I built a form filler Chrome extension. turns out I was solving the wrong problem.

ok so story time. this is kind of embarrassing to admit publicly but here goes 😅

three years ago i launched a Chrome extension called Filliny right here on Product Hunt. it auto-filled job application forms. you know those 47-field Workday portals that make you re-type your entire resume into tiny boxes? Filliny handled those. paste your info once, it fills the whole thing out. it actually worked pretty well, people liked it, it's still in the Chrome Web Store.

and i thought i'd cracked it. like genuinely believed i was helping people.

i wasn't. not really.

what i'd actually built was a tool that helped people get rejected faster 💀

here's what i didn't understand back then: it doesn't matter how fast you fill out the form if your resume gets auto-trashed by the ATS before a recruiter ever sees it. and that happens to... most people. something like 75% of applications get zero response. not a rejection. not a "we went with someone else." just nothing. silence.

i started paying attention to what job seekers were actually going through and it honestly messed with me. there was someone who applied to 260 jobs over a full year, got to five final interviews, zero offers. another person with a master's degree sent 500+ applications and heard nothing back. someone on reddit described the feeling as "not anger or frustration, just bewilderment" and that word has lived in my head ever since.

and then i found out about ghost jobs. apparently up to 30% of job postings aren't even real?? companies post them to "look like they're growing" or collect resumes for later. people spend hours tailoring applications for positions that were never going to be filled. that's genuinely cruel.

so my little Chrome extension was helping people fill out forms faster... for jobs that might not exist... with resumes that would probably never be read by a human. cool cool cool 🙃

that hit me hard honestly. i'd spent years on Filliny and it was solving the wrong layer of the problem. form-filling was a band-aid. the real issues were deeper: your resume doesn't match what the ATS wants, you're applying to wrong-fit roles, you're sending the same generic resume everywhere because who has 45 minutes to customize each one, and when you do get an interview you barely remember which company it was for.

i looked at what other tools were doing. Jobscan users say the scoring is inconsistent between their own tools. LazyApply has a 2.1 on Trustpilot, people report it filling in wrong visa sponsorship info across entire batches (imagine finding that out after sending 100+ apps 😰). Teal locks everything behind a paywall after advertising "free." Sonara shut down entirely. LoopCV matched someone with 1,800 jobs and applied to zero of them.

and none of these tools work together. you need one for scoring, another for tracking, another for matching, another for cover letters. it's a mess.

so i did the hard thing. i stepped back from Filliny and started building what i should have built from the beginning.

AI Applyd is one platform that handles the full cycle: score your resume against ATS before you waste time applying, find jobs that actually match your skills, tailor your resume per role automatically, apply while you sleep, generate interview prep from the actual job posting, and track everything in one place.

the auto-apply part is the one i'm being most careful about. i watched what happened with LazyApply and i refuse to build another spray-and-pray tool. there's a quality gate where AI checks each job against your resume before sending anything. bad fit? it blocks the application. you can review everything before it goes out, or let it run on auto if you trust it.

we're launching here on PH soon. still in pre-launch, building the waitlist. free tier, no credit card needed.

but honestly i'm writing this because i want to hear from you. if you've searched for a job recently, what was the moment that really got to you? was it the 200th application with no response? finding out a job you spent an hour on was probably fake? that google sheet of applications that got too depressing to open?

i built the wrong thing once already. trying not to do that again. what am i missing? 😅