My friend Sharqawy and I started Yaleeq to solve a problem we knew well: job hunting in Egypt is a mess for students. Listings are scattered across Facebook groups, inconsistent recruiters, and platforms that weren't built for fresh graduates.
We wanted one place where students could find opportunities without the noise.
Building the platform was straightforward. Next.js, TypeScript, Appwrite for the backend. Serverless functions for the heavy lifting. The code worked fine.
What we didn't expect
The hard parts had nothing to do with engineering.
Cost. We had to think about server bills, domain renewals, and what happens when free tiers run out. It's easy to ignore infrastructure costs when you're building for yourself. It's impossible to ignore them when you're responsible for other people using your product.
Business needs. Students wanted one thing. Companies wanted another. Recruiters wanted something else entirely. Balancing these wasn't a technical problem. It was a product problem.
User values. We had to figure out what actually mattered to our users. Was it speed? Trust? Simplicity? The answers weren't in the code.
What stuck with me
I learned that building something people use is fundamentally different from building something that works. The engineering is the easy part. Everything around it — understanding the problem, finding the right users, keeping them around — that's the actual work.
We're still iterating. Still learning. But I'm glad we started before we knew what we were doing.