Overview
Built Jobcadu from the ground up, starting with no existing product, no users, no business model and no "Jobcadu".
The goal was to create a career platform that combined job matching, career toolkits, and education resources to help workers in Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia discover opportunities and navigate their careers more effectively.
What began as a blank slate gradually evolved into a broader career environments spanning job discovery, resumes, career assessment, education discovery, and employer tools.
The Challenge
At the outset, both the problem and the solution were undefined.
The Southeast Asian job market presented several structural challenges:
- Skill mismatch between white-collar job seekers and employer expectations
- Fragmented job boards with poor UX (circa 2023)
- Asymmetry of career best practices across Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia
- Rapid emergence of new skills demand, online education courses and disconnected traditional instuition syllabus from real job demand
On top of that, we faced typical zero-to-one constraints:
- No product baseline
- No initial traction
- Limited resources and a very small team
- I'm totally new in Tech
My Role (Founding Employee / Product Builder)
As a founding member, I operated across product, business, growth, and operations, owning large parts of definition, execution, and early traction.
Product & Strategy
- Defined the initial problem space, product direction, and first MVP from scratch
- Shaped early positioning and go-to-market direction before product–market fit
- Designed information architecture across navigation, job functions, industries, career content, education courses, and user profiles
- Prototyped and shipped core flows for job matching UX, career toolkits, education portal, Pro Profile, Resume Builder, employer modules, and admin tools
Execution & Delivery
- Owned delivery of Jobcadu’s first website and core offerings (Resume Builder, JD Builder)
- Coordinated development scope and timelines
- Tested features end-to-end, documented bugs, and wrote product tickets aligned with user expectations
Business, Growth & Distribution
- Researched adjacent industries (Job & Education, Real Estate, Non-Bank products) to find business to start with my founder
- Iterated on monetization strategies from day one (freemium, pay-per-hire, resume tools, employer offerings)
- Learned SEO from zero: keyword research, content creation, and early social media distribution
Team & Operations
- Helped scale the team from a solo effort to a cross-functional group across Thailand and Vietnam
- Supported day-to-day operations to keep product, marketing, and business execution aligned
Key Decisions
Bet on Early AI Use Cases (2023) → AI-Assisted Matching (Q4, 2024 - 2025)
Instead of relying purely on keyword search, we explored AI-assisted workflows early:
- Built a skill taxonomy as a foundational data layer
- Trained models on job descriptions
Micro-Tools Strategy: Resume Builder & Career Toolkits
SEO research revealed strong unmet demand around resume optimization and keywords (100k+ daily in Thai):
- Built AI-powered Resume Builder and career toolkits (MBTI, DISC, Big Five, career archetypes)
- Resume Builder generated 1M+ impressions on TikTok and Instagram
- Adopted a build-to-viral mindset: small tools with clear value and strong distribution potential
Experimenting with Job Portal Design, Landing Pages, and Distribution
Without a proven baseline, we focused on experimentation:
- Iterated on job portal layouts and information hierarchy
- Tested landing page messaging and content positioning
- Optimized pages for organic discovery and social sharing
The focus was conversion and visibility.
Results
- ~3,000 monthly users by the end of the first year (primarily organic)
- 10,000+ monthly users by the second year through SEO, content, and micro-tools
- Thousands of registered users in the first year
- 50,000+ social media followers within two years
- 1,000+ job applications submitted through the platform
- Primary revenue driver: Resume Builder
Team Scale
The team grew to 8 people:
- 1 Product Lead (myself)
- 2 Content Creators
- 2 Developers (Vietnam)
- 2 Marketing team members (Vietnam)
- 1 Sales
Learnings
- Distribution is a product/business decision as features without visibility don’t matter
- Be explicit: build to monetize vs. build for distribution ( or vs. build to reduce churns/improve satisfaction)
- Some features existed primarily to generate revenue
- Others were built for discovery, learning, and user acquisition
- Feature bloat happens easily in zero-to-one environments as time limitation that affects decision led-time
- Constraints will likely sharpen judgment and prioritization
- Users care about outcomes, not effort, hours-spent
- LLM empowers early development, continous iteration but I think craftmanship and obsession in quality is real
- Grit matters — building from nothing is ambiguous and emotionally demanding
This reflection covers my work from 2023–2025.