job rejections and a dream to retire my parents

community college grad, no real coding background, just weekend side projects. 700+ applications and 100 copy-pasted emails a day got me nothing. 30 emails written one at a time got me 5 replies, 1 interview and the job i'm in now. if i had to start over tomorrow, this is what i'd do:

the emails i sent and the replies i got are all below.

where i started

i'd just graduated from a community college and couldn't get a job, because i didn't have a lot of the skills that jobs traditionally want you to have. what i did have was this bug where i'd hack around on weekends and build small projects. first it was stuff that was useful to me, then i started thinking about how it could help other people too.

i was your average lurker in discord groups and subreddits where people share what they're building, and that's basically where the motivation came from. seeing people actually build stuff and make something of it.

i was never really inclined towards getting a job tbh. but i want to retire my parents, so i figured i had to take one up.

and it's not like i didn't try the normal way. i sent 700+ applications. the ATS tools just rejected me, i guess because my resume didn't have the right keywords, and i wasn't going to lie on it. it had the stuff i'd actually built through college, and to be fair that should count for something.

100 emails a day

then i thought ok, why not startups. if a big company won't have me maybe i could try my luck there. i know they're less secure, and maybe retiring my parents gets a bit more far-fetched on that route, but i had to get a job somehow.

problem was most of them said they weren't hiring. but while i was browsing i noticed a lot of them were building something similar to my projects, just on a much larger scale. so i kept thinking i could actually help these people, if only they were hiring.

i wasn't dumb. i just wasn't traditionally smart. and since i hadn't done anything else the traditional way, maybe getting hired didn't have to go the traditional way either. around then i came across a blog about how to get into a company that isn't hiring. the gist was that cold email, which people use for B2B sales, also works for just showing your work to the right person and seeing if you're worth a reply.

so that's what i did. badly, at first. i made one draft i could copy-paste and sent about 100 emails a day to different founders, and trust me it was more exhausting than applying for jobs. this is the kind of thing i was sending:

after a few weeks of that i hadn't got a single reply.

it took me way too long to realise i was doing the ATS thing again, just over email. when i generalised the email i left out all the niche stuff so it could resonate with a lot of people. truth is it didn't resonate with any of them.

the harder way

so i took the harder way. research each startup manually, write each email manually, and say exactly where i'd fit there. instead of 100 a day i could do maybe 7 or 10. i honestly didn't know if it would work, but i'd tried everything else so why not once more.

the new ones looked more like this:

a week went by with no replies. i remember thinking maybe i should've paid attention in class, or spent my weekends taking coding lessons like my friends who got into the big companies.

the first reply

then one day there was a reply in my inbox and i thought this is it, this is my break. it wasn't. it said something like:

a rejection, no doubt about it, same as the last few weeks. but it meant someone had actually read what i sent, so i kept at it.

as luck would have it another reply came a few days later, and then one more, and then one more. they weren't yeses but they weren't really nos either. they liked my work and said they'd keep me in mind when they were hiring. after about six weeks of trying, that felt huge.

and then one of them asked for an interview.

best day of my life, honestly. it meant maybe i hadn't been crazy all this time.

the interview

i went in terrified. nobody tells you this, but startup interviews aren't really like normal interviews with a set list of questions. it's more about the vibe and whether they think you'd fit in with the team.

at some point it stopped feeling like an interview and more like we were already working together, and lucky for me that's how mine went. so i wasn't very surprised when the offer came a few days later.

it wasn't the offer i'd hoped for. but it was something, and it meant all of this had worked.

7 months in

i've been in this job 7 months now. the best part is i actually get ownership. a lot of my friends make much more than i do and tell me they're bored of their jobs, and i'm not. there's not a day where i don't learn something about the product or how people think or how teams work together.

how i do it now

i'm looking for a new role now with better pay, because retiring my parents is still the dream.

apparently people have built tools for this now. i've been using one called backdoor, which does pretty much what i was doing by hand. it takes your profile, finds startups where you'd genuinely fit, and drafts the email to the founder. i still read each one and fix whatever doesn't sound like me before it goes out, and nothing sends unless i say so.

it only does 10 emails a day unless you ask for more. that sounds low after my 100-a-day phase, but 10 is about what i managed by hand, and those were the ones that got replies.

i've had 13 interviews through it so far. no offer yet from those, i'll be honest. but it's a lot less of a burden, and i can spend my time upskilling instead of hunting for founders' emails. i wish this had existed when i started.

you don't need it, obviously. i got my job without it and everything i did is written above. chatgpt or claude can help with drafts too.

i wrote to the founders when i found it and they asked if i'd share my story, so that's why you're reading this on their blog.

to anyone in the middle of this right now: keep going at it. it's closer than you think.

it's free to start, link's at the bottom.