Signout

I was given an incredible opportunity recently to reinvent a semi-defunct startup called Signout. The project was started by an awesome group of medical residents and engineers who wanted to make life easier for residents and applicants looking for open positions, and they were succeeding, but their system required a lot of personal oversight, and as the team got busier and more successful it became difficult for them to maintain it.

So they brought me on. I was pretty trepidatious at first; as an AI-native developer entering into a legacy codebase, I really didn’t want to step on any toes. But after I built a suite of (legal) scrapers that turned the grueling manual task of aggregating jobs into a fully automated one, I was given a single open-ended task: get users.

So first I got obsessed. I researched the competition, read through their comically litigious terms and conditions, spent hours on r/residentswap reading people’s stories about their difficulties finding open positions and being preyed on by exploitative and overpriced services, and yapped my friends’ ears off about the ins and outs of the residency application process.

Then I updated the site, made it the best it could be without scraping proprietary sources. I updated the UI, upgraded the email automation, added more notification settings. But I still struggled with liquidity. The market was tiny: a few thousand people applying for open positions per year, on the site once and never again. Still, I was determined to make inroads any way I could.

I launched my first promotional campaign across niche communities on Facebook and Reddit, to positive responses and a nearly 10x increase in daily users, up to nearly a thousand.

But it was temporary. The nature of running any kind of “jobs” or “swaps” marketplace is that you are at the beck and call of your liquidity, and with an already tiny pool of jobs to pull from and an even smaller pool of safely scrapeable sources, I was hamstrung, and the users crashed. There was no reason to return, my retention was horrible, and I was left to ask the harder question: is this the best thing to build, and the best audience to build it for?

Because the need is real. It’s a small, desperate group of people looking to get out of bad jobs and into new ones, but it’s also tiny, like 3-6 thousand users tiny, and it’s a service you’ll only ever need once, if at all. I realized that if I wanted to impress the team and make an actual impact, I needed to find a bigger pond to fish in, and a bigger problem to solve. And I found it.

International medical graduates (IMGs) are people applying for residency who completed their med school in another country (or US citizens who completed med school in the Caribbean), and when I tell you these people have it rough, trust me. They go through a series of grueling exams and an absurd and punitive gauntlet of visa qualifications just to get to the point where they can even apply, and then spend an average of 1-3 thousand dollars in application fees applying to programs, many of whom reject them automatically based on obfuscated criteria like year of graduation, number of USMLE exam attempts, and visa status.

And they were legitimately underserved. So I decided to help them, for free. I built Signout’s IMG screener, which lets users input their visa status, YOG, USMLE attempts, and specialty, and then reports exactly which programs report excluding them, which don’t, and which don’t report enough data to say definitively.

Then I launched a social media campaign to promote it, and this time the spike persisted, sending us to nearly 2000 daily users, nearly doubling average session length, and flooding my Reddit DMs with comments thanking me and requests for features.

So I built the features. All of them. I replied to every comment, followed up on every curiosity, added application tracking and a checklist and a dozen other features, and I have a dozen more on the backlog, because I let myself get completely obsessed with the problem I wanted to solve and the people I wanted to solve it for.

I can say without a doubt that this has been the single most gratifying experience in my career as a developer thus far. Not because I’m making money, or solving an absurd technical problem, but because there are real users, literally all over the world, whose lives have gotten just the tiniest bit easier because of something I built.

This project has opened up so many doors for me, and I never could have done it without the awesome work and support of the incredible team who founded Signout. So thank you guys so much.