I'm a self-taught developer from India. No CS degree, 3 years of professional experience, day job at a small company.
A few months ago I started thinking about what I'd do if I lost my job tomorrow. Not a great feeling. So I decided to build something.
The problem I kept running into
I do some freelancing on the side. Every morning I'd open Reddit and manually check r/forhire, r/WorkOnline, r/freelance one by one. By the time I got through all of them, the good posts already had 15 replies and the client had moved on.
I thought — this is dumb. I'm a developer. I can fix this.
What I built
FreelancerRadar — a full-stack SaaS that pulls freelance job posts from multiple Reddit communities into one clean dashboard. You add your skills once and it shows jobs matched to what you actually do.
Stack: React, Node.js, MongoDB, Reddit RSS feeds, Nodemailer for emails, deployed on Vercel.
I used AI tools heavily to build it faster. I want to be upfront about that. But I made sure I understood every part of the codebase before shipping.
What surprised me after launching
The first real feedback changed everything.
Someone commented: "Dashboards are pull. Alerts are push. The daily-use habit comes from push — the second a new job matching my skills hits r/forhire, email me."
That one comment completely reframed the product for me. I was building a dashboard. The real product is the alert.
Most users signed up but didn't add skills.
Out of my first 50 users, almost none completed the onboarding. The "Complete Profile" banner was too easy to ignore. I rebuilt the onboarding flow to be a mandatory step between signup and dashboard. Retention improved immediately.
A recruiter offered to post jobs directly on the platform.
I hadn't planned for job posters at all. But someone commented "As a recruiter I'd be happy to post my vacancies there." Two-sided marketplace wasn't in my roadmap but now it is.
Current numbers
- 88 registered users in 2 weeks
- 1.3K events in last 7 days on Google Analytics
- Users from multiple countries
- 0 paying users (Pro plan with email alerts coming soon)
What I'm building next
The email alerts feature — instant notification when a job matching your skills is posted. That's going behind a Pro plan at $3.99/month.
One Reddit comment basically wrote my entire marketing strategy for me.
The honest part
I don't know if this will make real money. I still have my day job. But I've learned more in 2 weeks of building and shipping than in the last year of just working.
If you're a freelancer or a developer who freelances on the side, I'd genuinely love your feedback.
👉 https://freelance-radar-nine.vercel.app/
What's the most annoying part of finding freelance work for you?
