Indeed laid off his pregnant wife, so he built a rival job board

A job search startup built as an act of revenge against Indeed says it has now placed its first three candidates.

What happened

Colin Johnson’s wife was a product manager on Indeed’s social impact team. She was laid off in December 2025, by his account about seven months into her pregnancy, which meant losing health insurance and income at the same time. Johnson started building a competitor.

Writing on r/ClaudeAI on August 24, 2026, he described the result. DreamWork has more than 4,300 registered users and 91 paying subscribers, and only paying users can submit applications, which is why the placement number is small: three people hired in four weeks, one at Palantir, one at Accenture, and a videographer. The site ingests roughly 15,000 job listings a day directly from employer career pages, classifies them, and matches them semantically against an uploaded resume.

Johnson credits Claude Code with most of the build: 1,100 pull requests merged in the first months, on an investor-backed team of three in which he is the non-technical member and still wrote more than 200 pull requests himself. ERE, the recruiting industry’s trade publication, covered the product on July 22, 2026, describing it as a project that began out of spite and became a full pivot for the team. His wife now works at Google.

What it means

The product metrics come from the founder and have not been independently audited. What is verifiable is the shape of the thing: a three-person team, one of them non-technical, shipping a job board that parses live employer applicant tracking systems including Workday, Greenhouse and Lever.

That is the part worth noting. Agentic coding tools have moved the binding constraint on small software projects from knowing how to write the code to knowing precisely what should exist. The competitive question for incumbent job boards is no longer whether a small team can build a credible alternative, but whether users have a reason to switch. Johnson’s post closes with an edit saying the traffic from it crashed his matching engine.