Day 1: Building an AI job platform for 300M people in MENA 🚀

Hey IndieHackers! 👋

Starting my first real build-in-public journey today. Excited and nervous.

What I'm Building

Forsa AI (فرصة = "Opportunity") - an open-source, AI-powered job platform for the MENA region.

The Problem I'm Solving

I'm based in Tehran, and I've spent 15 years watching talented developers struggle to find opportunities.

Here's the reality:

• Jobs are scattered across 50+ different sites

• Zero AI assistance

• Language barriers (Persian, Arabic, Turkish, English mixed)

• No intelligent matching

• Western markets have indeed, LinkedIn AI, ZipRecruiter... MENA has chaos

If you want to find a developer job in Iran, you literally need to check: Jobinja, IranTalent, Quera, LinkedIn (if accessible), Telegram channels, company websites, and word of mouth.

That's 7+ sources. Every single day.

Scale this across 22 countries and 300M+ people in MENA. Same broken experience.

My Solution

Single platform that:

• Scrapes jobs from multiple sources (targeting 10K+ daily)

• AI career assistant (resumes, cover letters, matching using RAG)

• Actually understands Persian, Arabic, Turkish (proper RTL support)

• Open-source (anyone can contribute, everyone benefits)

Tech Stack

Python | Django | Scrapy | LangChain | PostgreSQL | Docker

Where I'm At (Day 1)

✅ Scraped first 5,000 Persian job listings

✅ Built an initial scraping engine for 3 Iranian job boards

🚧 Next: Data normalisation pipeline

🚧 Then: AI matching engine with multilingual embeddings

🚧 Week 2: Add Arabic/Turkish sources

Why I'm Sharing This

Technical side: I'm solid. 15 years Python dev, ex-CTO, built 50+ projects.

Everything else: Learning as I go. Marketing, community, distribution, monetisation strategy - all new territory.

So I'm building in public. Sharing wins, failures, technical challenges, and the learning journey.

## What I'd Love From This Community

Feedback on:

• Does this problem resonate with anyone else? (especially if you've worked with MENA markets)

• Am I thinking about monetisation too early/too late? (considering freemium: free basic search, premium AI features)

Any experience building multilingual products? RTL languages are tricky!

Happy to help with:

• Python/Django architecture questions

• Web scraping at scale

• Building for emerging markets

• Backend system design

Following Along

I'll post weekly updates here. Also building on:

• Twitter: @saeedbuilds (just started yesterday)

• GitHub: github.com/product-with-saeed (repo coming in 2 weeks)

If you're interested in AI, job markets, emerging tech, or just enjoy watching someone figure things out in real-time, follow along!

Questions? Roast my approach? Tell me I'm crazy? All feedback welcome 🙏

Let's build something useful together 🚀

—Saeed