I'm building a Proof of Work app to replace CVs
I'm currently building an app that I initially intended just as a place to create a community of builders.
But working on it made me reflect about how the future of work will be.
I am now getting the impression that what will matter more and more is what you have built over what you say you have built or can do.
CVs seem to have begun a slow march to extinction, especially as more and more people try to build their own businesses and stray from the classic employment path.
This is what led me to change the course of the project to make it progressively into a platform that will let people find projects of any kind or people to build with, but more importantly record every contribution and milestone they have ever made or reached on those milestone to provide. All of those are displayed in their profile in a simple and, I hope, readable manner, for everyone to see.
The daunting parts for me right now are:
- I know that if I want to have users stay and find value, they must not have to do the work of validating the contributions manually. It is too much friction, and it might be easily gamified or nudge people in optimizing for the wrong thing.
- In order to minimize user manual involvement in the process, I need to automate as much as possible the process. But then the hard question is: how do I automate when the contributions could be almost anything ? If it was just code, it would be easy. But what about product discovery, marketing, and all the other possible types of contribution someone could make to the project ?
- The whole contributions system must provide strong and reliable signals to the external world about a user's track record building things. Easy to fake, hard to make.
The point of this article is really simply sharing what I work on and and finding people to talk about these topics that I'm kind of getting obsessed with lately. WOuld be happy to have any constructive feedback or perspective on this.
Have a nice day if you read all the way up to here.
This is an interesting direction. I actually think you're right that proof of work is becoming more valuable than traditional CVs, especially in software.
When hiring developers, the most reliable signal is usually what they've built — GitHub repos, shipped products, contributions to real projects — not just what is written on a resume.
The challenge you're describing is the key one: verification. Code is easy because it leaves a trace (commits, pull requests, releases), but contributions like product discovery, marketing, and strategy are harder to quantify automatically.
One approach might be pulling signals from existing systems rather than asking users to manually record work — things like GitHub activity, product launches, project management tools, or even milestone tracking within projects themselves.
If the platform can surface verifiable signals of contribution, that could be very powerful.
Curious how you're thinking about preventing people from gaming the system if contributions become a metric.
The pairing of 'runs locally' + 'no API keys' is undervalued positioning. It speaks to the technical buyer who has already been burned by SaaS tools that changed pricing, added rate limits, or went down at the wrong moment.
The one-time purchase model makes sense when the tool does a defined job well. What's the job this tool does?
Really interesting reflection! I love how you’re thinking beyond CVs and focusing on actual contributions. it’s something a lot of platforms struggle to capture. Automating validation for such diverse types of contributions sounds challenging. Curious how you’re thinking about balancing trust signals with ease of use for contributors?