Looking for a Job Is Tough

It's going to get tougher and tougher in this job market.

1. Layoffs happening regularly.

2. Less Senior positions and virtually no junior jobs.

2. AI accelerating and reducing the number of software engineers.

3. Job postings being reposted with less salary and equity in US, EU and especially the UK.

You might as well take yourself off the job market / stay in current job, build a paying SMB company or side project on the side and make that your third income.

If it gets better and reaches sustainability you can choose to leave your job and live off it, or choose to get funding if need be.

After applying for over 60+ jobs after graduation and getting rejected over and over, I took myself off the market and started a pest control SaaS 4 years ago now it's bringing in over $2.2M+ ARR.

While the jobs I was applying for have now either shut down or not even bringing in anything over $100K ARR.

Congratulations! This is my dream. But the SaaS thing is so challenging. Couple of questions if you don't mind. Any tips for someone starting out? Did you have any experience in the pest control business? How did you decide pest control industry? How did you market the product?

On the other side of this you have people like me who've tried and failed, and now 15 years later I have 30 days to pay my mortgage or my life starts unfolding. Hoping to make some portfolio pieces in that time to impress some hiring managers, building fun tools for myself again without profit in mind. Not everyone can build a hyper successful SaaS.

Congrats on the business, I hope this inspires others to pursue their dreams.

Since you mentioned a specific number of applications (60+), I just wanted to share my job hunt story. When I was last looking for a role (8 months ago), I started out thinking 5 applications a day was good, but then I spoke with an industry mentor, and he laughed me off saying that wasn't close to enough. Turns out he was right.

On his recommendation I started aiming for 50 a day. At first it's very slow, but you build up a corpus of cover letters and other material to submit applications.

This would have been easier if I was employed at the time, since so many places auto-reject if you aren't currently employed. This was also looking for fully-remote in APAC, which has far fewer opportunities than other regions/timezones.

And you might say "but I don't want to work for all these companies" and I would agree. But provided you are applying for a role that you are at least curious about, those ones that are not great fits can provide good interview practice.

> since so many places auto-reject if you aren't currently employed.

That really happens? How do you know they do that? I'm not doubting you, but I've never heard of that before.

You can see a similar thing in dating. People tend to be more attracted to people who already have relationships, because they're "prescreened"

> pest control SaaS

How does this work? Are we talking computer bugs?

There are SaaS products for managing sales/compliance/billing for just about every licensed profession that deals directly with customers. I regularly get emails that are "from" my HVAC contractor or optometrist, but are obviously sent by a SaaS.