An Overnight Success That Wasn't

I’ve been heads-down building JobTracker.pro—a free, no-friction way to keep your job search organized. It tracks every application, the salary you negotiated for, a screenshot of the job posting, feedback you’ve received, and all the roles still on your wish-list.

Last week I opened a wait-list so early adopters could hop in line for the beta. Overnight the list exploded—hundreds of “new users” per day. At first it felt like a dream launch… until the email patterns, throwaway domains, and copy-pasted names started looking fishy.

Turns out bots were pounding the sign-up page—probably probing for vulnerabilities or just gaming yet another online form. Either way, they weren’t the kind of “users” I wanted.

So I tightened the screws:

• captcha for a double-check on humans
• Email Validation to make sure you’re real
• Rate limiting to throttle rapid-fire submissions
• Bot-fingerprinting (user-agent, header, IP heuristics) to catch the sneaky ones

Since flipping those switches, the “overnight success” numbers have snapped back to reality, and the wait-list now reflects actual humans excited to use JobTracker.

If you’re one of them, awesome—your spot is safe and you’ll hear from me soon. If you haven’t signed up yet, the (genuine) wait-list is open. I’m making sure the only thing you’ll compete with is other real people—no spam bots allowed.

So now that’s over, it’s time to start letting people into the beta!

If you haven’t yet, you can sign up here: https://jobtracker.pro

-Matt