holding page where the platform used to be — while I figure out whether there’s a next chapter or whether this one is done.
I genuinely don’t know yet.
