Started with 3 friends.
1 painful job hunt.
This is how JobOptix went from a weekend hack in a Bengaluru apartment to the career platform trusted by 500,000+ job seekers.
The breaking point
Three engineers — Aarav, Diya, and Rohan — graduate from IIT Bombay. Two of them spend four months applying to product + engineering roles and hearing back from exactly zero companies. The third joins a startup; within weeks, they're reviewing resumes and realizing why good people get filtered out.
The weekend prototype
A Saturday hack turns into a simple resume-to-ATS scorer. Shared with 12 friends. One of them gets her first callback in 6 months after two edits. That's the moment everyone agrees: this is the thing.
First 1000 users
They launch a Tally form + basic landing page. No ads, no SEO — just LinkedIn posts. Pass 1,000 sign-ups in week 4. Start charging ₹299/month for Pro. 7% convert on day one.
Product Hunt + ATS Checker
Public launch of the free ATS Checker as a lead magnet. Hits #2 Product of the Day. 14,000 resumes scanned in 48 hours. Traffic servers melt. Founders sleep in shifts.
100K users + first hires
Cross 100,000 paid and free users combined. Hire first five employees — an ML engineer, a designer, two engineers, and a content lead. The Interview Coach beta ships.
Series A
$8M round led by Lightspeed. Used to expand to global markets (US, UK, EU) and build the Career plan with voice-mode interview coaching. Team hits 15.
500,000 users
Cross half a million users. Launch Portfolio Builder and AI Career Copilot. Press coverage in YourStory, ET, and TechCrunch. First "I got hired at Google" tweets go viral.
Still small, still shipping
23 people. 2.1 million resumes built. 14,000+ 4.9-star reviews. Most of the team has never met in person — we do that twice a year. The mission hasn't changed: help serious job seekers get hired.
What we got wrong (and right)
We over-built for 6 months
We shipped 4 tools before users asked for more than 2. We now ship based on user demand, not our imagination.
Users are better PMs than us
The Interview Coach was requested by users 143 times before we built it. Every feature now has a waitlist test first.
SEO is slow but compounds
Our first 10 blog posts did nothing for 3 months. By month 12 they drove 40% of signups. Content is a long game.
Pricing psychology matters
Pro at ₹1,299/mo converted at 4%. Pro at ₹749/mo annually (with a visible annual discount) converted at 11%. Same revenue, happier users.
Where we're going
The first version of JobOptix was about winning the application. The next version is about winning the career. In 2026 we're shipping a career-graph that understands what your next 5 years could look like, a negotiation coach that helps you close real offers, and a "portfolio of you" that replaces the resume/LinkedIn split.
We're profitable. We plan to stay small. We want JobOptix to be the first tool you open when you're thinking about your career — not just the one you use when you're job hunting.