There’s another way in.

Job hunting can feel like feeding a very polite shredder. Find a vacancy, tailor the CV, write the cover letter, repeat.

There are routes outside that queue. A founder posts about a new team. Someone announces funding. A former colleague knows the hiring manager. You spot a product problem you could help solve. The hard part is finding the right opening and doing something useful with it.

Lenny Rachitsky’s November jobs report describes stalled engineering demand, weaker design hiring and fewer remote roles. It suggests a challenging search environment, not proof that outreach guarantees better results.

Meanwhile, this strategy shared by Ayesha recommends spotting fresh hiring posts and newly funded startups, then contacting relevant people directly. Its claimed job-offer result is an anonymous anecdote, not independent validation.

WayIn would organise those creative approaches into a repeatable workflow. The customer buys a better way to start a relevant conversation.

Build a workspace around companies, people and routes in, alongside any advertised vacancies.

1. Set the target. Add your skills, experience, preferred roles, location and companies. Define what makes an opportunity relevant.
2. Find the opening. Surface fresh hiring posts, funding announcements, team changes and product launches. Show the original source and date. Treat each as a reason to investigate; funding alone does not establish an available job.
3. Find the person. Suggest relevant founders, hiring managers, team members or existing connections. Explain why that person fits and let the user correct the suggestion.
4. Choose a route. Draft a short cold email, LinkedIn message or DM. Ask for a warm introduction. Suggest a small project, product teardown or portfolio example that demonstrates the candidate’s actual skills.
5. Make it personal. Tie the message to the company’s situation and evidence from the candidate’s work. Never invent an introduction, achievement or relationship.
6. Keep the conversation moving. Save contacts, notes, replies and follow-up dates in a simple pipeline. Track conversations and interviews as well as outreach attempts.

For example, a product marketer sees a fictional startup launch in a new market. WayIn helps identify the marketing lead, put together a short localisation teardown and draft a message asking whether it would be useful. The candidate edits and sends it.

Start with user-reviewed drafts and copy/export controls. Live account connections and sending can follow only where supported and authorised. The first product should already be useful without asking for access to someone’s entire inbox.

Illustrative test assumptions, not achieved results or a forecast.

• Test $29 per month for the self-serve product while someone is actively job hunting.
• 100 paying users × $29 = $2,900 monthly subscription revenue.
• 1,000 paying users × $29 = $29,000 monthly subscription revenue.
• Annualising the second scenario gives $348,000, but jobseeker churn means it should not be presented as guaranteed contracted ARR.

An initial unit-economics experiment:

• Assume $7 per active user per month for data, models, hosting and variable support.
• That leaves $22 contribution per paid month, about 76%, before acquisition costs, fixed salaries and tax.
• At a hypothetical three paid months, that is $66 contribution per acquired customer before those other expenses.
• A $40 acquisition cost would consume most of that contribution. At only one paid month, the same acquisition cost would exceed contribution.

These inputs need measuring. Reliable signal sourcing and contact data could cost more than the model calls.

A second test is a $99 four-week concierge pilot: a tightly scoped shortlist, outreach planning and a weekly review. Ten customers would produce $990 in pilot revenue. Delivery time determines whether that can become a business.

The pain is concrete. Lenny’s report documents changes in hiring demand and remote availability. The opportunity is helping candidates act intelligently in that environment, rather than promising an easier market. Source.

The pieces can be tested separately. A founder can manually curate signals, map contacts and help users write messages before building integrations.

The category already attracts spending. Teal offers resume and job-search tools. Huntr offers application, contact and interview tracking. These demonstrate existing products, not an unserved market or proven demand for WayIn.

The hypothesis is that candidates will pay for help turning a company signal into a specific next action.

Charge jobseekers a monthly subscription with a straightforward cancellation process. Keep a useful free tier for saved companies and a small number of opportunities; test whether personalised discovery and outreach planning justify upgrading.

Offer a more expensive, bounded concierge option while learning the workflow. Avoid unlimited personal coaching at a software price.

Later, explore career coaches, universities and outplacement providers as distribution partners or buyers. Their needs and buying cycles require separate validation.

Expect successful customers to leave when they get hired. Build an acquisition model that works with a short buying window. Do not depend on someone remaining unemployed for the economics to make sense.

• Teal: resumes, job tracking and related search tools. WayIn needs to earn its place beside a candidate’s existing application workflow. Product.
• Huntr: application and contact tracking, tailored resumes and interview organisation. Tracking alone is not differentiation. Product.
• LinkedIn, email and a spreadsheet: the practical DIY alternative. WayIn must save research time and improve relevance enough to justify another subscription.
• Career coaches and personal networks: people already help candidates decide whom to approach and what to say. The software should support that judgement.

The proposed distinction is signal → relevant person → tailored approach → follow-up, with evidence attached at every step.

Longer-term advantage could come from accurate sourcing, user corrections and knowing which approaches lead to meaningful replies. More generated messages would be easy to copy.

1. Interview 15 active jobseekers. Ask them to show their last ten applications and any conversations that led somewhere.
2. Choose one initial group. For example, experienced product marketers seeking startup roles. This is a pilot scope, not a limit on the wider idea.
3. Recruit ten paid four-week pilots. Agree target roles, locations and a weekly time budget.
4. Deliver five relevant company signals each week. Include the source, a suitable person and one credible approach. Have users reject poor matches.
5. Track the full funnel. Relevant opportunities accepted, drafts used, messages sent, meaningful replies, interviews and research time saved. Record the denominators.
6. Review quality weekly. Look at actual messages and replies with permission. Separate friendly acknowledgements from hiring conversations.
7. Ask for the next payment. Test whether users still searching renew, refer someone or would recommend the service after getting hired.

A proposed learning target: at least six of ten users consistently act on the shortlist, and at least four reach a relevant hiring conversation during the pilot. These are experiment thresholds, not industry benchmarks or promised outcomes.

Recruit through career communities, specialist newsletters and coaches who already serve that initial audience. A useful public example would show the announcement, outreach reasoning and resulting conversation, with permission.

• A signal is mistaken for a vacancy. Clearly separate “worth approaching” from confirmed hiring.
• Generic outreach becomes spam. Optimise for relevance and reply quality. Keep users in control of each send.
• Contact information is inaccurate. Show provenance, let users correct it and make deletion straightforward.
• Platforms limit access or automation. Validate the permitted sourcing and integration paths before depending on them. The pilot can use public sources and manual exports.
• The product suggests work the candidate cannot do. Ground drafts and project pitches in real experience. Keep speculative sample work clearly labelled.
• Service time destroys the margin. Measure curation, corrections and support per active customer.
• Customers leave quickly. Model short paid lifetimes and seek repeatable partner distribution.

WayIn helps people get jobs through creative, relevant approaches: finding a company at the right moment, identifying someone worth speaking to and starting a conversation that demonstrates what they can offer.

The first test is ten paying jobseekers, a month of carefully chosen opportunities and a clear record of what happened. If people act on the recommendations and get useful conversations, build the software around the parts they keep using.