Laid off in 7 minutes — why I build in public

TL;DR — I lost an 11-year career in seven minutes, found out how broken job hunting had become, and built RoleNavigator to get through it. This blog is me doing the rest of it in the open.

It happened on a Wednesday in November. It took seven minutes.

Eleven years. Poof. Gone in seven minutes.

I hadn’t looked for a job in over a decade, and the market looked nothing like what I remembered. Systems that eat your resume before a human ever sees it. Job boards that “recommend” roles that aren’t remotely right. I had bills to pay, and applying for jobs felt like using a typewriter in 2024.

I never had a grand vision for releasing anything. I just needed to get through it.

But I’ve spent my career around software, go-to-market, and AI — and at some point the obvious hit me: I could automate almost all of this. The scanning. The resume tailoring. The cover letters. The endless tracking of who I’d applied to and where each one stood.

So I built RoleNavigator because I needed it. Then I showed it to a few other people who were searching — and realized I wasn’t the only one drowning.

The job search hasn’t gotten easier since that November. If anything it’s gotten worse: more ghosting, more hours poured into applications that go nowhere, and roughly a hundred thousand more qualified people in the pool.

Why I’m writing about it

That’s the thing about getting blindsided — it’s lonely, and you assume you’re the only one. You’re not.

So I’m building in public. I’ll write about what I’m shipping — RoleNavigator, capquick, and whatever’s next — what’s working, what’s breaking, and what it actually takes to go from eleven years of stability to building your own thing.

If you’re in the middle of your own seven-minute Wednesday: you’re not alone, and there’s a way through. I’m documenting mine here.