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five

five was a hiring marketplace built around recorded video pitches. Recruiters explained the role, candidates could pitch back and both sides could see the matching score.

My role: Independent developer
Built: February to March 2026

See the app How it was built

Pitches ran to five minutes or less. Matching sorted the applicant list without hiding anyone, and contact details were shared after both sides expressed interest. I built five in about three weeks, launched it on March 10 and moved it to a waitlist on March 31.

Product

Inside the app

A local copy of the last build before the waitlist, with invented recruiters, candidates and roles. Select an image to view it full size.

five recruiter dashboard with a Senior Frontend Engineer role expanded, showing a high-fived candidate with quotes from her video pitch, key phrases, a portfolio link and her written pitch, followed by two more applicants — **Every applicant, in their own words**Quotes pulled from the video, the phrases that matched and the pitch itself. Matching sorted the list but never hid anyone.

five Open Roles feed for a candidate showing a Product Designer role marked as a strong 80 percent match and an external role labeled as imported from Remotive — **Open roles with the score shown**Candidates saw the same match score recruiters did. Imported roles were labeled and linked back to their source.

five My Applications page with two applications, one marked They're interested — **Consent before contact**Contact details were shared only after both sides said yes.

five Post a role page asking the recruiter to record a five-minute video pitch before adding job details — **Recruiters pitch too**Posting a role required a recorded video pitch and cost $5.

five transparency page headed Radical transparency, listing commitments such as no AI-generated content and no ads — **Promises in plain language**The app's published commitments, including no AI-generated pitches and no ads.

five landing page with the headline Hiring is broken and a LinkedIn sign-in button — **The pitch**Sign-in required a LinkedIn account.

How it worked

Two pitches and a handshake

01
Recruiter posts
A role costs $5 and needs a video pitch from the person hiring. Roles run for thirty days and can renew themselves.
02
Candidate applies
Twenty applications a week are free, then $1 each. A $1 high-five marks the one role you really want, and it rises to the top.
03
Matching explains itself
Skills, meaning, a second-pass reranker and the words in the pitch video blend into one score that both sides can see.
04
Both say yes
A recruiter marks interest and the candidate hears about it. Contact details are shared only then.

The build

Decisions and why

Limits on posting and applying

Posting a role cost $5. Candidates had twenty free applications a week, then paid $1 each. I used a posting fee and an application allowance to discourage bulk submissions.

A score you can read

Keyword overlap counts for 30%, embedding similarity 40%, a cross-encoder rerank 20% and the pitch transcript 10%. When a signal is missing, the rest are reweighted rather than scored as zero.

Consent law is per state

Recording a video pitch touches two-party consent rules in states like California and Illinois. Every recording started behind a clear consent prompt, and an applicant's video was kept only as long as the role it was sent to.

LinkedIn only

I switched off Google sign-in a week before launch. A LinkedIn account isn't proof of anything, but it raised the cost of a fake profile on a site built around real people.

Built with

Next.js 16React 19SupabasepgvectorOpenAI embeddingsHugging FaceDeepgramCloudflare R2StripeResendVercel

five is retired

The code is archived and the domain is lapsing. The rest of what I build is still running.

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