Should I Build It Should I Build It
03 May 2025
Marketing

an app that continuously monitors company websites for job listings

Confidence
Engagement
Net use signal
Net buy signal

Idea type: Run Away

Multiple attempts have failed with clear negative feedback. Continuing down this path would likely waste your time and resources when better opportunities exist elsewhere.

Should You Build It?

Don't build it.

Your are here

The idea of an app that continuously monitors company websites for job listings falls into a challenging category. Our analysis indicates that multiple attempts in this space have met with negative feedback, suggesting a high risk of failure. With 20 similar products already identified, the market is quite crowded, indicating significant competition. While the average number of comments on these products is moderate (7), the absence of net positive signals for both 'use' and 'buy' underscores the hesitations and potential pitfalls of pursuing this idea. Given this landscape, it's crucial to approach with extreme caution.

Recommendations

  1. Thoroughly review the criticism summaries from similar products. Many users expressed concerns about the low success rate of online job applications, the integrity of company reviews, and general distrust of job platforms. Understanding these pain points is crucial before moving forward.
  2. Evaluate if your skills could be applied to a related, yet different, problem within the career services domain. For instance, instead of focusing solely on job listings, explore solutions addressing the broader challenges of job searching, such as resume optimization or interview preparation.
  3. If you have already started building the app, assess whether the underlying technology can be repurposed for a different application. Perhaps the web scraping capabilities could be used to monitor industry trends or competitor activities.
  4. Conduct user interviews with at least three individuals who have used similar job monitoring products. Understanding their specific needs, frustrations, and unmet expectations will provide valuable insights for pivoting or refining your approach.
  5. Based on your research and findings, consider a completely new idea. Use the lessons learned to explore an unmet need that aligns better with market demands and offers a unique value proposition.
  6. Focus on addressing data privacy concerns, as these are a recurring theme in user feedback. Implement robust security measures and be transparent about how user data is collected, stored, and used.
  7. Instead of broadly scraping all job listings, consider specializing in a niche market or industry. This targeted approach could help differentiate your app and attract a more specific user base.

Questions

  1. Given the existing skepticism around job boards and application processes, how can your app differentiate itself and provide tangible value to job seekers in a way that addresses their specific concerns?
  2. How will you ensure the accuracy and reliability of the job listing data scraped from company websites, and what measures will you implement to prevent the spread of misinformation or outdated listings?
  3. Considering the prevalence of job application tracking tools, what unique features or functionalities will your app offer to incentivize users to switch from existing solutions or adopt your app as their primary job search companion?

Your are here

The idea of an app that continuously monitors company websites for job listings falls into a challenging category. Our analysis indicates that multiple attempts in this space have met with negative feedback, suggesting a high risk of failure. With 20 similar products already identified, the market is quite crowded, indicating significant competition. While the average number of comments on these products is moderate (7), the absence of net positive signals for both 'use' and 'buy' underscores the hesitations and potential pitfalls of pursuing this idea. Given this landscape, it's crucial to approach with extreme caution.

Recommendations

  1. Thoroughly review the criticism summaries from similar products. Many users expressed concerns about the low success rate of online job applications, the integrity of company reviews, and general distrust of job platforms. Understanding these pain points is crucial before moving forward.
  2. Evaluate if your skills could be applied to a related, yet different, problem within the career services domain. For instance, instead of focusing solely on job listings, explore solutions addressing the broader challenges of job searching, such as resume optimization or interview preparation.
  3. If you have already started building the app, assess whether the underlying technology can be repurposed for a different application. Perhaps the web scraping capabilities could be used to monitor industry trends or competitor activities.
  4. Conduct user interviews with at least three individuals who have used similar job monitoring products. Understanding their specific needs, frustrations, and unmet expectations will provide valuable insights for pivoting or refining your approach.
  5. Based on your research and findings, consider a completely new idea. Use the lessons learned to explore an unmet need that aligns better with market demands and offers a unique value proposition.
  6. Focus on addressing data privacy concerns, as these are a recurring theme in user feedback. Implement robust security measures and be transparent about how user data is collected, stored, and used.
  7. Instead of broadly scraping all job listings, consider specializing in a niche market or industry. This targeted approach could help differentiate your app and attract a more specific user base.

Questions

  1. Given the existing skepticism around job boards and application processes, how can your app differentiate itself and provide tangible value to job seekers in a way that addresses their specific concerns?
  2. How will you ensure the accuracy and reliability of the job listing data scraped from company websites, and what measures will you implement to prevent the spread of misinformation or outdated listings?
  3. Considering the prevalence of job application tracking tools, what unique features or functionalities will your app offer to incentivize users to switch from existing solutions or adopt your app as their primary job search companion?

  • Confidence: High
    • Number of similar products: 20
  • Engagement: Medium
    • Average number of comments: 7
  • Net use signal: -6.0%
    • Positive use signal: 4.0%
    • Negative use signal: 10.1%
  • Net buy signal: -6.4%
    • Positive buy signal: 1.2%
    • Negative buy signal: 7.7%

This chart summarizes all the similar products we found for your idea in a single plot.

