An ATS Replacement for Small Teams Perhaps?

I keep thinking about this conversation I had with my friend last month, he's trying to hire developers for his startup and he's literally tracking candidates in a Google Doc - a Google Doc! - and I'm watching him scroll through this mess of names and email addresses and interview notes that aren't connected to anything, and I realize this is probably what most small companies are doing right now, just winging it and hoping they don't lose track of the good people.

It's wild to me because hiring is literally the most important thing a company does, right? Like, everything depends on getting the right people, but somehow we've all just accepted that the process has to be chaos unless you can afford those enterprise systems that cost more than most people's rent. And I'm sitting there watching him stress about whether he followed up with that one candidate who seemed promising, and I'm like, dude, I literally built something that could fix this entire problem.

The Advanced Hiring Funnel started because I was frustrated with this exact scenario - not just for my friend, but for every small team I know that's trying to scale without losing their minds. I wanted something that would give you a proper careers page and application tracking and team collaboration, but without all the bloat that makes you need a manual just to post a job listing. Something you could set up in an afternoon and actually want to use every day.

I mean, it's not perfect - nothing ever is - but it does what it's supposed to do: it takes the administrative nightmare out of hiring so you can focus on actually talking to people and figuring out who's going to be a good fit. And it works in Notion, which means it's not another subscription eating into your budget, it's just there, ready to grow with you. [I found out that aside from marketing, and operations, hiring is one of the highest expenses for a startup.]

The remote stuff was important to get right too because that's just reality now, but it's more than that - it's about being able to manage a distributed hiring process where your team might be in different time zones and your candidates are everywhere and you still need to keep everything moving without things falling through the cracks.

Sometimes I wonder if I should have made it more complex, added more features, made it look more like those enterprise systems that cost thousands of dollars, but then I remember why I started building it in the first place - because hiring should be straightforward, not bureaucratic, and the best system is the one you'll actually use every day without wanting to throw your laptop across the room.