JobWave

Hey IH! 👋

I'm Mohammed, a solo French founder. I just launched JobWave — a SaaS that sends up to 170 personalized job applications per day, automatically, from the user's own Gmail.

Why I built it

Watching friends spend entire weekends writing cover letters and getting almost zero replies drove me crazy. The French job market has an interesting quirk: the "hidden job market" (positions filled without public listings) is huge, and spontaneous applications are a real channel. But doing it manually is exhausting.

So I built JobWave to automate this, but without sacrificing personalization.

How it works

1. User picks cities, industries, and company sizes

2. AI (Mistral) generates a unique cover letter email for each company

3. Emails are sent from the user's own Gmail via OAuth (big differentiator vs mass mail tools — replies go back to the user)

Database: 28,000+ French companies with resolved domains and HR contacts. Scraped from INSEE SIRENE, enriched via Hunter.io and Google Search.

Stack

• Next.js 16 (App Router, Turbopack)

• Prisma + Neon PostgreSQL

• NextAuth v4 + Google OAuth (scope gmail.send)

• Stripe (one-time payments, no subs)

• Supabase Storage (CVs + 39MB companies JSONL)

• Mistral AI for email generation

• Python pipeline (separate) for domain resolution + enrichment

What I learned building this

• Domain resolution is harder than you think. I ran Mistral LLM first, then Serper (Google Search) as fallback. Achieved 98.6% coverage across 11 French cities.

• Google OAuth verification for gmail.send is painful. Submitted the review on April 17, now waiting 2-6 weeks.

• The "send from user's own Gmail" approach massively helped with deliverability and user trust, but made the onboarding flow trickier.

Pricing experiment

I went with one-time payments instead of subscriptions. €4.99 for 150 credits (1 day), €19.99 for 1,000 credits (30 days), €39.99 for 5,000 credits (90 days). Credits stack if users rebuy during an active plan.

I'm curious: do IH founders here think one-time payments limit revenue too much vs subscriptions for this type of product?

What's next

• Background jobs (Inngest) to handle long campaigns

• Referral system

• Programmatic SEO for each French city

• Marketing email tools for users

Would love your feedback — on pricing, positioning, the landing page, anything. Roast me, it's how I learn.

👉 https://www.jobwave.io

Thanks IH community!