DearHiringManager.io

Clean execution, and the portal-vs-direct framing is genuinely the right wedge for job seekers.

Since you asked about positioning and distribution specifically, here is the thing I think actually governs both: legally you are not really a job-seeker tool, you are a contact-data provider.

You take a name and return that person's work email and, where available, their mobile, and you do it by reading LinkedIn for them. That puts two walls in front of scaling, and both are the kind of thing a quick gut-check would not flag.

One is supply. "We search LinkedIn for them" is the engine of the product, and automated LinkedIn lookups are against LinkedIn's User Agreement, which they enforce hard, including account bans and litigation against scrapers. So your data source can be cut off in a way you do not control.

Two is the people in your results.

Surfacing a named individual's email and phone and enabling cold contact puts you squarely in personal-data territory: GDPR for any EU or UK hiring manager (they are data subjects, with notice and opt-out obligations when you obtain their data from a third party), and US state data-broker registration laws (California, Texas, Oregon, Vermont) that apply to exactly this kind of providing of third-party personal info. I am not saying don't build it. I am saying the honest positioning is "we are a data product," and designing for that, a suppression and opt-out path for people in your database, a defensible source, region-aware results, is also what unlocks distribution. Payment processors, ad platforms, and career-coach partners all get nervous about contact-data tools that have not thought this through. Get ahead of it and it becomes a trust feature instead of a liability.

I came at this from the technical and performance side, and it's the cleanest page I've looked at in a while. Performance is a perfect 100, the main content shows up in about half a second, and best practices and SEO are both 100 too. Whatever you did under the hood, it's right. That's rare, so nice work.

A few things worth a look:

1. Your main button looks greyed out, and it's worth fixing. The "Find hiring manager" button starts disabled until someone pastes a URL, and the CSS fades it to half opacity while it's disabled. So the most important button on the page looks faded and inactive the second people land. Funny detail: automated contrast checkers skip disabled buttons, so tools like Lighthouse give it a pass, even though your eye correctly says it's hard to see. A primary call to action that looks greyed out reads as "I can't click that yet," and on a landing page that quietly costs you clicks. I'd keep the button looking fully active on load, or use a much lighter disabled effect. The small grey helper text under it could come up a shade too.

2. Two small accessibility nits. The page has no main tag in the HTML, which is a one line fix, and a few of the tap targets are a little small or close together. That second one matters more than it sounds, since a lot of job seekers will be on their phone.

3. The page blocks the browser's back and forward cache, so returning to it isn't instant. Worth a look, because people will bounce between your tool and the job posting a lot, and you want that trip back to feel quick.

All three are polish on top of a genuinely strong base, not red flags. On your actual questions about positioning, distribution and audience, that's a different conversation. I like the direct and bold approach but can also imagine it might piss off some hiring managers who wanted to delegate the process to recruiters. I can see it work mostly for higher value jobs.

But the page itself is in great shape to support whichever direction you pick.

Hmmm, it's the same principle behind going in person. 50/50 it works out or they see you as annoying.

The ATS black hole is real. Did you validate with actual recruiters before building, or after? I tend to talk to 5-10 people in the target market before writing code, but that adds 2 weeks.

Interesting idea.

My first thought is that job seekers clearly feel the pain, but career coaches might be the better customer. Job seekers may use it once or twice while searching. Coaches could use it repeatedly across many clients, and the value is easier to justify as part of their service.

Have you seen any early signal on which group cares more; individual job seekers or people who help job seekers professionally ?

The problem is real and the frustration behind it is universal — most people who've job searched in the last 3 years have felt the black hole effect firsthand. ATS filters and recruiter inboxes have made the "apply through the portal" path genuinely broken for a lot of roles.

On your positioning question: I'd stay focused on job seekers for now rather than splitting attention toward career coaches. Career coaches are an interesting distribution channel but they're a slower sale — they need to trust the tool before recommending it to clients, which adds a validation layer you don't need at this stage. Get direct job seeker traction first, then coaches will come naturally when their clients start mentioning it.

The 2x success claim is doing a lot of work on the landing page. Do you have any data backing that yet, even anecdotally from beta users? If you do, a single specific story ("Sarah landed an interview at Stripe after 3 months of portal silence") will outperform the statistic every time.

One distribution angle worth testing: post in active layoff communities and job seeker subreddits. People there are already in pain and actively looking for edges. The tool is free to try so the friction to test it is almost zero — that's a genuine advantage right now.

This is a very real problem — most job applications get lost before they ever reach a decision-maker, so the “black hole” framing makes sense.

The idea of shortening the distance between candidate and hiring manager is strong, especially because it shifts the strategy from mass applying to more targeted outreach.

The biggest challenge I see is accuracy and trust. In this space, even small errors in identifying the right person or contact details can quickly damage credibility, so the value will depend heavily on how reliable the data is.

I’d also keep the focus on job seekers first, since that’s where the urgency and emotional pressure is highest. If it works there, expansion to coaches or agencies becomes much easier later.

The problem is definitely real. I've heard countless stories of applications disappearing into ATS systems. My concern would be trust and accuracy. If i were a user, I'd want to know how often the suggested contact is actually the decision maker. That seams like the key metric that would make or break adoption.

Interesting idea, one question though, why the 1 look up per day?

Stay focused on job seekers for now career coaches are a longer B2B sale and you don't need that complexity early on.
One thing worth thinking about: LinkedIn ToS around data access. Having a clear answer ready before you scale will save headaches later.

Interesting idea, and I really agree with the “application black hole” point.

In my case, one of the best opportunities I got in the past didn’t come from applying through the standard process, but from reaching out horizontally to the right people around the company and starting the right conversations.

I think job seekers often underestimate how much access matters. Sometimes getting in front of the actual person who owns the role is already half of the battle.

Curious to see how DearHiringManager develops, especially if you decide to keep it for job seekers or expand it toward career coaches too.

It works. But I think not so many people know about this way of job seeking. Some market education is needed.

I'd be careful treating this as a distribution question too quickly.

The interesting question may not be whether job seekers or career coaches are easier to reach.

It may be which buyer actually experiences the problem strongly enough to change behavior because of it.

Those sound similar, but they can lead to very different conclusions about positioning, product direction, and what early traction should mean.

I wouldn't make that call casually from the current signals.

Yeah, I can see this being useful. Job portals often feel like a black box.