100 Days of building a idea

Himanshu Dodwani — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:29:48 +0000

Day 1
When I moved to Ireland for my master's, I gave myself 2–3 months to find a job. I was confident—I had experience, I had skills, I'd done this before in a different context.
Six months later I had 100+ rejections and a part-time job. I was exhausted, and the question that kept circling back was an uncomfortable one: if I can't make this work here, what was the point? I'd left a comfortable, fully remote job in India. Family around me, people I cared about. I'd chosen this.
I've always backed myself. Big fan of Conor McGregor, big fan of Virat Kohli — people who don't change their game just because the conditions got harder.
So I changed my approach instead. I stopped firing off applications and started actually reading job descriptions. Then I'd run them through AI—not to generate a resume, but to interrogate the gap. Where does my experience fall short? What's the hiring manager probably screening for? What's missing? Within a month I had callbacks from Google, Bloomberg, and EA. I got to the interview stage for a Google TPM role.
I was tracking everything in Notion. And after landing 4–5 calls from roughly 10–15 targeted applications, I realized I'd built something — a rough workflow that made the process feel less like shouting into a void.
The rejections didn't stop. But they started feeling useful. Each one told me something about how interviews work here, what I needed to prepare, and where the gaps actually were.
Then a friend asked me to share my prompts so he could do the same thing. That was the idea. Why isn't this a product?
Three weeks later: https://aplyr.io/

Aplyr is pretty simple to explain: you paste a job description, upload your resume, and it tells you where you stand—before and after.
The core output is a tailored CV. It rewrites your bullets to match the role, adds the keywords that are missing, strips out the stuff that's irrelevant, and gives you a before/after score. Match score, ATS score, improvement points. You can see exactly what changed and why—what was added, what was rewritten, what got cut.

There's also a keywords tab that shows you what's critical and missing versus what you already have and an ATS scan that flags formatting issues that would get your resume filtered out before a human ever sees it—things like inconsistent date formats or section headers that parsers don't recognize.

The part I'm most proud of is the tracker. It's a Kanban board for your job search: Saved → Applied → Interview → Offer → Rejected. Every application has its match score attached to it, so over time you can actually see a pattern — which roles you're getting calls from, where you're getting ghosted, and what your average fit score looks like across the board. I added follow-up email reminders too, because that was always the thing I forgot.

The whole thing came from that one conversation with my friend. He just wanted my prompts. I thought, What if it just did it for you?

DEV Community: Himanshu Dodwani

100 Days of building a idea