The x-axis represents the overall feedback each product received. This is calculated from the net use and buy signals that were expressed in the comments. The maximum is +1, which means all comments (across all similar products) were positive, expressed a willingness to use & buy said product. The minimum is -1 and it means the exact opposite.

The y-axis captures the strength of the signal, i.e. how many people commented and how does this rank against other products in this category. The maximum is +1, which means these products were the most liked, upvoted and talked about launches recently. The minimum is 0, meaning zero engagement or feedback was received.

The sizes of the product dots are determined by the relevance to your idea, where 10 is the maximum.

Your idea is the big blueish dot, which should lie somewhere in the polygon defined by these products. It can be off-center because we use custom weighting to summarize these metrics.

Similar products

Relevance

First2Apply – job scraping desktop app

10 Feb 2024 Hiring

Inspired by the latest tech layoffs and all the conversations about how bad the job market is, I decided to build a tool to solve a part of this problem.I’ve had this hypothesis that if a job has more than 200 applications it’s pretty much useless to apply anymore because they will probably find a candidate amongst those first few hundred.This is how I came up with the idea for https://first2apply.com/ an app that continuously scans job boards customised by the user and alerts when it finds a new opening. I built a prototype over one weekend to see if I could actually pull it off and then created a landing page and started spreading the word. Two weeks later there have been 200+ signups on the waiting list and the MVP is ready to be shipped.How it works? You go to a job site like LinkedIn, search for your desired role/tech stack, filter by country or remote and apply the last 24h filter. Then copy paste the URL in the app. The app will then periodically scrape the links you saved and check if there are new listings from last time and send a native desktop notification.It's also very easy to organise your job hunt when using multiple sites since you have one dashboard to check new entries from all of them and recently added a tab to save the ones where you applied in order to manage them more easily.I've been testing this with my wife who is currently looking for a job as a junior react dev and am starting to get some positive results after using it for a while: - https://imgur.com/a/LFOdAOD here is an example of a job from LinkedIn which got 50 applications in the first 12h and then they closed it. I think it's safe to assume they have enough to pick from- https://imgur.com/a/2Coi1KQ finally the holy grail, a job with no applications. Unfortunately it was for a Java position because even though you filter by React in LinkedIn they still show you jobs for other tech :/She has been using the app for the past 2 weeks and was able to find ~5 valid jobs that she could apply for. Unfortunately there are not a lot of companies hiring juniors. One other benefit that she noticed was that she doesn't have to constantly refresh her job sites, just wait for the notification to pop up and check the latest results. This way she has more time to spend working on her portfolio projects.So from my one beta tester, I have gotten positive feedback, but it's very much a textbook case of the Mom test. Looking forward to hear what other people think and hopefully this could help someone get that extra edge needed to land a job.

Users have requested a Linux version of the product. The product has also received positive feedback, with one user describing it as 'cool.'

The product lacks a Linux version, which limits its accessibility and usability for users who rely on this operating system.

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Relevance

NotifyAI - Automate job search

05 Dec 2024 Hiring Career

NotifyAI helps job seekers monitor companies career pages. It send instant alerts on March found. It automate job searching efforts saving time. One can never miss a job from dream company. One can automate monitoring multiple companies across globe

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7
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Relevance

Job Listings Scraper

04 Dec 2024 Career

I found my last job by using a scraper that visits company websites in search of job listings. Now I've turned it into an app for others to use and access jobs that are posted on company websites (rather than paid employer ads on Indeed or where ever). This gives the job searcher an advantage to find jobs not listed on job search sites and show the company you have taken time and interest to visit their company website.

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A tech job board I've been building over the last 8 months

25 Jun 2024 Career

Hey HN! Quick TL; DR: I set up scrapers for the websites of ~20k tech companies, fed the results through GPT, spent some sleepless nights building a web app, and voilá.I started this after getting fed up with how slow LinkedIn felt. I finally got it working and easy to use, so I wanted to share it with you guys.The job list is free. But I’m currently paying a lot of money to OpenAI for all the data I’m passing through GPT, so I may end up eventually charging for some advanced features, or putting ads on it or something.Please let me know what you think!I’m actively developing this so I’m happy to add requested features.Some technical details you may be curious about: - I began gathering the career pages for each company manually, but I ended up hiring a few Filipino contractors to speed up the process. - I run the web scrapers once per day. - I do the web scraping with Node.js. I use cheerio for basic web pages, and puppeteer for more complicated ones. - My OpenAI API dashboard tells me I process 7 million characters per day. - The list doesn’t encompass every single tech company (yet). I have most of the major ones (~20k), but the process of adding new companies is pretty labour intensive so it’s still ongoing. - The web app is built with React, and I got the infinite scrolling to be so smooth using a great library called React Query.For feature requests, please leave a comment here or email me at dorfmanjames@gmail.com

Users suggest adding European companies, remote job options, email alerts, and detailed company information. One user finds the app cool and shares a related link.

The product lacks European companies, remote job options, email alerts, and detailed company information.

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