Hey there, it’s Dmitry, founder of AriadneJobs. Last week, AriadneJobs.com was publicly launched on Linkedin. I would like to thank everybody who tried it out so far! Thank you to everybody who commented as well, your encouragement means a lot 💖

Needless to say, it was an exciting week for me, and yet I was able to push several updates to the app. To highlight these and the future updates, I added this blog. So, what’s happened so far?

Funnel Now Supports Adding External Jobs

Ariadne’s Funnel View allows you to track your job applications. I always found it weird that most job boards don’t have any way to mark jobs that you’ve applied to or ignore jobs that you’re not interested in. Job search is a marathon, not a sprint, so you can expect to search for positions multiple times, on multiple platforms, and you also need to somehow track all your applications. Constantly sifting through the same positions that you’ve already decided for or against is not a good UX.

Thus, the Funnel View was born. When you search for jobs in Ariadne, you’ll see two buttons in each job ad: Add to Funnel and Hide.

Job Ad Card with Funnel Controls

Once you click on the Add to Funnel button, the job ad will disappear from the search and appear on the Funnel View, which is, essentially, a simple Kanban board. You can then move the job ad between different columns representing different application stages: Liked, Applied, Offer, or No Match.

The Funnel View

If you click on Hide, the job will just disappear from the search. If you want to un-hide it, you can do it from the Funnel View with the Ignored Jobs expander in the right bottom corner of the screen.

The Funnel View also automatically tracks the status of the job ads on the companies’ websites, so if the job ad is hidden by the company, you will see it marked as “Archived” in the Funnel.

But of course, no job board has all the jobs in the world, and Ariadne - especially so. We are focused on small to medium sized companies primarily in Germany, and there’s still lots of work to do to add more companies to our database. In general, I would not advise anybody to rely on only one job board when they are searching for a job, yet I still want Ariadne to be helpful in your job search even if the job ad is not known to Ariadne.

The natural solution is to support adding external jobs to the Funnel, which you can now do. Just click on the plus icon on top of any of the Funnel View column, add the link to the job ad, position title, and the company name, press Add, and the job ad link will appear in your Funnel.

Adding an External Job to the Funnel View

Google Login

I hate registering for apps. Even though I use password manager (bitwarden - it’s amazing and free), it’s still a hassle. So, I decided to add the most common way to simplify this: Sign-in with Google. Just press on the corresponding button on the Sign Up or Sign In pages, follow the familiar flow, and you’re in.

Sign-in with Google

Would you prefer to have an ability to sign-in with some other OAuth provider, for example Github, X, or so on? Feel free to tell me by sending a message to [email protected] :)

Subscription Tier Changes

Around 30 people registered in the app during the first week. This is not bad! I didn’t post about it anywhere, except Linkedin, and Linkedin has never been a high-engagement channel for me, so getting around 1% of people who saw the post to register is pretty good and shows that there’s interest in the app, despite lots of other job boards being on the market already.

At launch, the app offered two subscription tiers: completely free tier with some limitations (you cannot use Funnel, Digest, and I thought about limiting the number of searches you can do and showing ads, but decided against both in the end) and a paid Ariadne Pro subscription (there’s still a coupon code LAUNCH50 for the ones who want to try it out).

One person (a friend) has upgraded to the Pro subscription, which is one more than I expected at this stage :) Yet, the limitation of this subscription structure became apparent quite quickly - if nobody uses the paid features, I have no data to improve those features, so nobody will pay for them!

After thinking some more, I decided to change the way subscriptions work in Ariadne. There’s now only one plan - Ariadne Pro, but it now offers two weeks of free trial. If you cancel before the trial ends, you won’t need to pay anything. You’ll get an email from Stripe a week before your trial expires. You get the full experience during the trial, which also gives me an ability to see how people use the app and what I can improve, even if they decide to cancel.

And naturally, those people who registered in the first week and choose free plan will have the same access they had so far - I don’t plan to retire it any time soon, and I also won’t add ads or search limitations. Thank you for giving me a boost in confidence to move forward! If at some point you will want to upgrade to get access to the Funnel and Digest, you can always do it on the Subscription page.

Design, Companies, and Bugs

AriadneJobs is easy to support technically thanks to an incredible array of technologies I used to build it with - Elixir, Phoenix LiveView, Postgres, and Kubernetes. If those words don’t mean much to you - don’t worry :) But if they do, check out my personal blog - I write about all of these and more technical topics there.

However, no matter how good the tech is, bugs are inevitable. And it’s hard to beat the first week of a new product being on the market in terms of how many bugs you find :) So a lot of effort went into testing the app, finding, and fixing those bugs. If you’ll see something wrong in Ariadne, please, tell me - just send an email to [email protected], and I’ll look into it.

And of course, what’s the job board without jobs? 25 companies were added in the first week (around 90 job ads), bringing us to 100 companies in the database. I plan to add more companies every week.

And finally - I did a mild redesign of the user interface. I think the app looks better now, and is more comfortable to use during the long German winter evenings :)

Thank you all and till the next update!