Why I'm building this

I’ve been building ClimbIQ, a side project that tries to help job seekers figure out what’s actually missing between their resume and experience and the jobs they’re going for, and for a long time I’ve been telling myself the reason I’m doing it is basically income, some extra money on the side if it works out. I think that framing has been quietly working against me, and I only really saw it after listening to a podcast called 97th Floor, which had Robert Cialdini on talking about influence and persuasion, mostly research-backed stuff, nothing wild, but a few of the ideas landed somewhere I didn’t expect.

The framing thing came first, before I even got to his specific points. If the whole project is just about money, then every decision kind of collapses into “what’s fastest to ship,” because faster shipping means faster revenue, and there’s no real reason to spend three extra days getting a feature right instead of two hours getting it good enough. But if I actually think about who this is for, people who’ve been job searching for a while and can’t quite tell what’s holding them back, that’s a bigger deal than a side income stream, and I noticed as soon as I framed it that way I was suddenly willing to spend real time on the parts that matter instead of just whatever’s quickest to get out the door. Same project, same features on paper, just a different reason for doing it, and the reason changed what I was willing to spend time on.

Cialdini’s actual points fit right into that shift once I was already thinking about it. One idea that stuck with me is that people are more likely to trust you with the bigger ask if you’ve already given them something real and related to the problem first, not as a trick, just because it’s true that help builds trust before a purchase does. Another one is that people want to feel some kind of personal connection now, not just a slick product, so something as simple as actually welcoming someone when they show up for the first time goes further than I would’ve guessed. And the one that stuck with me most is just being straightforward about the actual constraints, saying plainly that this needs to charge money at some point because I can’t keep funding it myself forever. He made the case that people respect that kind of honesty a lot more than they respect a project that pretends it’s not also trying to survive.

What ties all of that together, I think, is that none of it works if the underlying reason for building the thing isn’t real. You can’t fake genuinely wanting to help someone land a job, not for long anyway, and if the reason is hollow the honesty part falls apart too, there’s nothing true to be honest about. So I’ve been sitting with the idea that getting the framing right for myself might matter more than any single feature decision, because the framing is what decides how much effort I’m willing to put into the feature decisions in the first place.

I don’t know exactly what changes yet, practically, day to day. I just know I’ve been building with a different reason in my head this week than I was building with a month ago, and it’s made me want to slow down and get a few things right instead of just getting them out.