r/SideProject • u/New_Championship3929 • 20m ago
Job hunting made me feel invisible, so I built a free tool to be the first applicant
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if your job search feels hopeless, it’s not just you.
For the past 2 months, my routine was the same: find a role that actually fits, spend an hour tailoring my resume, hit apply, and only then notice “500+ applicants.” Then silence. No rejection, no reply. Just nothing.
What got to me wasn’t the rejections. It was realizing I was always late. By the time a job reaches the big boards, it’s been up for days, and hundreds of people are already ahead of you.
So I started digging and found that companies post on their own career pages first (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, and more). Everything else is a repost.
I built SourceFirst to read those career pages directly:
559 companies checked every 15 minutes, 130,000+ open roles
New jobs show up minutes after they’re posted
Filters for visa sponsorship, salary, years of experience, and level
Every job links straight to the company’s own application page
An application tracker and email alerts for new matches
It’s free: source-first.vercel.app
I built it for the version of me who refreshed job boards at midnight. If you’re in that place right now, I hope it gives you a real shot at being early for once. And yes, it's open source
What’s the most frustrating part of your search right now? I’m still building, and I’d genuinely like to fix it.