Hello! 👋
It’s Thursday, 15th January 2026. Welcome back to Bold Efforts.
Today’s note is different. It’s not just an idea. It’s a product.
Job search is broken. Not just inefficient. Fundamentally broken.
Most job search feels like walking through a hall of mirrors. The same role reposted ten times. Listings that expired weeks ago. Redirects layered on redirects. Platforms that add steps between you and the actual employer.
Companies struggle too. Real roles get buried. Teams get flooded with low-signal volume. Everyone spends time, and trust keeps shrinking.
The incentive problem
The hiring ecosystem optimizes the wrong things.
Clicks. Time on site. Profile capture. Form fills. These metrics reward browsing, not connection. Middle layers extract value without improving truth. A simple match turns into work.
The biggest players in this space are shaped by business models that make more money when employers pay for listings and placement. That doesn’t always reward accuracy. Some try to look like they have the most jobs, even if the number is inflated by duplicates. Others are social media companies that happen to have jobs, so the feed wins over the search.
And people treat these defaults as “the market” for two reasons:
There hasn’t been a real alternative at that scale
Network effects make the big platforms feel inevitable.
You feel it when filters don’t match reality, when location tags are inconsistent, when duplicates inflate the market, and when the path to “apply” is anything but direct.
How it started
A few years ago I started working on a solution to make opportunities for remote roles accessible to all.
Remote work felt like the cleanest place to begin. It had a clear promise, and it was growing fast. But it also had the sharpest pain. The same job would appear in ten places. “Remote” meant five different things. Location was either too vague or totally wrong. And the further a role traveled from the employer’s career page, the less you could trust it.
I kept seeing the same pattern in people around me. Smart, capable folks doing everything right, still wasting weeks. Not because they lacked skill, but because the market was noisy and the paths were full of traps. Meanwhile, recruiters were drowning in volume and still missing the right candidates. Companies said “we’re hiring” while candidates couldn’t find what was real.
So I went deep. I talked to candidates, recruiters, and founders. I watched how people actually search, what they repeat, where they drop off, what they screenshot, what they save, what they stop trusting.
And that’s when the bigger truth hit.
Remote wasn’t the category. Remote was the microscope. The same problems showed up everywhere once you knew what to look for: stale jobs, duplicates, misleading labels, and platforms optimized for clicks instead of outcomes.
That’s when the project turned into something more foundational.
The job market doesn’t need another board. It needs a search layer that respects truth. Something that starts at employer career pages, stays fresh, removes duplicates, and makes the market feel searchable again.
That’s what led to Fursa - which means “opportunity” in multiple languages like Arabic and Swahili.
What Fursa is
Fursa is a real-time index and search layer for employer job listings across the open web.
It starts at the source, on company career pages, where hiring actually happens. It keeps roles fresh. It removes duplicates. And when you click apply, you go straight to the employer’s own application flow.
Fursa is not trying to trap you inside a feed. It’s trying to make the job market queryable.
3 user insights that kept repeating
Beyond the obvious gaps like stale jobs, duplicates, weak filters, and a noisy experience, three user truths kept showing up in every conversation. Existing options didn’t really serve them.
First, you should not need to log in to search. You can use Fursa without an account. If you choose to log in, you unlock power features, but basic discovery should be immediate.
Second, people don’t browse randomly. Job search should not look like a social media feed. People come back to the same four or five searches again and again, with small tweaks. We made search modules the core unit, because that’s how real behavior works.
Third, job search is no longer only for job seekers. It’s how people track the market. They check what’s hiring, what titles are moving, what skills keep appearing, and which companies are expanding. The best opportunities show up when there’s no urgency and you have the space to be selective.
Where we are today
Fursa is in beta. We have not launched publicly yet.
I’m sharing this with you first because you’ve been with me so far. Over the next few days, I’ll collect early feedback, fix what breaks, and tighten the quality bar. Then next week, when we launch publicly, we’ll restart the pipeline with what we learn from you.
You also might not see a lot of jobs right now. That’s expected. I’m still refining coverage and tuning freshness and dedupe rules. I’d rather show fewer roles that are real than flood the page with noise.
We’re starting with the GCC and North America: UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Canada, and the US.
Next week we go public, and the target is aggressive: 500,000 live, fresh, deduped jobs within a month.
Try it and tell me what’s wrong
If you want to check it out now, go to fursa.io.
If you try it, tell me how you expected to use it, what you searched for, what felt good, and what felt off. Bugs, missing filters, wrong results, confusing UX, anything.
Reply to this email, or email me directly at [email protected]. Thank you for reading. Appreciate it.
Best,
Kartik
I write Bold Efforts every week to think clearly about where work and life are actually headed, not where headlines say they are. If you want these essays in your inbox, you can subscribe here.